Tips For SEO Outsourcing

Google and Bing are constantly changing their search engine algorithms, so SEO techniques that worked well last month may not be working so well today.  The only way to find SEO techniques that work is to do extensive testing on multiple different websites at different times.  Every time Google changes their algorithm, they create new challenges for SEO techniques that are no longer working, plus new opportunities for SEO techniques that work better than before.   It is necessary to carefully monitor rankings over a diverse group of website businesses over a long period of time.

SEO agencies have an advantage over your in-house SEO experts because they can see what happens across a wide variety of customers, which makes SEO outsourcing attractive.  Many of these agencies are constantly conducting testing to find new, effective techniques.  Of course, none of them will tell you what really works because it is their competitive advantage.

Picking The Right SEO Specialist

If your business is important to you, you don’t want to pick the wrong SEO agency; you don’t want to dramatically lose rankings or get your website de-indexed.  However,  you don’t need to be in an SEO specialist to hire an SEO specialist.

Common Sense Prevails

How risky are the techniques that your SEO agency is planning to use?    If it doesn’t sound like their link building would occur naturally on the internet, then it could be a red flag.

LINK CONCENTRATION: if your website only has links going to one webpage, or if all the links have the same, identical keyword (anchor text), then it doesn’t look like it occurred very naturally.

LINK VOLUME:  if your website suddenly received 1000 links per day, that might attract negative attention from the search engines.

LINK VELOCITY: if your website is receiving 100 links per day for 30 days in a row, and suddenly goes to zero, that might be red flag as well.   .

LINK DIVERSITY: if all those links only came from a single technique like article creation or blog comments, that might look suspicious..

LINK AUTHORITY:  if all the links came from spammy PR N/A and PR0 websites, rather than a mix of PR1 through PR9 websites, then it may not be that effective. [Quick Tutorial:   PR or Page Rank is a Google term that indicates how much authority a website has based upon how many backlinks it has.   Links to your website from a PR7 website are more valuable to you than hundreds of links from a PR0 website, for example.]

Shift Your Risk

The more risk you’re willing to take, the more potential reward.    Low risk equals low reward.  You need to manage the risk to fit your situation.

You can minimize risk through not only the choice of what you do, but also how you do it.  To minimize risk to your main website, you could slowly increase your link building over a long period of time, diversify your link building techniques, and ensure links are coming from quality sites.

The more impatient you are to see results, the more risk your SEO specialists will take to achieve those results.  If you see results in less than a month, they are using aggressive SEO techniques.  Normally it should take one to three months to see results, unless you’re in a very high competitive market space.

If you’re in a hurry, don’t risk your bread-and-butter business.  Internet marketers would translate that to saying “don’t link to your money site”.    You can always create a “mini-site” relatively cheaply and use it to feed traffic to your main site.  You could use more aggressive SEO on the mini site because you have less to lose if things go wrong.

Don’t Be Held Hostage

Link building is never permanent; the other website owner can always delete the article that just happens to be pointing to your website.  And like brick-and-mortar businesses, some Internet businesses don’t make it and websites disappear.

More and more, backlinks are being rented versus purchased.

Generally if you want to post an article into an article directory, such as into Ezines Articles, there is no charge and the article will remain there until deleted.  But if you want to have your article on the home page of a PR4 website, for example, it will cost you $X/month.  When you stop paying, the links disappear.

You need to understand if your SEO agency is subscribing to monthly links, or, if they are using their own private network of websites to host your links.  There are advantages for them to use these techniques, however, you need to understand up front what happens to your rankings should you choose a different SEO agency in the future.

MEASURE Every Step Of the Way

You must monitor your ranking achievement over time, otherwise, you won’t know if you’re getting a good ROI from that particular SEO agency.  Obviously, you don’t want two agencies working on the same website at the same time because you would never know if one is not worth the money.

A good marketing strategy is for you to start small with a new SEO provider, measure and monitor results, then increase your business with them as the results and relationship grows.   Hire an SEO specialist for a specific marketing technique or program at a fixed-price.  When you start to see the results that you were hoping for, or you have developed a good working relationship with them, expand your business with them:  increase your purchase of that marketing technique or go to a monthly service or try an additional technique from the same SEO provider.

Search engine optimization is a critical component of the marketing services mix.  It is continually evolving in both techniques and complexity.   SEO outsourcing is an attractive option. However, you don’t have to be an SEO specialist to make a good business decision.  With Marketing Outfield, there are a broad array of SEO techniques and SEO providers to choose from, and all are rated by other buyers.  Services are available on a fixed price basis, either as a one-time project or monthly subscription.