Do You Fear Not Being Found On Google?

For most businesses, being found on Google is a critical part of their success. A basic requirement is to be found for your brand name. Even better is when you can be found for keywords that match the products or services you are selling.

Taking things to another level is when you are found offering solutions to problems. This is when you really can tap into the benefits of the people looking for your services. So it’s quite understandable that you may fear your website cannot be found for the search terms that are going to add bottom-line profit to your business.

Depending on the size of the task ahead or the business that you own, you could employ an SEO freelancer, an agency, or even a mixture of different agencies to do different tasks. For example, you could use a copywriting service that handles all the words for your website, a specialised backlink service focused on quality links, or a social media specialist to improve engagement — and finally an SEO strategist to bring all these things together for real results.

It Is The Trust Factor

Most of the fear tends to come from a trust factor. Because of the low cost to set yourself up as an SEO agency — or simply pretend to be one — there are many people out there who do not deliver what they promise.

Many businesses have been burnt by SEO individuals who have used black hat or low-quality techniques and damaged the profile of their website rather than improved it. So in most cases, to eliminate the fear, you have to improve the trust factor.

What About The Opportunities?

One opportunity to improve that trust factor is to work with a local freelancer — someone you can sit next to, have a cup of coffee with, and look in the eye. A person who will tell you the truth about the real challenges of running a website and the real costs of ranking it.

The real cost of adding great content, achieving quality backlinks, maintaining a good social media profile, and conducting a comprehensive audit is in most cases more expensive than businesses expect. A low-quality agency — one that does not understand the fundamentals of ranking a website — will probably underestimate the real cost and overestimate exactly what they will achieve.

Unfortunately, many agencies operating from overseas have this low trust factor. Some do offer a great service, but they are hidden amongst many who really should not be selling their services. And it is not just restricted to overseas — there are many freelancers in the UK who also offer an inadequate service. Sometimes this is not because they lack SEO knowledge; sometimes it is because they take on projects bigger than their in-house skills and do not know how to scale up.

Good SEO freelancers know their specialities, know what skills to outsource, and know the limits of what they can achieve within a given budget and timeframe.

Yes, There Are Salesmen

Unfortunately, some of the best SEO professionals are not the best salespeople — and yet some of the poorest agencies have excellent ones. Anyone can put together a set of graphs showing keywords they have ranked for. How would you know if those keywords were genuinely difficult to attain, had meaningful traffic, or were simply easy wins with near-zero search volume?

So the fear, in many cases, is entirely understandable. A solution, however, is meeting your potential SEO freelancer face to face. Not over the phone, not via video call — in person, where you can get a real feel for that individual and their values. Try to bypass the sales ability. Look at them as a person. Can you trust this individual to do what they say they can do?

There Are Still Challenges

It is also true that everyone in the SEO industry faces challenges that are new to them. Google makes regular algorithm updates. Being able to stay calm, remain part of a network, and analyse what has changed can help you find solutions to protect your website — or in some cases, rectify new issues Google has introduced.

So as much as this is a digital industry, it is still real people who find the solutions. And if you can trust those individuals, you can remove the fear.

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