If you have a website or business you are likely wondering whether it is worth outsourcing your SEO work to an agency and just how easy it is to do yourself. This is a very good question.
There are some advantages of outsourcing your SEO work if you do it properly however in order to understand what is needed you need to learn about SEO yourself.
There are 2 areas to having your website ranking well. The first is the on-site factors which concern how your site is structured and where you place the most important words on your web pages.
The other area is SEO off-site, which is about the strategies you can use to get visibility for your content. There are right and wrong ways of doing this.
And underpinning both of the above is a good understanding of keyword research. There are many keyword research tools which you can use to find out what your customers are searching for, and they don't cost you anything.
Many people still think that SEO is for "geeks" and web developers but actually it is more of a marketing skill.
It is all about getting visibility for your product or services.SEO is also not just about getting listed in the standard web results. You will have noticed on the first page of major search engines, there are also blog results, news results, local search results, product results, video results and more.
You can double or triple your visibility by tailoring your search campaign to target more than one channel.
Therefore to get good search visibility you need to do an SEO training course so you can either do the work yourself if you are up to it, or else to understand what you need to outsource.
You also have to be careful on outsourcing because if you get a person who does not know best practice, you can destroy your company image or brand.
There are a lot of companies which spam you about building 1000 links to your site for little money, but how you build your links is very important.
It is much better to get natural links developing and pointing into your site by the types of off-site SEO strategy you decide to implement, rather than pay someone for links.
So if you have spent a lot of money and time on your website it is a very good idea to get a basic SEO training.
If your business relies on online traffic then it is probably worth taking your knowledge to the next level by attending a SEO training workshop / event or by doing some training over webinar if you can't make the event.
You can often get a lot more out of attending a search marketing workshop because you get the chance to ask questions about your own site, something you can't usually get from an online SEO course.