A recent study published in early 2018 by BrandMuscle revealed that only 3% of small and medium-sized businesses in the United States are hiring outside experts or agencies to market their business, and more than 60% choose to do the marketing themselves. themselves, or by relying on internal “specialists”. The study also mentioned SEO, or search engine optimization, as one of the popular local business marketing tactics for SMBs because they find it to be one of the easiest strategies to implement. However, the report’s authors concluded that small and local businesses were seeing miserable results and a low return on their investment by going the do-it-yourself route, especially when it came to SEO.
So why is it highly ineffective for local business owners to try to optimize their web properties themselves?
I have compiled 5 reasons why it is not only ineffective but also risky for a small business owner to go DIY when it comes to optimizing their websites, Facebook pages, Instagram etc. for search engines.
1. SEO is a constantly changing landscape and what works today may not work tomorrow. In other words, it’s not for the jack of all trades. As a business owner, we recommend that you spend any free time you have trying to improve your business so you can get great reviews, not moonlighting trying to learn the latest website ranking tactics or how to beat the latest website updates. Google. or the Bing search algorithm.
2. Bad SEO can hurt rather than help your search engine marketing efforts. Search engines, especially Google, have been known to penalize websites for over-optimizing or using spam tactics designed to trick their system. In fact, for local businesses, not optimizing your website at all may be better than, say, spraying spam backlinks all over the web to your web properties, or over-optimizing them.
3. Choosing the DIY route can trap you in a skills spiral: you learn to do one thing today and it leads you down another rabbit hole tomorrow, and a whole new learning curve. Before you know it, you could be spending more time learning the web optimization game than running your business. Almost every month there are new tactics on how to rank websites or how to drive traffic to your websites. You want to focus on your business, not run around chasing your web page visitors!
4. While your web properties are a great way to attract new prospects to your business, most experts agree that to multiply your profits, your time would be better spent “surprising and wooing” your existing customers. SEO is not a game changer as is often advertised, especially for local businesses. According to marketing guru Jay Abraham, author of “Stealthy Marketing: How to Outmaneuver, Outwit, and Outmarket Your Most Formidable Competitors…Before They Know What Hits Them,” the key to staying ahead The forefront in competitive times is fine-tuning your marketing. – “to make sure you’re getting new customers, returning old customers, and customers who buy more.”
SEO will get you new customers, but these are in many cases “bargain hunters”, rarely your ideal customers. He gets them through referrals or through word of mouth marketing…
5. Lastly, even assuming you’ve done the hard work and learned the rules of search engine optimization, good SEO should give you phenomenally better results, plus outsourcing to a good provider is always a great return on investment because saves you that. the most precious of goods: time. Time that you can use to get to know your customers better, to communicate with them, to improve their experience process when they buy from you.
In closing, as a small business owner, you should learn as much as you can about web search optimization, just so you know what’s good for you and how to tell good SEO from bad. But you can earn more if you outsource this part of your marketing efforts; both in terms of time you can save, costly mistakes you can avoid, and ultimately ensuring you get a good return on your investment.
