Is Professional SEO Worth It?

Every business manager is looking for an edge today.  But are they doing enough to create it?

And where is that edge? Is it your budget, creative talent, marketing strategy, competitiveness, and the true value of your product/service/brand? What’s so valuable about your offer and strategy that it will win?

When we stop a moment to consider how competitive digital marketing is today, we have to think about how we’re going to win.

Expert SEO talent is almost certainly your biggest asset.  Yes, competing sucks and in a sense it is for losers.  Competing wears you down and doesn’t really ever stop unless you build a captive audience.

Expert SEO generates a number of leadership advantages, and capturing that loyal audience is a key one.

If audiences don’t find your website and can’t see why your value proposition is better than competitors, then they’re not going to switch providers and become your customer.

Expert SEO works at a higher level, to get you off of the playing field to a quiet zone where you have customers all to yourself. It creates a bigger traffic pipe, but also continues building significance on all good keyword phrases.

The point overall is to separate your company/brand from all of that desperate competition.  Professional SEO works to set your brand apart, with repeated impressions, and strong impact and engagement. Every time they see your icon or page url in the Google results, they’re reminded of your brand’s superiority, and that the rest are just noise.

Begin With Deep Insights

A professional level approach would begin with a digital marketing audit, rather than only an advanced SEO audit (yours is free if you become my client).  By using the insights in the digital marketing audit, we’re able to focus on presenting your key strengths on Google.

Searchers look for quality and value.  We establish that first (brand message) so that all these impressions/views really create an impact on them. Amateur SEOs just scramble madly for rankings, and the impact never registers with searchers.  Sometimes poor Google listings, poorly written, make your company and brand look bad.

There’s a lot that goes into a winning search engine marketing strategy:

• conducting high quality market research — digital marketing audit
• building a market leading unique value proposition for customers
• high quality content
• impactful content
• consistent freshness and trimming of content
• applying market leading, advanced SEO techniques and tactics
• a focus on expertise and thought leadership
• expert strategy that synchronizes relevant assets
• timely battle tactics to win keyword rankings, visibility and capture brand awareness
• continuous effort to enrich and refresh content assets
• accent on analytics to identify successful tactics
• time taken to stay attuned to industry trends and Google Algo updates
• the ability to persuade clients to do the right thing and avoid failure

The challenge is more than top rankings on a few keyword phrases.  That will only a small amount of traffic,

Instead, the challenge is to create a winning, persistent, and well written presence in the search results. It means your site isn’t a continuous stranger, but rather an omnipresence on Google or Bing. Always relevant, always fresh and updated, and always communicating your key brand message.

People don’t click on top rankings if they see copy that doesn’t interest them.  Expert SEOs ensure the listing reads relevant and makes searchers want to click through to your site.

Expertise to Orchestrate Your Campaign Win

For more than two decades clients have hired me to do SEO magic. That’s what they called it.

It is sophisticated and is a creative skill more than a technical talent.

The professional level SEO consultant also provides big picture insights and planning advice, advanced strategy and techniques, tactical execution assistance, and the energy to commit to a challenge that can be often overwhelming.

Clients do give up at times. That’s because they’re not putting enough money/talent into the effort to be competitive. They believe it should be easier, but it keeps getting tougher.

SEO tricks and spam aren’t sufficient to win today. You need a serious focus on creating real value, and to communicate expertly within the search results. Do it well, and you draw much more traffic.

Best Practices is Child’s Play

There’s been a big push to promote and adhere to Google’s so called best practices.  It’s enough to know the priorities of Google and try to meet them. Yet, watering down your efforts to fit a standard is unwise.  Success comes via strategy, techniques and tactics which mean manipulating Google’s impression of your content’s meaning.

Because Google is unfair in how it typecasts your content against your will. They often interpret wrongly.

And we need to get every ounce of value out of your content to build a leadership position. We need to shape content, control meanings, and ensure we use all of your ranking power expertly. Fine tuned and precise.

Strong visibility, impact, significance, and engagement are difficult to build in a fatigued internet audience.

This is what distinguishes the SEO pros from the amateurs:

1. a focus on content quality and its value to customer/visitors
2. a talent with strategy that makes them awesome regardless of resources/funding
3. big push for strong promotion to gain visibility
4. a focus on content which target audiences are truly interested in
5. good use of social media channels to share good content and build reach to well targeted prospects
6. curiosity and a talent for deep analysis of a complex marketing problem
7. diverse, encompassing view of all aspects of marketing
8. creative imagination to solve tough, complex problems and build workarounds
9. deep understanding of client’s specific audiences
10. ability to create authority/expertise/admiration with industry people
11. respect for and connections with intelligent SEO professionals
12. persistence, determination, and decisiveness in driving a winning campaign
13. strong understanding of copywriting, audience engagement, and value propositions

Find the Right Pro to Personally Manage Your Success

Your professional quality SEO provider is a consultant giving you the right advice and guidance. They may also be producing some of the marketing content thus adding significant value.

If you hire a marketing agency, you may have the work shifted to a novice worker as the key person promoted doesn’t have time to work on your account. They’ll give a quick overview and push the project into a system, which basically means your project is a commodity and is distributed to amateurs.

That won’t work today. It’s too competitive.

Your Professional SEO provider must be completely and personally involved in your project, or you’re paying big bucks for an amateurish effort. That won’t be enough to win today.

Find about more about professional level SEO services packages.

I’ve enjoyed serving clients in Toronto, San Diego, San Francisco, Boston, New York, Houston, Palm Beach, Mississauga, Calgary, Vancouver, Chicago, and London UK.

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