6 of the top reasons why you should hire an SEO specialist and not do it on your own.

Plenty of times I've had clients come to me after they have been trying to do their own SEO and online marketing. Here I'll go over the top 7 reasons I think everyone should hire an SEO expert, and it's not just because I am one and I want more sales lol

1. You can't learn SEO over night. It's not easy.
Plenty of people have bought an ebook and when they're done reading they think they have a firm grasp on what to do. But they are very wrong because just one ebook can't cover all the topics and techniques of SEO. You will have to cover coding and programming, users experience on your pages, links coming into your website, your social presence, etc. And even if you get decent at optimizing your website, you will have to keep learning because it's an ever evolving field.

2. Everything Frequently Changes
When you're reading a book here and there you gain knowledge. If you happen to binge read and test methods learned from the books you can think of yourself as a temporary SEO expert. I say temporary because Google is constantly rolling out updates to make their search engine perfect.

Google does anywhere from 400 to 600 updates to their search algorithm and they really only tell people about the major updates. Google didn't release information about their new RankBrain until 2 or 3 months after if launched lol.

If you're a business owner you probably don't have time to study every single little tweak to the search engine algorithm. It's the job of an SEO expert to monitor the algorithm and apply techniques on their own time to their websites to figure out the changes and see what works best to increase their rankings. Doing this they can then set up campaigns for their clients and increase the rankings of the clients page

3. You could be doing bad stuff
You could do all your own SEO, but you could actually be hurting your website and it's rankings since not all SEO is good. You could actually get a penalty or get deindexed completely if you mess something up.

Steer clear of these:

• Low Quality Backlinks - Backlinks from websites that aren't seen as "good" in the eyes of Google. This will hurt your overall rankings do to linking to "bad neighbors".
  
• Keyword stuffing - Write your content so it's readable. Don't jam 1,000 of your keywords into an articl or page to game the system.
  
• Unrelated Keywords - Write about your keyword, not something that is unrelated in which you're trying to rank for because you think that keyword has a lot of traffic.
  
• Cloaking - Don't hide anything. It looks shady and Google will penalize you pretty quick.
  
• Copying Content - Do not copy content because it will be seen as duplicate content and your page will never get indexed.
  

Any good SEO professional will know how to lift a penalty from doing the above and they will help you avoid any of them in the future.

4. They have the right hardware, software and services
Some of the pieces of software that the SEO professional uses costs $150 to $750 a month and they only make their money back by increasing their own rankings or helping out clients. They pay for the software, servers and third party services so that you don't have to.

Keyword tools, backlink generators, rank trackers, servers, campaign builders, etc. They pay for these and you would actually pay more to get them yourself and learn how to use them rather than just pay the professional. They pay for all of this and pass the savings to you, but still profit a little depending on how many clients they currently have.

5. Track your competitors
Just running your own campaigns isn't enough, you'll need to know what is already working and where the traffic is coming from. An SEO professional will know how to track what your competitors and see what kind of campaigns they are running and the keywords they are targeting. The SEO professional will know not to copy the competition, but to run your own campaign in order to beat your competition in order to rank much higher for the competitive keywords.

6. The ROI potential
You could run your own SEO, SEM and PPC campaigns and be very successful, but that's not usually the case for people just starting out. Putting in the time to learn how to use all the software and implement the techniques could take years, and even then the algorithm will have changed a few thousand times lol.

Hiring an SEO professional will save you time so you can focus on other aspects of your business. Let the SEO professional do the work so you don't have to stress out about it.