Should I be Paying for SEO?

Why Pay for Online Marketing - My Business Already Makes Money

So you have a great website. Your business is making money and is even profitable in this crazy economy. Good for you. So what's all the buzz about online marketing and SEO? Why do businesses pay for it?

Bottom line: to stay ahead of the competition, you need to maintain a healthy website and implement an online marketing program in-house or with an online marketing vendor. If you don't - your competitors will pass you up.

Do I really need to spend money on SEO?

Quick answer: Yes. Either spend money in your own time or with an expert who knows how to maintain a valid online campaign.

Now I'm  not saying that you have to create a budget and find an SEO firm and spend away.  What I am saying - is your organization should be spending time doing the things that will allow you to keep up - if not stay ahead of your competition on the internet.  I'll break this down for you shortly.

You see - if you haven't noticed lately - it's highly likely that your competitors are starting to show up for key phrases on Google, Yahoo and Bing.  Are you showing up too? Are you maintaining your placement - or are you slowly dropping in the ranks? 

If you are not making SEO a priority - you WILL be left behind. It's just a matter of time.

So what can you do?

You can pay someone to do it for you (SEO Firm, Online Marketing Agency, etc.). Or - you can do it yourself. You say - "Do what?". I'll get to that in a minute. Ongoing website maintenance and online marketing - is critical to an organizations online health. Here's a break down of what you should be doing regularly to stay healthy in marketing on the internet.

Online Marketing Health Checkup List:

Onsite marketing and optimization is part of a good websites life. You eat food and drink water every day.

Good websites with healthy online marketing campaigns will have continuous:

• content creation
• content syndication
• on-page optimization
• maintenance of sitemap.xml and static sitemap
• maintenance of robots.txt file
• analysis of competitors ranks etc
• submissions to strategic directories and engines
• strategic yet natural link aggregation
• keyword research
• email campaign marketing
• social media distribution (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Digg, etc.
• analysis
• the list goes on...

You too need get a website health checkup (in each area) to make sure you're not being left behind.

Here's an example:

Let's say you built your website 4 years ago. You got a great design and your site was "optimized" for the search engines. This does not mean it will rank - nor does it mean if it is ranking now that it will continue to rank. 

Let's take meta tag optimization for example:

• Title character and word parameters have changed since you built your website and will continue to change for the most important search engine algorithims.
• Keyword density changes.
• Keyword phrases you are shooting for will be re-prioritized.

To stay ahead of your competitors (who many of which have an SEO vendor in their hip pocket), you also need to be maintaining at least at the same speed. However you look at it - it's a cost in employee time or budget to outsourced to an Online Marketing firm. But choose a firm that has experience and results and fits your budget, goals and priorities.