For those who have online companies and online portals for their businesses, one of the challenges that they face day-in and day-out is how to make their site rank better on search engines. The biggest solution to this dilemma is often to hire a competent SEO company or specialist to take care of their site for them. This will allow them to focus on running the business while their site is being optimized by someone else.
There are times however when the cost of hiring a good SEO company is not feasible and may cost the company a sizable amount of money in the long run. This is particularly true when competitors have more funds to spend than you on their sites. If you were in this position, one of the best solutions to this problem would be to either train to become an SEO yourself or to have one of your current staff members learn how to become a competent SEO for your site.
Reasons Why Training to Become an SEO is a Good Idea
Training to become an SEO specialist or learning about the rudiments of this process is a good idea, particularly if your site does not require too much work or does not have too many pages yet. This is because you can easily fix whatever it is you need to fix to make sure your site is optimal for search engine pages. It is also a good reason to learn about this or to have one of your personnel become a specialist for these following reasons:
Increase online revenue and traffic without increasing overhead – assuming that the person you are assigning to do this task does not mind being reassigned to do work that was not what they were originally hired to do (or you hire someone who has some background in the process and is willing to train to become your resident SEO), you will be able to save some money doing this instead of hiring an SEO company to do your site optimization for you for the next few months or years. Of course, the person you need to nominate to this position will have to have some inherent writing chops, not to mention some skill in data analysis.
Whatever the case may be, you will find that when you have a trained individual, or have yourself trained to work on your site for improved SERPs ranking and visibility, you will be able to earn more from your site without having to shell out monthly fees to an outside entity for your site optimization. You will have to realize however that whoever you have trained, even if you are the one who underwent training yourself, will need to be given a learning curve and a margin for some error. No one, after all, becomes an expert overnight.
Have regular updates on your site without needing to follow up – while most SEO companies do stick to a schedule as per the agreement with the customer when it comes to optimizing a site, not all companies are truly reliable, with some of the lower costing ones actually needing a bit of prodding every now and then to get things done. When you have an in-house specialist or are handling these yourself, you can expect updates on a regular basis, and if these are not up on time, you simply need to walk over to the person in charge and give them a small nudge to remind them of this regular task.
The great thing about having a specialist of your own, even if you are it, is that you can change certain aspects of your updates (article and blog topics, videos, tweets, etc.) according to current and emerging trends. While you can also do this with some SEO companies, when you hire outside help that is not truly reliable and does not answer as quickly as you want or is not that receptive to sudden changes to plans and strategies, you will only end up frustrated, pissed, or both.
You know the dos and don’ts of SEO when you decide to hire an outside firm – some people start with having an SEO company work on their site for them then hire their own in-house people to do the job for closer monitoring and ease of updating. Having some knowledge will help you handle this transition better and to handle the people doing the work for you better as well. It will also give you better control over what is being done with your site and can give you the chance to try out strategies that you believe will work better for you.
This skill will also help you understand what needs to be done to your site for it to do better on the SERPs. It will also enable you to help family and friends who have sites that may need help. It may even open up another avenue of income for you, which is optimizing sites for others.
These are just a few of the reasons why it is a good idea to learn how to optimize your site and to have some SEO knowledge of your own. Other reasons include being able to optimize new sites you create off-the-bat and being able to experiment with new site concepts that you feel may bring you new revenue streams.
