Hiring a SEO Company vs. Do it yourself

Like anything in world, a person can do SEO himself or hire a specialist. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a complete industry by itself encompassing many activities and streams. A SEO needs to know about designing, programming, hosting besides SEO itself. Over the last few years, SEO has become lot more complex and wide but this hasn't stopped people from trying their hands at SEO.

Everyday, I see people thronging to SEO forums asking if and how they can learn SEO. Opinions are sharply divided with each camp sticking to their guns. As a SEO practitioner myself, I have seen SEO evolve so much from early days. In this article I will try to analyze who wins in the ‘Hiring a SEO Company vs. Do it yourself' debate

1) Can you learn? One of the first steps towards SEO is learning it. If you have to learn SEO, you will have to start from HTML and go on Google analytics, keyword research, link building, blogging, articles and many other things. SEO is not difficult but it certainly is vast. One of the good points of SEO is you can learn a lot from just reading and observing what industry leader are doing. SEO industry is blessed with many SEO experts who impart and share their knowledge very freely.

The thing about SEO is that you have to constantly learn (and many times unlearn) it. If you like reading, learning and bit of writing then SEO is for you. In case you do not like to read, then SEO can be difficult for you. There are no standards manuals or texts for SEO that you can read once and you now it all.

2) Do you have the time: As mentioned in the previous point, SEO needs lot of reading. And that takes time. If you are short on time then SEO is definitely not for you. SEO consists of many activities such as keyword research, article writing & submissions, directory submissions, Bookmarking, blogging etc. Most of the activities are manual even if you take help of various softwares.

3) Cost: Doing SEO yourself may seem to be free but only if you do not value your time. Depending on your business, SEO can take up a couple of hours every week or few hours every day. Do it yourself SEO means investing time. Calculate what an hour of work costs you in money. Does the time invested by you in learning SEO and doing it month after month justify doing it yourself over hiring a SEO company? Let's say you earn $50 per hour and you spend two hours every day doing SEO. It will mean 10 hours every week, which translates to $500 every week. So you are effectively spending $500 per week on your SEO. I can bet you can get a better SEO consultant and better results with that kind of money.

4) Keep up with changes: SEO changes frequently. The major search engine Google updates its algorithm every few months. And when that happens there is a major turmoil in SEO world. After evaluating the damages, the stage for major changes to sites and SEO campaign starts.

When you do SEO yourself, do you think you will be able to handle all this?

I believe that while it pays to learn and be aware of SEO for a business owner, doing SEO yourself will turn out to be costly affair. SEO needs skills and time for which a SEO company is perfectly equipped. As a business owner you should be more focused on how to get more business and serve your customer rather than the intricacies of SEO.