Recent "SEO to learn it or to outsource it?" Thread

[J.McVeigh]

Hey guys, just been reading through a recent thread "SEO to learn it or outsource it". It seems the general consensus is that it is wise to understand at least the basics of SEO so that you have the tools to be able to effectively outsource.

My knowledge on SEO, keyword research and the like is relatively limited and I should probably know more... I have been thinking about paying to have someone carry out an SEO audit on our site. At a cost of £200-£300, I wondered if this might be a cost effective SEO kick starter that would give me a framework to move forward on and take further by myself.

Any thoughts on this? How useful is an SEO audit? Or would it be more advantageous to get stuck in from the start doing all keyword research and analysis myself?

Thanks,

James

 

[fisicx]

Save your money and do TIn's fantastic DIY course: https://www.freshbananas.co.uk/

 

[dan19900]

No, you just need a fast loading page, you can use one of the free online tools for that. Then just make sure you're not over optimizing for the keyword you're targeting and add internal links to the pages you want to rank.

 

[J.McVeigh]

Thanks for the quick responses.respo definitely check out that course.

you can use one of the free online tools for that

Which free online tools specifically?

Cheers,

James

 

[fisicx]

No, you just need a fast loading page, you can use one of the free online tools for that. Then just make sure you're not over optimizing for the keyword you're targeting and add internal links to the pages you want to rank.

That's just about as wrong as it gets. You have missed even the most basic SEO techniques from your summation.

 

[dan19900]

Thanks for the quick responses.respo definitely check out that course.



Which free online tools specifically?

Cheers,

James

Google page speeds insights
tools.pingdom
gtmetrix

Any of these will be fine, sorry it's not letting me post links

 

[dan19900]

That's just about as wrong as it gets. You have missed even the most basic SEO techniques from your summation.

Such as? I'm not sure what's more basic than making sure your website loads fast and adding your keyword to the page.

 

[jamesandjanie]

Both. I suggest outsourcing the SEO work to an SEO expert. It's massive work and takes lots of time, you'd better not to do it alone. However learn basic things about SEO and get update about Google algorithm from time to time, in order to find out what's wrong and discuss with your SEO guy, otherwise you just blindly follow whatever he says.

 

[fisicx]

Such as? I'm not sure what's more basic than making sure your website loads fast and adding your keyword to the page.

Page titles, descriptions, headers, content, calls to action and trustmarks. The content should be informative, interesting and add value.

The things google has been telling people to do since forever.

It's not about page speed and adding keywords. It's about relative page speed and how the content on one page relates to the content on other pages. Semantics not keywords. Get it right and you can rank for things that aren't even on the page.

 

[dan19900]

Page titles, descriptions, headers, content, calls to action and trustmarks. The content should be informative, interesting and add value.

The things google has been telling people to do since forever.

It's not about page speed and adding keywords. It's about relative page speed and how the content on one page relates to the content on other pages. Semantics not keywords. Get it right and you can rank for things that aren't even on the page.

Oh right, I thought all of that was too obvious to mention to be honest.

 

[websitehelper]

SEO audits are good but I wouldn't pay that sort of money. You could do an audit yourself with the right tools.

Freshbananas looks like a good starting point, also check out CaniRank.

 

[fisicx]

Oh right, I thought all of that was too obvious to mention to be honest.

Unfortunately not. Many UKBF members and visitors will have read your post and think that's all they need to do.

 

[Paul Carmen]

To carry out a proper SEO audit you realistically need a few tools to do it really well. Although there are some tools that can scan your site and others that will let you review multiple sites/competitors for free. You really need to do some market/competitor research, along with what keywords and services your customers search for (that you need to rank for), as you need to benchmark yourself against the best local (or national) competition.

None of the tools are good at all of it unfortunately. They tend to specialise in areas; a good website technical SEO tools let you look at problems with your site; e.g titles, meta descriptions, tags, any duplicates of these or duplicate content, plus broken links, sitemap/indexing problems and canonical issues.

For technical SEO we'd recommend Screaming Frog spider, they have a free version. It does need a reasonable amount of SEO knowledge to use well and we tend to export, analyse, manipulate and edit the data further in MS Excel.

For keyword, ranking, market and competitor research it's quite difficult to use one tool, as many companies need to look at both local search elements and national keyword/contextual results too. The best all rounder is probably SEMrush, although we use Moz for local citations and Majestic/Ahrefs are better at backlinks! There is a free version of SEMrush, but its quite limited, they often have a trial period if you're prepared to sign up.

You can do keyword/competitor research the old fashioned way for free using AdWords Keyword Planner. Then look at who ranks for key phrases in a Google incognito search tab, it's a bit time consuming and manual though!

As an aside, anyone who is carrying out any SEO work for you should really ask you lots about your business, customers and services. They should also be able to carry out at least a preliminary SEO audit for you, as the actual SEO work they undertake will depend on the results of the audit itself. I'd be wary of anyone who wants £200-£300 just for the audit!

 

[StevePoster]

When it comes to SEO audit don't just rely on tools on the web but treat them as a guide to see the most important part that needs to be improve in the process. Anyway, if your knowledge is limited try to outsource it with the trusted ones and simultaneously learn from it.

 

[Local SEO Mastermind]

£200-£300 for an audit is extortionate. You can pretty much learn everything you need to know about SEO for free on YouTube or websites such as backlinko.

Most reputable SEO companies offer free website audits as part of their quotation process, as they cannot possibly give you a quote without first auditing the current state of your on-page and offpage SEO. Each websites circumstances are unique.

I've paid over £100 myself for audits in the past and was provided with the same information I could have discovered for free. More than 50% of what most SEO auditing tools report as an issue are garbage anyway and don't make the slightest difference in your rankings.

 

[Petr Gogolin]

Most reputable SEO companies offer free website audits

Whenever somebody offers me a free audit, I go away. It's complete opposite of being reputable. My position is that I want to work only with the best. That costs money. When you're good, you have tons of work and the idea of doing free audit is ridiculous to you. Actually I had to approach five experts to find one who would have time for new project.

We have worked with several SEO specialist at very different skill level. We paid £100, £300 and £1000 for an audit. Only the last one was worth it and helped us with insights that translated in 10x returns.

All of the above applies to a situation when you take SEO seriously, invest in it more than £100 per month and expect sizeable returns. On the other hand if you have local barbershop, perhaps few online tools nd DIY action is all you need and that's fine.

 

[James Rae]

Beware of the many interesting characters who try and sell you the emperors clothes. 90%+ of UK businesses have less than 10 employees and there advantage is the personal touch. SEO should not be farmed out to anyone. As long as you have a good to great website with all the correct components (as suggested above) and a carefully crafted social presence. I suggest you ignore anyone who says they are an SEO expert. BTW I may be a newbie here but I have had my own businesses for more than 40 years with turnover in excess of £100 million.

 

[xoxoseo]

It depends whether it's e-commerce or a company's site. It's e-commerce, then I would recommend having SEO audit done by a reputable agency. If it's a company site (you are going to attract traffic by a blog), you can try to manage by yourself. However, remember that keywords search is one of the most important stages, where you should use proper (and a few) tools, and be aware of long tails, proper text formating (Title, H1, etc) and linking.

 

[xoxoseo]

As long as you have a good to great website

I would add in accordance with Google point of view

 

[RjMaan]

My suggestion would be to save your money and invest your time on learning the basis of SEO.

 

[Ecowritingtablet]

My suggestion would be to save your money and invest your time on learning the basis of SEO.

i agree so also. I think 200-300 pound is just to help their website more search engine friendly. Yet there is much other work to do, off site marketing etc. It is really a big compaign which I believe will take years.

 

[Davidincognac]

James, if it costs you £200 a month
what does that mean in time to you?
How many hours would you need to spend to achieve the same results?

Concentrate at what you are good at, make sales and pay for the seo.
Dont listen to 2bit advice mate
go out there and smash your goals

 

[James Rae]

James, if it costs you £200 a month
what does that mean in time to you?
How many hours would you need to spend to achieve the same results?

Concentrate at what you are good at, make sales and pay for the seo.
Dont listen to 2bit advice mate
go out there and smash your goals

It ALL depends on if the £200 is paid to an 'seo guru' who doesn't have a clue-oow...which is a complete waste of your time and hard earned money.

 

[Davidincognac]

combine the 2 thoughts

It ALL depends on if the £200 is paid to an 'seo guru' who doesn't have a clue-oow...which is a complete waste of your time and hard earned money.

 

[The Longley Sales Academy]

I'd suggest getting stuck in with basic SEO audit online tools - see where that takes you first. Some of the ones I used in the past are SEO Site CheckUp and Varvy SEO tool.

 

[Davidincognac]

the problem with online audit tools is the language, for a newbie they are so hard to understand

 

[fisicx]

I'd suggest getting stuck in with basic SEO audit online tools - see where that takes you first. Some of the ones I used in the past are SEO Site CheckUp and Varvy SEO tool.

Except of course both those tools (and many others like them) miss the most important ranking signal which is of course the content. And many other of the reported fails aren't. They keep saying I need things like a sitemap, Google Analytics and social signals. None of these are necessary.

 

[George Owen]

if you're outsourcing... make sure that it's all white hat and above board. Google cannot be fooled!

 

[Leonardo Gonzalez Dellan]

If you are an expert SEO or you have worked on two or three projects of SEO then you can easily perform various SEO tasks on your website as well. But, if you are a beginner then you should not do the SEO of your website. If your website gets penalized by google then it will be very difficult for you to remove the penalties and your website will not get rankings on the search engine.

 

[SEO Ninja]

This is funny- Just been on a car forum and the conversation is: "Do it yourself" v "Take it to a garage" Very similar type of thread...

 

[bmt Promotions]

Most reputable SEO companies offer free website audits as part of their quotation process, as they cannot possibly give you a quote without first auditing the current state of your on-page and offpage SEO.