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So you’ve decided you want to outsource SEO. It’s a great decision – especially when you look at the big picture of your business. Sure, it might be a bit cheaper to do SEO yourself, but you’ll find yourself spending hours of time doing repetitive tasks that detract from the overall goals you might have for your business (marketing, business direction, etc).
And as far as outsourcing goes, SEO is extremely popular – only content outsourcing can equal the overall demand.
Unfortunately, the majority of people who outsource SEO are doing it wrong. Instead of helping their websites rank, they’re actually hampering their progress in the long run. By putting rankings before content quality, they're alienating their visitors, ensuring that even if they’re at rank #1, their website will only be a shadow of what it could’ve been.
In today’s article, we’ll be looking at why most people struggle when outsourcing SEO and how you can avoid these pitfalls.
The Wrong Way to Outsource
When most people start their online business, they don’t think of SEO. Instead, they build their website the way they think will help them reach their goals easiest. Along the way, they learn that SEO can bring them free targeted traffic.
Targeted traffic is possibly the best type of traffic your website can receive, but since SEO is so time-consuming, these webmasters smartly turn to outsourcing. They hire an external SEO or SEO firm to go through their website, insert keywords and build links.
These online business owners view SEO as a strategy separate from their overall marketing and content strategies.
So here’s what they get: a website that’s full of keyword-stuffed pages and backlinks built to those pages. Sure, their website might rank for some key terms, but the pages are difficult to read and provide no value to the people who are visiting the website.
The problem is, these website owners don’t realize that good SEO isn’t just about getting to page #1 of Google. They have some key terms they’d like to rank for, then hire an SEO firm and let them work out how to get rankings – without having any control over the content (something very frustrating to an SEO).
But what’s the point in reaching page #1 if once you get there your visitors aren’t interested in anything on your website?
The Right Way to Outsource
SEO should NOT be separate from content creation. Ideally, SEO would begin the moment you start your website.
So first things first, instead of viewing an SEO firm as an external part of your overall business plan, view the SEO firm as a partner in developing your website. Work with them to plan content.
To illustrate how this works, let’s look at a specific example.
Let’s pretend you have a website on “dog treats.”
What most website owners would do is hire an SEO firm to get them ranking for keywords relating to “dog treats” (healthy dog treats, dog treats for strong teeth, etc). But they wouldn’t give the SEO any control over their content.
The end result?
Their pages contain awkward keywords that make no sense to the viewer. In fact, it clearly looks like someone went into the pre-existing content and added keywords for the sole purpose of SEO.
Here’s the better way:
Start SEO right when you begin your content creation or, if you already have content up, change your existing content to fit with the keywords.
So for your main keyword, “dog treats,” you might have an entire page just devoted to that keyword. Then you might have a “healthy dog treats” page, where you could also include keywords like “cheap healthy dog treats,” or “dog treats for strong teeth.”
As you can see, we’re building up natural pages that fit in with our SEO strategy. Instead of forcing SEO firms to rank your pages without changing the content, you’re integrating SEO into your overall content strategy.
When people visit a website with SEO done correctly, they don’t even notice the keywords. Because SEO is used alongside content development, the page flows naturally. Most importantly, the page gives the visitor exactly what they want: high-quality information that’s easy to understand.
And in a post-Panda SEO world, this can be even more important than building backlinks.
Want More SEO Tips?
By taking the above information to heart, when it comes to outsourcing SEO, you’ll be able to do so without compromising your website’s content. As a result, not only will you find your webpage ranking on page #1, but your visitors will interact with your website (buy products, sign up for newsletters, etc).
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