SEO is only one channel of digital marketing. Normally, businesses refer to SEO as a source of free traffic, but you might be surprised to find that the ROI of SEO can often be lower than other channels like paid search or social media. SEO requires a lot of time and effort to produce quality content and work on off-page factors (e.g., link building). For some industries, this could be more expensive than many other channels.
Investing in an SEO consultant to conduct marketing research and technical analysis to determine:
- If you are covering your SEO foundations .
- If SEO is the best ROI channel for your business and can save a lot of money down the road.
- If you have the best SEO strategy or develop the right strategy and execution plan to achieve your SEO targets.
- Why your existing SEO strategy or provider (if you already have an SEO agency helping you) is not delivering results.
Will always yield a good return.
Another situation where you might need an SEO consultant's help is when you are making significant changes to your website, such as:
- A design and content change
- A CMS change that includes URL changes
- Moving to another domain
- Rebranding
A pre and post-migration audit will be required in this case, with the objective of maintaining the same ranking for all keywords, which will preserve the website traffic.
Are Your SEO Foundations Covered?
Covering SEO foundations does not require extensive ROI calculations. SEO foundations include:
- Having a well-designed website that works well on all browsers and devices.
- Having an SEO-friendly CMS that generates SEO-friendly title tags and URLs.
- Having a fast and crawlable website that search engines can discover, crawl, and index easily.
- Knowing your bottom-of-the-funnel keywords and having landing pages dedicated to targeting each of them or a group of them.
- Having the best content (winning content) compared to anyone in the top 5 spots in Google search.
- Having an off-page strategy to improve website authority by attracting quality links and citations.
If you are unsure whether your SEO foundations are covered, then investing in hiring an SEO consultant will always be a good investment.
Is SEO the Best ROI Channel for Your Business?
Ranking at the top of search results often has an ego element to it; many businesses aim to rank highly for specific keywords without analyzing the business value of such goals. They may be surprised to find that reallocating resources and investment to another digital marketing channel could be more beneficial. Situations where SEO (assuming your SEO foundations are covered) might not be the best investment for your business include:
- There is no awareness of your industry; many new niche industries lack awareness (manifested in low keyword search volume).
- Your top keywords have a low search volume (e.g., less than 100 each) and are not very expensive (less than $10 each). In this case, if you have limited resources, you could be better off using paid search, such as Google Ads, which is also quicker and more predictable.
- You are already ranking well for your keywords. This does not happen very often, but some businesses do not know their top keywords and do not track them. They could already be in the diminishing returns zone, making further investment in SEO less effective.
- You have a new business/domain and are targeting very competitive keywords, and you want to generate sales quickly.
In any of the situations above, hiring an SEO consultant might not be necessary. Just ensure that your SEO foundations are covered and allocate your resources elsewhere.
Do You Have The Right SEO Strategy?
SEO has one primary objective: promoting keywords (in most cases, bottom-of-the-funnel keywords) to become visible to searchers (e.g., ranking higher), which improves their chances of getting more clicks (better CTR).
If you know your keywords and they are already ranking at the top, there’s no need to worry much about creating an SEO strategy—it’s a mission accomplished situation. Search engine algorithms naturally promote the best content on the most trusted domains. Good marketing should ensure this happens, and it doesn’t necessarily need to be labeled as SEO.
An SEO strategy will include:
- Identifying your keywords and mapping them to the marketing funnel (top of the funnel and bottom of the funnel).
- Deciding where to focus in the marketing funnel. If the budget is limited, prioritize bottom-of-the-funnel keywords.
- Map your top keywords to your website content, identify content gaps, and areas for improvement.
- Ensure you have winning content for your target keywords, content that is better than any other result when you search Google for that keyword.
- Optimize your tags, focusing primarily on your title tags.
- Develop an off-page strategy (with link building being the most popular approach) based on competitive analysis and authority gaps. This step is crucial to evaluate correctly, as it is often the most expensive aspect of SEO. If there is no budget to target a long list of competitive keywords, it is strongly recommended to adjust the targets.
- Develop a dashboard that tracks SEO KPIs, such as top-of-the-funnel keyword rankings, organic traffic, and organic conversions, to ensure the strategy is producing results within the expected timelines.
If you are not confident about your SEO strategy, then hiring an SEO consultant will be a good investment.
Why Is Your Existing SEO Service Provider Not Delivering Results?
Before answering this question, I’ll assume your SEO provider has already covered your SEO foundations and implemented the right strategy. If not, I’ve already addressed this, simply revisit the sections on renewing your SEO foundations and strategy.
When everything is done correctly and there is still no ranking, the answer in most cases lies in off-page factors, often referred to as offline signals under different names, such as:
- Authority and trust
- Link profile strength
- E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.)
For some competitive keywords, Google has more than 1,000 relevant pages (content-wise). If it relied solely on content analysis and on-page factors, it would be challenging for the algorithm to determine which page should rank at the top. Google was built around offline signals, specifically links, and developed a metric for this called PageRank (PR). Off-page SEO is the most expensive and time-consuming aspect of SEO.
When an SEO project with solid SEO foundations and strategy fails to achieve results, the off-page factors need to be reviewed. The most common outcomes of that review are:
- Increase the budget to attract more and better-quality links.
- If the authority gap is significantly large compared to the websites ranking at the top, and a higher budget might result in a negative ROI, consider changing your keyword targets to focus on less competitive keywords.
- Consider changing your SEO provider. Most SEO providers focus primarily—or only—on content, on-page factors, and technical SEO, with minimal effort dedicated to link building. These providers are suitable for starting an SEO project but may not be the best choice for taking it to completion.
This is another situation where hiring an SEO consultant would be a good idea to assess the current state and recommend the adjustments needed to get the SEO project back on track.