SEO Advice From Andy
Search Engine Optimization – Inhouse or Outsourced Part 1
I recently wrote a guest article for a blogging site on the topic of search engine optimization. Rather than point a link to that article I figured I would just do a new post here on my own blog that would be a little more informational for prospective clients questioning on what to do regarding search engine optimization, learn the techniques and apply them on their own or hire a SEO Services professional.
SEO, whether done in house or outsourced is a requirement in today’s online market if you want to attract visitors to your site and generate sales. It used to be very easy to put a website up and generate traffic, it’s a different world today and I’ll give you an example to illustrate the difference a few years has made.
I started my first ecommerce website in mid 1998. At that time I did no search engine optimization for the site at all, in fact I’m not sure SEO as we know it today was even widely by anyone back then, remember Google wasn’t even created until September of 1998, though there were other search engines around.
Anyway, that first website in a short amount of time was generating decent sales every month with really very little effort. It wasn’t that great by today’s standard, but it was consistently generating $10,000 to $12,000 a month and I was quite proud of it. In contrast, I personally launched a new website of the same genre almost a year ago as of this writing with quite different results. The new site is beginning to rank well and perform with the top competitors in it’s field now, but it’s taken a lot of SEO efforts by a handful of people under my direction to get there. My staff and I literally have a couple hundred man hours in applying the latest SEO techniques to get the site ranked for it’s top keywords. The term build it and they will come no longer applies on the www. Here is why:
Estimated number of websites in 1998: Approximately 3.6 million
Ecommerce revenues in 1998: 8 billion
Estimated number of websites in 2008: Approximately Over 100 million
Ecommerce revenues in 2008: 176 billion
(The above numbers are conservative estimates culled from various sources)
The internet was a baby back in 1998 and it had not really caught on. It’s a whole different story today. More and more people are routinely buying products online and where there is money to be made there is fierce competition. The entrepreneur in me loves that competition though. I often tell people, when you sell online you are no longer competing with the brightest minds and most well funded competitors in your community like you would with a local brick and mortar store, you are competing with the brightest and best in the world.
I don’t mean to scare you with the above paragraph. Doing business online is tough, but I’ll give you another analogy. You don’t need a piece of the internet pie to be successful. It’s a huge monstrous pie, a crumb will be enough to fill you up. Another thing to consider is that although you may be competing with some of the largest companies in the world online now, the playing field is more leveled online. While being well funded is nice, you don’t need to spend a ton to become successful online, you just have to be smart about where you allocate what funds you do have. This is where you have a huge advantage over the big guys and is also one advantage to using an experienced SEO services firm. Stay tuned for part two to find why and some tips for success if you do wish to try your own search engine optimization.
