Getting a consultant or company that is focused exclusively on Search Engine Optimization to try to rank your website in Google is very important to your search engine marketing success.
The spoils go heavily to the victor — the data that I show in the video proves it. The value of mediocre SEO is often a big fat zero.
SEO is a deep knowledge subject with a shifting environment that didn’t exist 20 years ago. Do you really think someone that’s spent 5 hours a week doing/studying SEO for a few months can really provide your business with profitable results in the search engines?
More about the Dallas SEO Geek:
Approximate transcript of video:
Hi, this video is about Generalist SEO versus SEO Specialist. My name is David Hood, I’m the Dallas SEO Geek. There is a big difference. This comes up a lot. I don’t necessarily get as many questions about it as I hear people talk about their past and their future plans. Past plans not working or future plans and it’s a little bit of a re-education process because this is very different than a lot of other disciplines out there.
One thing that is really important to keep in mind throughout this whole thing is that the value of high quality SEO versus medium or low quality SEO is dramatic, absolutely huge. This is only one piece of the puzzle. There’s actually several other pieces that reinforce this and amplify this even stronger. This is one example of what I mean by the rewards distribution.
If you rank #1 for something you’re going to get about 37% of the traffic. This can vary dramatically; it could be 50%, it could 25%, but the trend that I’m showing here is the same in that it is an exponential drop off. When you go from #1 to #2 you’re already losing about half the amount of traffic. By the time you get to #5 you’re at about 10 times less traffic. The bottom of the first page, if something only gets searched 100 times a month and you’re #10, that’s really not going to provide a lot of value. Maybe if something gets searched 100,000 times a month and you’re #10, okay, that’s pretty stinking good.
The point here is that some people, they go for the cheaper or the more general SEO people and sometimes they’re not even getting on the first page and in their thinking they’re getting a deal when if they’d pay double, let’s say it was double, they could get 10 or really more like 100 or 1,000 times the kind of results that they could get. This is very important. I would say when you go to hire someone, don’t hire the least expensive person. I’m not the most expensive sometimes, but I’m usually not the least expensive either. Hire who you think is the best fit. Obviously you have budget concerns, but if someone doesn’t seem like a fit or they don’t seem like they really focus at all on SEO, then just don’t hire them. It’s better to do nothing and move on to other marketing opportunities.
Some examples of web designers that are generalists. Web designers, a lot of times they know a little bit about on-page SEO and they know nothing about off-page and so they integrate it a little bit with the web design and sometimes they sell it as SEO when a lot of times it’s like the very most basic simplest SEO that could be done. It’s really not going to help you rank on the first page, or especially high on the first page, unless it’s extremely noncompetitive.
Marketing agencies are another example of this. It’s a little bit different. Sometimes they have a partner that is an SEO specialist. It’s really pretty hard for them to hire a full time person who really knows SEO. It does happen from time to time. If they really are that good then a lot of times they end up leaving the company because they can usually make more money outside of that, unless it’s a really good agency. Most of the time I would say marketing agencies, their SEO is pretty limited. Sometimes, again, they do have a quality SEO. I would ask, if you are considering a marketing agency for your SEO, I would ask about the person or the team that is doing it. Make sure that there is someone who focuses on SEO exclusively because there is plenty of work to do as a full time SEO for years and years for someone who is highly technical. I’ll get a little more into that in a second.
Part time SEOs. These people are probably new, maybe they’re doing it 10 hours a week. It’s pretty hard to be really good at SEO in 10 hours a week, even if you’ve been doing it for a year like that. A part time SEO, that’s going to be pretty hard. New full time hire, some people think, “Okay, we’ll just hire a new person and train them.” Well, first of all, you’re not going to know what to train them on or how to get them started on the training. Second of all, they’re not going to know anything about SEO. They’re going to and they’re going to read the general articles that are publicly out there and they are going to choose the most expensive, least powerful, least effective form of SEO out there. The main this is people say, “Oh, content marketing, build it and they will come.” That can work, but content marketing is not in and of itself an SEO, it does help with SEO, if done well, but also it’s the most expensive and longest term pack.
For big companies that can hire a bunch of people to do the content marketing for them and they already are doing other marketing and they already have authority, this can help definitely. This can be an okay path for them. I still think it would be better if they took a little bit of a different approach, but that’s the approach that these people are going take and it’s going to take you forever to get results.
Let’s look at a specialist real quick. Me: I’m highly technical, I’ve been building my own computers since I was a kid, and websites, since the ’90’s. I have 2 engineering degrees. I’m highly technical. I’m very computer-oriented. I spend all day doing SEO, SEO is all I do. There are some things that are closely related to that that I do work on, but basically the focus on my day, every day, is SEO. Sometimes even when I go to talk to people, I’m thinking about SEO and I should be listening to them. Sometimes that happens. I’ve been doing this full time for over 4 years now and actually part time for 3 years before that. There is still more for me to learn. There’s always more, even the best people in the world have more to learn. Actually I have quite a few mentors that are extremely good at SEO and they all do it a little bit differently. They all have their own little flavor. They’re all also learning and testing and doing more, trying to get better every day. That’s kind of what I would think that you would want in order to get the quality results. Usually that’s what is required.
Another thing is focus. This is true for pretty much any discipline. If you’re a lawyer, but you try to be a lawyer and a doctor and an engineer all at once, that’s going to be pretty hard to do, right? There’s a lot of benefits to focusing. You’re going to be … If you try to do 3 different jobs, as opposed to 1 job, you’re going to be less than 1/3 as valuable. You’re going to be like 1/10th or 1/100th as valuable because there are certain efficiencies and big gains that you get when you focus and you dig deep and your brain spends a lot of its time just working on that one concept.
There’s a lot of complexities with SEO. SEO is a new discipline. It has shifting goal posts in that the algorithms change. Now the core of Google’s algorithm, I think, is roughly the same. They do have some additional factors going in there, but it’s extremely complex. There’s a lot of moving parts. There’s thousands of different moving parts. Thousands of little decisions and you don’t want someone who just knows a little bit or spends a little bit of time trying to navigate these complexities. Your website is a boat and you’re on a bunch of different rivers and you need to navigate through alligator infested waters for your business to be successful. Someone who has no experience with those rivers, it’s going to be very hard for them to deal with all the complexities that are going on. That’s maybe not the perfect analogy, but an analogy none the less.
If you’re looking for an SEO specialist, you can get a free analysis. Go to my website. Click on the discovery forum and fill that out and submit it. Then I will get back to you very soon and I’ll give you a free SEO analysis and recommendations. Then we’ll go from there. Thanks for watching and have a great day. Bye!
