Do SEO Yourself or Hire a Pro?

If you've just recently discovered SEO, you may be feeling overwhelmed by how much there is to learn. It's a little like college. You know you can master the material, but it's going to take time – and if you're also trying to run a business and maintain some kind of personal life, where will you get the time? Perhaps it's time to consider an alternative to doing it all yourself.

If you're an SEO yourself, of course, you'll want to do your own SEO for your business. My father was a CPA, and he always did his own taxes (though he had my mom do the bookkeeping for the business). But the small business owners who used his services often handed that aspect of their workload over to him with a sigh of relief. It let them concentrate on providing their own, very different services to THEIR customers. After all, what does filling out a tax form and dry cleaning a formal gown have in common?

And what does your day-to-day work have in common with SEO? This isn't a moot question; in fact, it's very relevant to whether it makes more sense to do your website's SEO yourself or hire a pro. By the way, the kinds of questions I'm going to bring up should sound very familiar to you if you've ever had to decide between doing something in-house or hiring someone outside your company to do it.

If deciding whether or not to outsource your company's SEO could be expressed as a math problem, the variables would include time, money, and capabilities. You can't get around the fact that SEO done right takes up a considerable amount of time. Learning the skill set takes time, as does keeping abreast of new developments. You might be better off spending this time elsewhere. But hiring someone to do it takes money – and hiring someone to do it right can take a lot of money. How do you decide?

You might start by actually approaching it as a math problem. Since we're looking at an investment of time, you need to find out what your time is worth. Yes, I know, if you've run the numbers, you're probably making minimum wage; that's true for all business owners. Instead, look at what you charge for your products or services. “If you can put a dollar amount for what your time is worth,” notes Stoney deGeyter, “that can help you determine if you can make time for SEO.”

Now that you've figured out what your time is worth monetarily, you need to look at your skill set. What do you do better than anyone else? That's what you should be spending your time doing. If customer relations is your true forte, that's where you should invest your energy. If you're best at coming up with new products and services, that's what you should do. Let go of the idea that you need to do everything; nobody can do everything equally well. Stoney deGeyter suggests that you should “Think about what you can do that provides the greatest benefit for the company before you decide that you should allocate your valuable time to the SEO.”