Online Success 6: Why You Don't Need to Pay for SEO

October 01, 2024

Retailers often ask, “Is it worthwhile to hire someone to do Search Engine Optimization?” The short answer is no, you don’t need to hire an SEO company. However, you may not see the search results you’re looking for without good SEO practices. If hiring an SEO company isn’t an option, you’ll need to manage the SEO yourself. The good news is that you know your website and business needs better than anyone else, and that makes you uniquely qualified to be your own ideal SEO candidate.

**SEO is an ongoing process;**It is not a “set it and forget it” scenario

that requires little or no effort after publishing your website.

Like anything else in life, you will get out of your website what you put into it. Invest time learning about SEO , understand what works in your market, and know your target audience (check out this article). As discussed in previous articles in this series, you can’t wait for things to happen, you must actively and consistently put in the work to make them happen. You need to:

Publish compelling articles for your industry.
Post how-to tutorials with video and images.
Always use your identified keywords strategically.

Provide unique and valuable resources or references on your site that are not easily available somewhere else and if you can, do it for free.

The best thing you can do to enhance your SEO is

create quality content that people want to use and link to.

There are a lot of free tools available to you for analyzing your website’s performance and user behavior. Take advantage of these to make improvements that will enhance your SEO. Great ones to look at are Google Analytics, SEMrush, and Moz.

The more effort you invest in quality SEO, the more you’ll reach your customers where they are. Your search rankings will increase, making it easier for your target customers to find you. If people can find you at the top of their search results (because these days few look past the first page of results), your likelihood of sales will increase. If it feels intimidating, work on it a little every day. The more you familiarize yourself with SEO and what it takes to be pretty great, the easier it’ll be to maintain. However, if you continue to struggle with SEO, hiring a good SEO company is always an option.

Below are links to some excellent articles on the subject by industry experts.

This image from LifeDev says it all:

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