Search engine optimization (SEO) can get more eyes on your website, build customer loyalty, and hopefully bring in more business. There’s a lot you can do yourself to optimize your website for search, like researching keywords or building backlinks through directory listings or asking your local business association to link to your website from theirs. But it’s easy to do SEO wrong, especially if you don’t know much about it, and there are times when you need to bring in an SEO expert. Whether you’re doing a site redesign, trying to reverse a manual action, here’s when you should hire an SEO expert.
You’re Doing a Site Redesign or Migration
Making any major changes to your website runs the risk of damaging its rankings in search engine return pages (SERPs). If you’re redesigning your website or making changes to your domain name, URL structure, design layout, content management system, layout, or navigation, you need guidance from an SEO expert to make sure you don’t damage your site’s rankings. Choose an SEO agency that specializes in redesigns and site migrations.
Search Engines Aren’t Indexing Your Whole Site or Part of Your Site
If search engines aren’t indexing your website, then it can’t show up in search. Individual pages on your site that aren’t indexed won’t show up in SERPs even if the pages that are indexed do. And while the problem could be minor, it could also be very major. You need an SEO professional to figure out the problem with your site and fix it so all of your pages can be properly indexed in search.
You Don’t Have the Time or Staff for In-House SEO
Optimizing a site for search takes a lot of time, and if you don’t have it, you don’t have it. If your marketing staff doesn’t have room on their plates to make and implement an SEO strategy, either, then you need to hire a reliable Phoenix SEO company to handle it for you. Improving your SEO performance can make all your other marketing efforts really pop. Between email campaigns, copywriting, landing pages, lead gen, and all the other chores marketing professionals typically have, there’s often little time left over for SEO – take the pressure off and bring in someone who knows what they’re doing.
You’re Not Getting a Lot of Traffic to the Website
If your current SEO strategy isn’t working and you’re not getting as much traffic to your website as you’d like or expect, then it’s time to bring in a professional SEO. You can’t rank high in SERPs with low traffic – at least, you’re unlikely to. Low traffic signals to search engines that your content isn’t worth seeing.
You Have Little to No Experience with SEO
If you don’t know what you’re doing with SEO, you could do a lot of damage to your website’s rankings and reputation. Sure, there’s a lot of information online, but there’s a lot of misinformation, too, and it can be hard to tell the two apart. If you’re not familiar with white hat SEO practices or don’t know what factors go into determining search rankings, you need professional help.
Your Site Has Been Subject to a Manual Action
If your site has been subjected to a manual action, that means a human being at Google has reviewed your site and determined that it’s trying to game the search index, usually by using black hat SEO practices. This is part of the damage that can be done when you attempt to do SEO yourself without knowledge of accepted best practices. You will need the help of an SEO to fix all the problems outlined in the manual action, and then you’ll need to submit your page for reconsideration. You will need to convince Google that you have fixed your site and intend to adhere to white hat practices from now on, and you’ll usually need professional help to succeed.
Do you need expert help with your website SEO? Unless you’re an SEO yourself, you probably do. SEO strategy is complex and time-consuming – and that’s why it’s often best left to the professionals.
