The Importance of SEO: 5 Reasons Your Business Needs a Dedicated SEO Agency

As e-commerce has become the most rapidly growing and robust sector of the worldwide marketplace, search engine optimization has become increasingly important for businesses who want a chance at competing in an Internet-first world. SEO, as it’s commonly called, is the practice of maximizing traffic to a website by increasing its rank on SERPs, or search engine results pages. But is it necessary to hire an SEO agency, or can you achieve the same results by doing it yourself? For most businesses, a dedicated SEO team can dramatically improve your revenue. Here are a few reasons it might be worth it for you to hire a dedicated SEO agency.

1. SEO Can Be Impenetrable for Beginners

If you’re a small business owner considering doing your SEO yourself, or delegating to an in-house marketing guy without any experience, ask yourself how much you really know about this field. Do you understand the importance of HTML tags, the best ways to appeal to Google’s algorithms for rating sites based on relevance and authority, and the complexities of Accelerated Mobile Pages? Or is that all ‘gobbledegook’ to you? It can take years to fully grasp how SEO works, and in the meantime, it’s constantly changing. An SEO agency is already equipped with the knowledge and skills that you lack, so they can accomplish what you can’t.

2. SEO Agencies Offer Scalable Services

One thing you may be concerned about if you’re a small business owner is the practicality of paying a large agency to handle your relatively minor needs. Sure, contracting with a massive SEO firm to promote your mom n’ pop shop is overkill, but that doesn’t mean you should dismiss SEO altogether. Look for an agency that offers scalable plans, with smaller commitments and expenses for smaller sites with fewer needs. If your SEO efforts are successful, many firms will be willing to grow along with you, putting more work into promoting your brand as it organically expands.

3. SEO Is Time Consuming

Keyword research, content creation, and link building are all tedious and laborious tasks, requiring hours of single-minded focus. Unless you’ve got a ton of excess time on your hands (and what business owner does?) you won’t have enough space in your day to devote your attention to all the little things that make up a solid SEO strategy. An agency can dramatically reduce your workload by taking over all of that stuff and more. Meanwhile, you can devote your time to things you actually have a chance of affecting.

4. SEO Agencies Are Invested in Providing Results

The high level of competition among SEO-specific firms has led to increased emphasis on demonstrable results. That means an SEO agency will be focused on making changes that they can prove have impacted your bottom line. Since they’re performance driven, they’ll be constantly checking your analytics and consistently refining their strategy to address your weak spots.

5. An SEO Agency Can Keep Your Website Up to Date

Another thing that makes SEO time consuming is that it’s a rapidly evolving field. Once Google spots one strategy that sites are using to boost their rankings, they immediately start working to counteract its efficacy. This means SEO professionals need to be on the cutting edge of their field. Agencies are constantly shifting their techniques in response to the changing nature of search engines and other sites. That’s something you just won’t get by shifting that task onto an employee or handling it yourself.

Since most web users click links near the top of Google’s results after typing in a particular keyword, a spot at the top translates directly into sales. Investing in an SEO agency can help you keep up with the competition and maximize your ranking for the keywords that matter.