The question that I get asked most often by small business owners is do I need professional SEO for my website? The short answer to the question is Yes, but the long answer is you should proceed cautiously. The reason for this is a lot of the search engine optimization companies out there use spam or thousands of back links from low domain authority websites which can actually hurt your site. This poses a big problem for small business people because their expertise is in their business niche, and not website optimization. This is why smart business owners need to hire out a team of competent website managers to keep up with their competition. Over the past few years we have seen the world wide web change dramatically. Some of the biggest changes we have seen in the last 10 years is the rise of e-commerce giant Amazon and social media sites like Facebook and Instagram take over. Previously, we watched social media giants like Myspace out of no where loose favor with the public and drop off the map. The point of this background story is that the only constant part of the internet is change. That's why to beat your competition you need to stay ahead of the curve and hire the best seo firm you can afford who specialize in search engine optimization. After some bad experience with past SEO companies we feel it's important to do your research before you take the plunge. The best way to verify that a company can do a good job optimizing your website is to ask them to show you proof of their past successful projects. If they haven't been able to rank a website well then you might want to look elsewhere.
Google's latest update Penguin has made it harder for small business owners to keep up wi the latest search engine optimization updates. This can mean lost rankings, lost customers, and lost revenue. In the modern world you almost need a full time SEO team to keep up with all the changes. I believe that computer savvy small business's can keep up with the changing search landscape. A big part of dominating your competitor is to properly position yourself for local search. That's right folks local search is the new growth area and if you haven't positioned yourself you could be left in the dust. There are many companies out there promising local search results including Moz, Yext, White Spark, and Bright Local. These are all reputable companies that will do what they promise, but the price points are very different. Using a combination of Google Pages listing and Business Citations these companies can help you dominate even competitive markets, but at a price. You can pay as much as $10 per citation which I feel is too high. Or you can pay as little as $2 to $4 dollars a citation which is more reasonable. Whatever you do make sure you either learn proper local SEO techniques or pay someone to do it for you. It's that important.
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Greg FallersI am a search engine optimization professional who has been helping business owners optimize their listings for over 10 years. |