When you’re dipping your toe into the online business market, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is often what decides whether you sink or swim. By design, SEO boosts your online visibility and traffic — both of which are key factors for increasing product sales and service bookings.
Getting results would be easy if all SEO was equally valuable, and even easier if all SEO providers had equal talents. In this post, we look at the difference between overall SEO knowledge, and the focused, results-oriented SEO knowledge that makes you money.
Get Wise
Almost anyone can gain knowledge about almost anything. What takes time is building the wisdom to distill a vast ocean of knowledge into something useful. There’s nothing stopping you from Googling “everything about SEO” right now and taking a crack at it yourself. But you’ll quickly realize that unlimited SEO knowledge isn’t what you really want. You want SEO results.
SOS: Save Our Search
Since you already have a business to run, we can safely assume you’d rather have someone else do your SEO for you. The typical starting point is to hire someone cheap — just to see if this SEO stuff even works. If you’re working with a marketing company, you might ask them to test the waters with some basic SEO. The outcome for both can be eerily similar.
Yo-Ho-Ho, SEO Bro!
For small businesses starting out, hiring one “SEO bro” freelancer might be enough to get some results. Where it usually falls apart is when your company grows, and your SEO needs outgrow their experience. If you go the marketing agency route, you still might be getting one “SEO bro” for your strategy, and they might not even know SEO.
The agency “bro” might be a junior project manager who’s just farming your work out to some monolithic SEO factory that applies their “Generic-O-Matic SEO 9000” package to your account (and every other account). Either way, it’s not enough people, focus or expertise to get lasting results.
“Somewhere” Isn’t On the Map
Without seeing them, we know those generic plans don’t apply to your company. How do we know? Because every company is unique. If generic plans yielded anything other than generic results, we would probably have a generic package ourselves. But we don’t.
We also don’t compete with the cheapest providers because (here’s the ironic part) they’re just too expensive. Wait, what? We can explain.
Fire, Ready, Aim
If there’s no strategy leading the way, there’s no focus for your plan. Usually when bare-bones, generic SEO fails to deliver, clients take the same budget to another low-cost provider and get the same results. After doing this a half dozen times, they either give up — or talk to a real SEO specialist.
It’s About Time
The expensive lesson here is that under-spending with a string of low-cost SEO providers costs more than starting with (and sticking with) a strategy-based SEO expert in the first place. On top of all the money lost, and the potential new business missed, the cheap trial-and-error path wastes something you can never buy back: time.
Precious Cargo
We’re not here to waste anyone’s time or money. Battleship always lets strategy lead the way because without it, there’s no way to tell if you’re going somewhere profitable or just going around in circles. We’ve got boatloads of SEO knowledge, but what’s more important is we have the wisdom to know what specific pieces of that knowledge your unique business needs to get where you want to go.
If you feel like you’re getting lost in a sea of generic providers and generic SEO plans, give us a call. Or better yet, call us before you drift through the Sea of Mediocrity.
