An SEO Study To Help Answer: Is It Worth Hiring An SEO Expert?

By now, doing SEO is an absolute given for a business or company of any size.

Yet so many business owners and company executives still scratch their heads about how to implement SEO and wonder,

“Is it worth hiring an SEO expert to initiate or take over this kind of work?”

Hire an intern or an expert - maybe both? Staff an entire SEO team? Perhaps you’re still frustrated trying to figure out what exactly SEO is supposed to accomplish for your business? And that’s ok because honestly, SEO is still a bit of a digital marketing enigma for many folks out there.

Moreover, you might be asking yourself (or your boss is asking you) if a service like SEO is worth investing in and more specifically, what is the typical ROI (return on investment)?

In other words, you need to weigh your options and think about your own unique business context.

If you're reading this article, you may already be convinced by the plethora of statistics and data showing that SEO is worthwhile.

This article is our original study that goes in depth - but not excessively (about a 5 to 10 min read) - to find out why it truly is worthwhile to employ the expertise of an SEO professional.

Now onto the good stuff. Read on to find out why it’s valuable to hire an SEO expert.

Table of Contents:

1. You Have A Website, But Can We Find It?
2. SEO Case Studies
3. Calculate The Value and Worth of SEO
4. SEO Vs. Traditional Marketing
5. Is It Worth Hiring An SEO Expert?
6. Should I Hire An Seo Professional Consultant Or Agency?
7. Conclusion

If you were to describe your product or service without revealing your brand or business, would we be able to find your website using Google (e.g., "charity services for the poor, IT security software, wedding venue in Dallas)?

It sounds simple, but if people can't find your website on Google besides using your business name or brand, then you're really missing out on a ton of other traffic to get discovered.

Anything come up for the first page? If not, users are likely to not see your website (Search Engine Journal):

Why? Recent studies find that:

1. The first organic result in Google Search has an average click-through rate of 28.5%
2. The second result has a 15% average click-through rate;
3. The third organic result has 11% click-through rate;
4. The tenth position in Google has a 2.5% click-through rate.

When it comes to any hope for pages listed on the second page, well there isn't much hope for an average search.

These days, with so much competition for attention online and the knee-jerk habit of Google searches, it's likely that competition is eating up your potential share of the search pie.

In short, SEOs (what we call SEO professionals) with qualified experience will make it their goal to rank #1, period.

Foundation Worldview

Foundation Worldview offers critical thinking and Christian apologetics curriculums for kids. With an established partnership and deep understanding of their services, we were able to get their website ranking in the top 3 results for 12 keywords, such as “apologetics for kids.”

Most of these keywords consistently rank in the number 1 result that in turn drives brand awareness for homeschool parents and Christian schools alike.

Overall organic website traffic grew 281% year over year while non-branded traffic growth of 391% compared to the previous year (keywords used to search excluding “foundation worldview”)!

What’s more exciting is that organic traffic also led to over 3,000 sample requests of the curriculum and over 400 webinar registrations. In total, these leads also turned into a certain percentage of curriculum purchases.

Gen2 Innovations

Gen2 Innovations represents a niche market for firefighter equipment. They came to us to build a website and promote their tool for firefighters with digital marketing including SEO efforts.

With only a few blog articles and an optimized website, new visitor traffic through search results increased 91% compared to the prior year - that’s almost double the traffic along with its first purchases to launch this new brand of products.

Signature Custom Flooring

This wood floor contractor wanted to increase visibility and leads for local search results and maps results in their area.

Our localized strategy targeting various cities and towns generated 51 general inquiries from their website and 113 consultation requests for wood flooring projects.

Tennessee Music College

A music college in Tennessee began SEO work with us in 2020. As a result, their website had an overall boost of 70% increase of new visitors in 2021.

The number of leads generated to date through search results has totaled to over 500 inquiries.

Alright math geeks, roll up your sleeves and let's crunch numbers to justify the value of SEO.

Let's say you make $150 per order on average and that your online store gets around 1,000 visits each day.

It will also be important to understand what percentage of your visitors convert into customers. For our example, we'll use a 1% conversion rate.

The math laid out:

So hypothetically, that comes out to $45,000 in monthly revenue without current SEO work. We've seen some of our clients achieve #1 organic results with over 300% overall organic traffic growth. We'll input a conservative figure of 20% organic growth (which is healthy by industry standards).

Whip out those calculators one more time:

With a relatively decent SEO effort, you can potentially increase revenue by $9,000 each month or $360,000 every year. This exercise is clearly simplified, but the powerful value of SEO is no exaggeration. We encourage you to plug in your own numbers based on this example and other pertinent research.

It's no wonder why SEO is considered a valuable way to understand and reach customers in moments that matter most in a customer journey.

The significance of SEO in comparison to conventional marketing requires a metaphor to drive home the point.

We get that analogies are never perfect, but this one certainly rings true - To ask if SEO is worth it is kind of like asking during the 90’s if it’s worth paying to have your business listed in the original telephone directory, the Yellow Pages (which by the way, now is a YP website).

That is, just as important Yellow Pages were for physically located businesses, so are search engine results (e.g., Google search results) for businesses with websites in digital spaces.

We’re not trying to snub our noses by giving this analogy, because it's a wise and right question to ask after all, especially in today’s saturated online marketing environment.

What this means is that SEO experts can bring your business out of a traditional outbound marketing approach to a perpetual inbound marketing stance.

We've seen that SEO is a smart approach, but should you hire an SEO expert to perform SEO services for you?

You have several methods for improving your website's SEO:

1. Implement SEO on your own (Become an expert)
2. Hire an in-house SEO expert
3. or work with an Agency/SEO consultant.

Implement SEO Yourself

If you have a tiny website and a lot of time on your hands, this strategy might work for you, but it's not easy.

This is due to the fact that learning SEO takes a long time. As a result, it might take you some time to get started and even longer to see results. Take into account that you would need to keep up with changes in the SEO industry to be able to maintain site ranking success.

Hire an in-house SEO Professional

You can utilize this strategy if you want to maintain complete control over the job while not having to do it all alone.

Hiring a new employee, on the other hand, may be time-consuming and comes with on-boarding costs and other expenses. For certain organizations, particularly small businesses, these expenditures may be prohibitive.

If you aren't familiar with how SEO works, it might be difficult to find the appropriate candidate.

You may also hire an SEO company to collaborate with you.

The best SEO professionals have a lot of experience getting #1 rankings, but don't promise immediate results. That can be misleading, but sometimes SEO consultants really do provide quick results depending on the business, context and various other factors. Experts in the industry say that SEO is the most cost-effective channel for the long-term.

Of course, the advantage of this strategy is that you won't have to be concerned about learning how to do the job yourself or figuring out how to find the perfect employee.

An often overlooked fact is that some digital marketing agencies like Rocket Park offer both website development and SEO expertise to truly align business and marketing goals with completely tailored strategies.

The reality is that every business should have their website optimized for SEO, but the implementation and goals vary widely.

Your website needs to be discovered in search results besides people who already know your brand. Our case studies and cost/benefit analysis shows the value and worth of hiring an SEO expert no matter how that'd decided.

Sources:

1. searchenginejournal.com
2. searchenginewatch.com
3. smallbizgenius.net