Why do I need to pay an SEO Company? The answer is that you don’t.
I had an epiphany on the weekend whilst I was painting my house in readiness to list it for sale. You see, similar to the question above, I thought, why do I have to pay someone to paint my house? Especially when you can simply go to the Hardware shop and buy all of the paint, paint pushes, prep gear and do it yourself.
I actually enjoy painting, I never used to. I have owned my house for about 14 years now and this is the 3rd time I have painted the interior and to be fair I think that I have gotten better every time. Better with research, pricing, preparation, quality of actual painting, time it took and the clean up afterwards. But man my body is sore today. I mean, I’m a pretty fit person, I go to the gym 4-5 times a week and work most of my body in doing so but I am still pretty stiff, using muscles in a way that I don’t normally do.
I think the trade off though is that for me, my weekends are pretty valuable for downtime and today, although I had a good time painting, I felt like I didn’t really get a break mentally (nor physically). See I work at the ‘conscious competence’ level. I have the ability but I still need to think about what i am doing and I really have to work hard for the same sort of result that someone that does this stuff all day everyday takes for granted. Not to mention how much more of it they get done.
This is sort of where I had the epiphany. You see, ultimately I chose to do it myself and I would do it again, not for the results but the enjoyment. The question is the same with SEO. DO you or someone you have in your organisation enjoy SEO? Do you enjoy ensuring that all factors within the site are as ‘Search Engine friendly’ as they can be? Are you up to date with the latest trends? When I painted the house I spent the time doing the research to ensure that what I was doing was in line with the modern colours and styles. With SEO, it isn’t even just a style thing, if you are doing something that is outdated it can actually harm your website’s rankings.
The other thing I thought about was the amount of time it took me. I bet if a pro did it they would have done the same amount of work smarter and faster not to mention all of the other things that I could of been doing if I didn’t have to paint. Again it’s the same with your business. Enjoying SEO is one thing, what about all of the other things you could be doing instead? It is a simple value versus output metric. What is your time worth versus the return you would get if you paid a company to do it instead? Not to mention what the results might be?
Like I said earlier, I would still do the painting myself and ultimately you might still choose to do SEO yourself but in the end form a business perspective you simply need to look at it from an ROI perspective. What will give you the greater return?