Fire your SEO Guy
As a business owner, in the last decade or so I may have spent a half-million on SEO for my service business. Today I have the SEO tools that now save me tens of thousands and offer me better control and management of my online presence.
SEO for small businesses may seem intimidating to learn about but it’s not so bad if you have trustworthy sources of info and professional tools.
Like all advertising, some things have worked, and some things have just been expensive digital marketing lessons.
The truth is, as a small to mid-sized business we can’t expect to get the value out of this cookie-cutter service for Contractors websites.
Do we really expect a young college graduate that spends his days cold calling small businesses from some marketing agency will have the silver bullet to internet traffic and conversion?
Do we think they even understand what it is we do? We are not general contractors.
How to write about it on our website? No. We are the subject content experts when it comes to concrete.
WTF do they know. Nothing. They do know how to say you need to work on your local search strategy, or “you need to boost your online presence with Local SEO.
They may suggest blog posts or say social media will help your bottom line. Maybe they will say pages for mobile devices need to be optimized.
At this point for my company a local business, I must get 5 calls a day from some guy from India that thinks he has all the internet marketing answers.
Outside of all the SEO scams and half-ass SEO agencies, we should never hire a real SEO guy for one reason. We can’t afford it and you can’t trust these people.
The amount of work that needs to be done to our sites is a big and critical job. If you were able to find a real SEO guy (0.05% chance) could you afford to pay him for the results you expect? Probably not.
Did you ever notice SEO reporting from agencies always paints an amazing picture of their work? It’s very easy to manipulate data.
Or half of the time they come up with stupid goals that they know they can accomplish but offer no value.
Occasionally, I’ll talk to these guys, sometimes even get a proposal from them. I remember I had an SEO guy tell me that he could get me some certain five keywords to the top five.
As I looked at the words, I quickly realized that they were very low volume words that had zero PPC value. These were not words that convert. His efforts would have offered me zero value.
Poor guy was just a salesman that didn’t have the tools or information I have.
So, if you don’t fire your SEO guy you should at least have the tools necessary to understand what changes are occurring, what goals should be set, and a diagnostic tool to understand and manage your SEO agent.
Be your own SEO GUY, bring this in house
Obviously, a guy from the Philippines can’t write the content you need to rank and even a real page SEO guy doesn’t have your knowledge.
So let me real clear. You wouldn’t leave your kids with some yahoo that doesn’t care about them. Why entrust your website or web development, the greatest opportunity for lead generation to someone that holds no stake? They don’t care if they screw up your traffic.
What I am saying is that you need to learn everything there is about SEO pronto and dedicate a part of your day working on SEO and learning about your website visitors.
In order to start learning about SEO you will need to start learning about:
The website
A WordPress based website. This is the only format you should be using. Learning basic web design is critical. Read this article too
Host
Learn General SEO Practices and trends.
SEO Tools for small business owners
SEO companies will use tools to diagnose your site. They don’t know anything about SEO, but their tools do. Get their tools and get out of your $500-2500 monthly agreement.
For like a hundred a month(no-contract) I was able to have the data I needed to understand whether my SEO guy was doing anything relevant for the outrageous fee I was paying.
Understanding search results is the start.
You will learn these Seo strategies,
Learning the basics of SEO like meta descriptions, title tags, anchor text, internal links, site links, or keyword researching for your product or service is important. Understanding Google analytics google search results will help.
Learning about local area business SEO. These strategies focus on google my business page and local directory citations.
Content Marketing is very important today. You are a subject matter expert, so you could write about what you know better than someone in a 3rd world country that gets paid 1 cent a word to write content for SEO firms.
Google tends to be rewarding pieces of content that fulfill the user experience or user intent. It’s not just about building links anymore. Ranking factors have become more complex these days. Google and other search engines want to see high-quality web pages.
Lately, structured data has been a ranking factor. Schema language can be applied on pages on your site to boost traffic to your website.
With the proper tools, search engine optimization SEO you can fix technical issues that affect performance.
If none of this makes sense, this tool will guide you to what needs to be learned and done.
There are a few but if you are new to this use this GOOD Organic SEO Tool:
TOOL LINK
Pay Per Click for google and Facebook and Bing Tool
For PPC (pay per click) you should use this tool. This tool is not cheap ~$299mo, but it saved me so much more then it costs. I’ve been doing PPC since 2005 and wish I had this tool.
I would have about $200,000 in the bank if I had this tool to diagnose past SEO campaigns. If you are spending $500 and up on PPC a month doesn’t go without this. We waste so much on bad PPC practices mostly because it takes a goddamn robot at this point to figure out and keep track of what is working and what is not.
PPC TOOL LINK
If you would like a free SEO audit of your page we can work on one to see how your site is performing.