Outsourcing SEO

[Stefan Joubert]

Hi all,

I love doing my own SEO work, and I enjoy it a lot.

The issue is my time is really limited.

I need to outsource parts of my SEO.

What parts can one successfully outsource and still get quality?

Any thoughts/ideas will be much appreciated!

 

[sambarnes90]

Hi Stefan

I think it depends on where your skills or interests lie really.

If you're more technical - out source the creative stuff (content, graphics, link building etc.)

If you're more creative - outsource the technical stuff (site audits, content analysis, competitor monitoring, on page structures etc.)

There are plenty of great companies out there that are great at lots of these aspects of SEO.

If it's purely about time - perhaps content creation / link building should be the first things to look to outsource.

Be EXTREMELY careful outsourcing your linkbuilding though. Make sure you're getting someone who is giving a full white hat service. You don't want to end up in Google's bad books six months from now!

Feel free to PM me if there's anything you really struggle with.

Thanks
Sam

 

[fisicx]

Do you even need to do any more SEO? If the site is ranking well and competition isn't fierce just leaves things alone.

That being said, there a gazillion thing you could do to your site yourself that would improve things and wouldn't take a lot of time to do. The page titles for starters are in need of some TLC. You are using yoast which isn't helping and the whole site structure needs some help. Get yourself a website review, either private or public: http://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/forums/website-reviews-testing.74/

 

[Stefan Joubert]

HI Fisicx - Why is Yoast not good and how can one make better page titles?

 

[fisicx]

Yoast makes all sorts of suggestions that generally aren't that good.

And your page titles should reflect the things potential clients are looking for. Really busy right now, can I send you a PM later with some suggestions?

 

[Stefan Joubert]

Perfect!

 

[webgeek]

Yoast makes all sorts of suggestions that generally aren't that good.

And your page titles should reflect the things potential clients are looking for. Really busy right now, can I send you a PM later with some suggestions?

Yoast handling of canonical is one of the hallmarks of what not do to with your site. Assuming that it's doing what it should has cost so many site owners their rankings it isn't even funny. I've personally had to pick up the pieces, educate the site owners about meta robots noindex and map out the fixes on too many occasions to count.

Canonical is one of the worst implemented tags in the history of SEO, one of the most dangerous and least understood. Yoast either doesn't care or understand - it's hard determining which is the case.

 

[webgeek]

Find a good writer and outsource the content development.

Create the topics and skeleton outlines of what you want written, assign to the writer and then review. Write a brief for the graphic artist you're outsourcing to, and make sure they affordably hit the mark.

These two bits of outsourcing can keep you in control of the site while taking hours off your schedule and offloading on theirs.

 

[fisicx]

Yoast handling of canonical is one of the hallmarks of what not do to with your site.

Not only that, their traffic lights are so wrong it's dangerous and only a busy site yoast can degrade performance. Did you know they load every page twice: once for you and I to look at and once server side for their analysis.

 

[Stefan Joubert]

Webgeek - thanks regarding outsourcing the writing part. This seems feasible and sensible!

 

[Stefan Joubert]

What plugin would you all recommend rather than Yoast for a wordpress website?

 

[Elliottc26]

Yoast is the popular choice. Many use it. Everything has its weaknesses but it's pretty straight forward to use.

 

[fisicx]

Just about the only thing you need to do is rework your pages titles and write descriptions. Everything else Yoast offers is unnecessary fluff. It's popular because it has all the gimmicks but you don't need any of it.

It's why I built the simplest SEO plugin ever. All it does is let you edit you page title and descriptions as in nearly all cases that's all you need: https://quick-plugins.com/free-things/no-fuss-seo/

 

[webgeek]

You don't need a stoplight plugin to tell you your title, meta description, h1 are optimised.

Instead, you need a course, like FreshBananas. Learn the fundamentals, crawl the site with ScreamingFrog and then work through it page by page.

Use SiteLiner to check the internal duplicate content and the output from ScreamingFrog and you'll be cooking with gas. The biggest threat is often the auto-dupe content created from people using full-length excerpts in categories, tags, authors and archives, making 4 copies of your 1 set of posts, thus having 5 sets of dupe content!

 

[Stefan Joubert]

Freshbananas sounds great will definitely take a look. I am really open to learn!

 

[StevePoster]

my time is really limited.
I need to outsource parts of my SEO.
What parts can one successfully outsource and still get quality?

First you need to told us what part of SEO do you still manage, and the other part in which you need to outsource? it is because every website needs different SEO so we don't want to guess.

 

[Stefan Joubert]

Steve, I like to source quality relationships myself (rather than links), but the writing part I would like to outsource when and if possible.

 

[Hospitality_king]

@ stefan-joubert


There is no such hing as a 'relationship' or quality for it no matter, as the whole free link game dies years ago - forget about it. Free links that don't exist - only matter to optimization scammers who wana rip u off man. Never pay linkbuilders who pretend their doing optimisation. (there are clues to identify them, I may teach u this later).

You is right bout doing seo yourself, as it will save u loadsmof £££ on paying linkbuilders, but u still must pay the websmaster sites for the linkspace. But there is no substitute for brains over stupid decisions like spamming via articles that no one will ever read. U must hink bout what surfers do, and it not to read long article junk or visit empty sites - they want link traffic benefits, and that real visitors who will hopeful buy from em.



Each link deal must be approached so careful, to not upset the webmaster owner, or you can forget a link yes? you peeve off people and forever regret that mistake.

See - sole traders have nothing to trade wth linkwise, there sites are so low quality hty got no traffic, so why some huge site want to do a deal - they wont as it not a level playing field, compared to wht a spacky little site got - make sense ye??? and all outsource will do is you wil pay a expensive fee to some Indian from Kalcutta, they spin out your links to 400 real bad sites and you will suffer in money so bad it will feel like a beating.

Don't get taken in by fak promse of amazing links - amazing links from like where lol - u never see them in ,illion years, I guarantee it and anyone lying is lying to grab your money best way to approach sites is ask permission nicly and if they say bugger off - you just need to take it like a man, maybe even shut down your biz if that what it ends up for most We been there and done it many times friend - I not lie to you

 

[lisa benner]

if you find a good company do let me know, id love to outsource some seo stuff

 

[Stefan Joubert]

Lisa, I will keep you updated with my search!

 

[fisicx]

But Stefan, you don't need to outsource your SEO. We spoke at length on how you can fix your site and it's all basic on-site work. You may wish to employ a copywriter but you don't need to pay for SEO.

 

[Elliottc26]

It all depends on what you want to outsource as this will determine how much this is going to cost you.

They come in this order:

1. SEO Strategy and Plan
2. UX Optimising
3. Copy (sales pages) and Content (info pages) Plan
4. On-page Copy and Content creation
5. On-Page Technical
6. Backend Technical
7. Related and relevant, quality Directories and Citations
8. Relationship Building and Outreach

Reason being is that if you have no strategy and plan, the rest will not even matter as the results will be poor. Which means spending twice over.

Expect to pay £20 to £85 per hour depending on who you use. So this could easily be £500 pcm for 25 hours a month for Small Agency / Freelance / Consultant down to 5.88 hours a month for mainstream agency / Freelance / Consultant.

 

[Stefan Joubert]

Fisixc, Your opinion on the matter is one of many. I want to hear what other members have to say too about SEO and outsourcing. (Obviously staying within google guidelines)

I appreciate your initial response and I am taking things on board, but I think outsourcing SEO can be a valid strategy if done correctly.

We only have so many hours in a day and I do not have enough time available to do everything.

I do honestly appreciate your candid feedback.

 

[Stefan Joubert]

Christopher thank you for your advice. It seems very sound

 

[fisicx]

I appreciate your initial response and I am taking things on board, but I think outsourcing SEO can be a valid strategy if done correctly.

I agree. But you don't need to outsource yet. Get the site properly structured and the content sorted and you will be almost there. You may need help with this but it's not SEO it's more about marketing. And good marketing will be far more valuable than just focusing on SEO.

 

[Stefan Joubert]

Now i am confused on this forum.... Some recommend YOAST others don't. Why the Yoast hate?

 

[Elliottc26]

Now i am confused on this forum.... Some recommend YOAST others don't. Why the Yoast hate?

For some it's personal preference whilst some have their own plug-in to promote and need to get users onboard. Some may have had issues whilst others find it straight forward without issues.

I've never seen any issues with using Yoast and neither have my clients, or others' clients I've worked for. I like it.

 

[Stefan Joubert]

Now I'm even more confused! Christopher who obviously has experience with marketing and the net is cool with Yoast, Graham who post here like thousands of times hates Yoast...

Can we have like 10 pertinent reasons with PROVE why Yoast is not good?

 

[Stefan Joubert]

This is a comment from someone: (An actually comment left on Elegant Themes' blog post reviewing Yoast)

Personally, I would gasp at the notion that there’s a better plugin for SEO than Yoasts. Namely because of the extensions they now offer. The benefits of having schema markup for local businesses now is an absolute must. Futhermore their redirect manager (integrated with Search Console) cannot be overlooked. All in all they’ve done a damn good job on improving the plugin’s offering as users needs change. However, I have to use the term users loosely – the above mentioned extensions are paid.

Why would someone praise Yoast so much if it sucks???

Seems weird to me!

 

[fisicx]

Those things they praise are minor features that the majority will never need. Schemas for example are mostly pointless and you don't need a plugin for redirections.

For a small site Yoast is fine - but so are all the other SEO plugins. Just because something is popular doesn't mean it's the best. The most important thing you need from these plugins is the ability to edit the page titles and description. If you can do this then you don't need anything else.

 

[Stefan Joubert]

The most important thing you need from these plugins is the ability to edit the page titles and description. If you can do this then you don't need anything else.

Actually this comment is very spot on I think!

 

[fisicx]

And it's why you don't need 90% of the stuff Yoast offers. Because you have a small site with low numbers of page views you will never see the performance degredation. But I'm working with a client that has thousands of daily page views. Replacing Yoast with another SEO plugin reduced server load by almost 40% which meant it could deliver more pages to more people much faster. Time to first byte dropped by about 0.5 seconds (on average over the day).

 

[BDLtd]

I outsource web & graphic design, content writing & guest posting. I couldn't bear to outsource any other parts! xD

p.s All in one SEO is my favourite WP plugin. Purely because I can enter metas from the Page list as oppose to having to visit each page or rely on auto generation rules.