Why You Should Stop Paying For Monthly SEO Services

Let me preface this blog by saying this:

SEO is not dead!

SEO is alive and well, much better than ever before!

So why should you stop paying for monthly SEO services?
Well SEO is far too complex and multidisciplinary to pay one single SEO agency or entity a monthly SEO service and get the ROI you should be getting. Additionally many of the most important things that you need to do for SEO are very specific skills that should either be done internally or contracted to specialists that are not necessarily SEO companies per se.

The keys to SEO:

1) High Quality Unique Content
Without high quality unique content, Google has nothing to index and is most likely not going to rank your site very high. Your goal should be to increase the number of pages Google is indexing, with a focus on high quality pages and content.


2) Creating a very useful high quality website
This may sound obvious but most business owners large and small fail miserably at this. Can a customer easily order products / services or log into your website to see their bills, pay their bills, schedule an appointment, and do other things that a customer might want to do in regards to doing to business with your company? Chances are your website can do little more than display basic images and content, and has no useful features or functionality that a customer may want. A high quality website will generate buzz and Google will take notice.
3) Getting your content and pages shared on social media
Simple put, look at sites that are ranked ahead of you on Buzzsumo. Chances are they have way more shares than you. If you can get your content shared heavily you will rank higher.


4) Getting high quality back links to your website
Since the dawn of Google you need good backlinks to rank high, but bad links to your website can now lower your rankings. Tools like Ahrefs and OSE can tell you what kind of backlinks you have. To get quality backlinks requires a more concerted effort towards winning partnerships and links through associations with other websites, as well as simply having quality content people want to link to.

What you should really pay for to improve your SEO rankings:

This means you should be paying for high quality copy writers, internal or external, web design services, and social media services. Most of this could be split between internal and external resources. I would suggest using internal resources for social media and copy writing if you are smaller because hiring in house developers is expensive.
When it comes to backlinks, you should really be building your site up over time in a way that encourages other sites to link back to you such as building up partnerships, creating press releases about important company news, and other things that would make another website link back to your website.

In all honesty, I could go on forever about this and there are many things I left out like local listings / citations but the point is that the things you need to improve SEO are often specific skills or tasks that should really be left to specialists not generalists. If you have something to add to this please comment below!