During the course of my career, I've met a lot of small business owners who did their own 'SEO'...and I'm using the term lightly here.
Believe me when I say that what I saw were stuff of nightmares.
A sh*t ton of bad URLs in twisting, turning, content structure. Pages upon pages of plagiarized content. Loading speed so slow, I could brew coffee and drink it before the site is fully loaded. (On a side note, they should have taken my SEO training course hehe)
I might be exaggerating about the last one, but you get the picture right? This begs the question:
Should business owners just hire SEO specialists instead of do-it-yourselfing?
Here are 2 major reasons why:
1. It's A Matter Of Specialization
With my story above, does this mean business owners just naturally bad at SEO?
Not exactly.
It's simply a matter of specialization - SEO is a very technical job to do and takes a lot of time and dedication to get things right. And as business owners who are already juggling multiple things at once, they should be focused on growing their business, not making sure each page has a relevant <H1> tag.
That being said, the SEO industry is full of sleazy snakes oil salesmen - people pretending to be SEO "gurus" when all they really know is outsource link packages from Black Hat World or Warrior Forum - so I kind of understand where business owners are coming from.
They think it's better to do SEO themselves than put their five-figure website in another person's hand.
Although, we still have the occasional know-it-all business owner who wants to rank in the first page in 2 weeks for Php8,000. All of this without ever letting me inside their site! At this point I just simply run away.
2. It's A Matter of Economics
Let me ask you a question.
Let's say you want your lawn mowed because you have a barbecue party at 3pm and it's already 11am. You have two choices:
- 1The friendly kid next door who mows lawns on weekends.
- 2A professional lawn mower
Sure, you can save a few extra bucks if you hire the kid next door, but are you sure you're going to make it in time? And will it even look presentable to your guests? Now, if you hire the pro lawn mower, you bet your bottom dollar he's going to do a fine job (provided you hired someone with good reviews!) and beat the deadline.
Who will provide more value for your money then? The pro lawn mower of course.
That's pretty much the same thing with doing SEO - if you let a non-professional SEO do the job, you're probably going to get sub-par results.
It would be inefficient for a non-professional SEO to run an SEO campaign - especially one with a lot of moving parts. It is simply a waste of time and resources for everyone involved.
What do you think - should a business owner hire a professional SEO instead?