Table of Contents
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The goal of a search engine (Google, Duckduckgo, Bing, Yahoo, etc.) is to respond accurately to a request.
Search Engine Optimization consists in optimizing the content of your website to encourage search engines using your website to answer the request.
Concretely, SEO makes your website appear higher in the results and on the good keywords.
Why is SEO important?
But will those optimizations make a big difference? Are search engines not clever enough?
Search engines, even if they try to be as accurate as possible are far from perfect.
They can misunderstand what your website is about or push your website down if you do something that displease their algorithms.
The principal criteria used by search engines are:
- Keywords.
They have to correspond to what the user is searching. But careful.
Putting 100 times a keyword will displease google algorithm. You have to make good content to be rewarded. - Backlinks.
Does another websites talk about yours? The more websites cite yours, the more google will give importance to it. Be careful though, Google takes the quality of backlinks into account. - Performance of the website.
Your website has to be performant. If your page takes 5 seconds to appear, people will not wait that long and leave.
But generally, for a WordPress made website, you don’t really need to do any modification. The base is sufficient.
My personal experience with SEO: the importance of keywords
When I created ElectroCroissant, I neglected the importance of keywords.
As I don’t use enough these words, google was not understanding that they were the core of ElectroCroissant.
The consequence was that people who were looking for art photography were missing my website.
I am now a lot more aware of the importance of keywords and pay attention to use the words “art”, “artistic photography” or “fine art photography” when I write a post.
SEO is complex
As you’ve read, search engines have their rules, and if you don’t respect them, your website will be sanctioned and relegated to the bottom of the search results, where no one one will find it.
And the higher the number of you competitors is, the more “optimization” you’ll need to perform.
Hiring a SEO agency to do the job
But how to optimize my website?
How do I do that?
An SEO company is here to do that job for you by selecting the right keywords and creating backlinks on the appropriate websites.
Thus making your website more appealing to google’s algorithm.
SEO: avoid the scammers
To the uninitiated, SEO can seem like a dark art.
And a lot of dishonest and incompetent people are using that ignorance to bamboozle credulous and inexperienced website owners.
A few days ago, I exposed the Searchregister scam, a website selling SEO services by using deceptive techniques – using spam to get customers, using false certifications, implying the idea that you have to pay them to make your website appearing in the search results.
You have to be very be careful when choosing an SEO agency.
First SEO results take months to come. If you hand this task to incompetent people, not only you’ll lose money but also a lot of time.
Why an agency is a good idea
Acquire customers
SEO is an excellent to acquire customers and give authority to your website.
The advantage of SEO over ads is that it inspires more confidence in your website.
In the mind of a customer, google rank higher your website because it is objectively good.
Your website won’t rank well without SEO
As we see earlier in this post, search engine algorithms rules are not obvious. Learning them on your own will take time and efforts.
Thus, delegating this task to specialists is appealing.
The drawbacks
A big investment
If you want results, SEO services will cost you anywhere from $1,000 to several thousand dollars.1
Loss of control
You’ll have to delegate the writing of your content to the agency to let them place the keywords correctly.
If it is important for you to have a website that looks authentic, it may not be a good option.
You can live without a SEO agency
And this is what I do with ElectroCroissant.It is simply impossible to delegate the writing to specialists on a website about art.
Otherwise, if all you need is a little presentation website, you can pay an agency to put it in place – Again, be careful! Some agencies have literally a business based on bamboozling inexperienced entrepreneurs with one-sided contracts.
There are other ways to acquire customers
Ads, speaking to potential customers, participate to talks on a forum, etc.
There are proved and more certain ways to get results, including some that will not cost you anything.
Do it yourself
It is also possible to do everything yourself with basic knowledge: create your WordPress website with an FSE theme and learning the intricacies of SEO on the job.
My experience with ElectroCroissant
It took me years to come to the ElectroCroissant.Art website you see today. And I am not even done yet.
But at the end of the -long- journey, I know I’ll have a unique tool that will stand out among the more generic websites.
Conclusion: it depends on your wallet, your needs and your strategy
Unlike what I often read, SEO is not a “free” mean of getting visitors.
It demands a commitment or substantial amount of money to rank high in the search results.
And if the keywords that you’re aiming for are disputed, the results are far from granted…
It is often wiser to explore other customer acquisition channels before investing in SEO.
Hiring or not an agency is also question of strategy in customers acquisition and the harshness of the competition – what is the point of paying if you already rank well because you’re the only one responding to the request?
If your means allow it and you’re ok with losing control on your website, a -good- agency still an excellent way to acquire customer and can be very profitable.
- https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/1e7ti45/cost_of_seo_services_how_much_to_pay_agencies_and/ âŠī¸
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