For most businesses, being able to be found on Google is a critical part of its success. A basic requirement is to be found for your brand name. Even better is when you can be found for some 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 that 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 either 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 does all the media and all the words for your website. You could also use a specialized backlink service that only focuses on getting you the best quality backlinks.
Some specialise in social media that can improve the engagement of your website. and maybe finally using an SEO strategist, this is someone who can bring all these things together to give you big results.
Most of the fear tends to be from a trust factor. because of the low costs to set yourself up as an SEO agency or pretend to be one, there are many people out there who do not deliver what they promise.
Many businesses have indeed been burnt by SEO individuals who have used black hat techniques or low-quality techniques and have damaged the profile of the website rather than improved it.
So, in most cases, to eliminate the fear, you have to improve the trust factor.
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 you can see their eyes and believe what they are saying. a person who will tell you the truth about the real challenges of how to run a website and the real costs of ranking a website.
The real cost of adding great content, achieving great backlinks, having a good social media profile and having a comprehensive audit is in most cases more expensive than businesses expect it to be. a low-quality SEO agency someone who does not understand the fundamentals or how to rank a website will probably underestimate the real cost and overestimate exactly what they will achieve for you.
Unfortunately, many agencies from India, Pakistan and the Philippines have this low trust factor. Some do offer a great service but they are hidden within many hundreds of individuals who really should not be selling their services.
Of course, it’s not just restricted to these Asian countries there are many freelancers in in the UK who also offer an inadequate service. This does not necessarily mean they do not know SEO, it sometimes means they take on projects that are bigger than their in-house skills and they don’t know how to scale up.
Good SEO freelancers know what their specialities are, know what skills to outsource and know the limit of what they can achieve within the budget they’re given and the time that they have.
Yes There Are Salesmen
Unfortunately, some of these great individuals are not very good salesmen and yet some of the poor SEO agencies have excellent salesmen. Anyone can put together a set of graphs that shows what they’ve achieved, a set of keywords that says we’ve ranked for this and ranked for that and can suggest that they’ve got dozens or even hundreds of clients. How would you know if this data was true or not? How would you know if those keywords were difficult to attain, had lots of traffic or whether these keywords were something very easily attained with zero traffic?
So, the fear in many cases is understandable.
A solution however is meeting your potential SEO freelancer face-to-face, not over the phone, not via Skype and getting a real feel from that individual and that individual’s morals and beliefs. Try to bypass their sales ability.
People who do SEO are not always the best salespeople and just look at them as individuals. Can I trust this person to do the job they say they can do?
There Are Still Challenges
It is also true that everyone in the SEO industry will be faced with challenges which are new to them. Google is regularly doing algorithm updates. being able to stay calm, be part of a network and analyze the changes that have happened within that algorithm update can help you find solutions to make sure that your website is not affected by them. or in some cases do things that rectify the new issues that Google has found.
So as much as this is a digital industry, it is still real people who have to find the solutions. And if you can trust these individuals, then you can remove the fear.