The Top 3 Things To Think About When Outsourcing Your SEO

When Google’s Algorithm made a very large update in 2013, the SEO landscape changed forever. We saw a complete change in the traditional approach to getting links and building domain authority. This change ultimately brought content marketing into the forefront because we now know that this is the ONLY way to build quality links and domain authority.  If you have the resources to do your content marketing in-house, fantastic. However, more and more companies are outsourcing this need to professional agencies and SEO firms. With that being said, in 2015, there are really three things that you need to think about and understand when you’re looking at outsourcing SEO.

The Top 3 Things To Think About When Outsourcing SEO:

1. Time is Money.

Most companies need to spend their time in the day to day, revenue producing components of their business. Most companies simply do not have the time to stay abreast of the latest trends and what is working in the SEO world. So, when you outsource SEO, you want to make sure that you’ve got thought leaders — people that are very active in the community and in understanding what the trends are.

That group needs to be able to hire and then train a team of people who can actually do the work for you.

Ideally, that team of people can’t be jacks of all trades. You want to have specialization. Writers aren’t good at technical analysis, and people that are good at managing paid search campaigns aren’t always good at running a social media campaign. You want to be able to hire a team of experts that actually have specialization in different areas, and then establish a training program to make sure you build up those skills.

Then, that team needs to be able to project manage and make sure that the services are delivered as expected.

2. Make sure that the team that you are working with is very result-oriented when you are outsourcing SEO in 2015.

Again, there are a lot of people that practice “checkbox SEO”, which is just going through a mechanical list of onsite SEO tagging, offsite content syndication, etc, which is important, but ultimately the end results are what count.  If you don’t have good rankings, you don’t have traffic. You don’t have leads. You want to make sure that your team is looking at and has a very good handle on, “Is the campaign performing?”

Usually, when you’re talking about SEO, you want to make sure that that starts with the rankings and then, of course, leads to traffic and leads. You want to make sure they’re very focused on ROI.

3. It is critical to think about and understand what Google is talking about what they’re looking for with SEO in 2015.

It is very difficult to do good SEO if you aren’t thinking about the end user, making sure that the content you’re creating is actually valuable to a real audience, not just the search engines.

There is always going to be a component where you want to make sure that your content and the activities you’re doing are optimized so the search engine gets maximum value out of it, but you can’t make the search engine the primary audience. It has to be a real person.

That means blog posts that are actually interesting and insightful.

One of the things that we’ve done at AutoWeb Technologies is that we’ve actually aligned a lot of the content that we create with the news. So we’re able to newsjack interesting information and add that to a client’s blog, which, of course, has a much higher value to a potential customer on your website than just recycling the same content over and over again.

The other point there is that you then want to make sure that content gets shared and launched (as we call it in our REAL SEO process) — launched across as many different places on the Web as possible so that you can earn maximum benefit and increase your likelihood of earning links back to your website, which is going to improve your domain authority and improve your rankings.

The bottom line…

If you are considering getting some help with your SEO, you really need a partner who understands all of those things that we just covered….One that really understands return on investment, that has a focus on results, that is using content marketing and PR (which are rapidly merging with SEO) for higher quality content outreach, and earning those links the way they should be, so that they’re building equity in your client’s site.

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