When should you hire an SEO specialist?
Working at one of Utah's oldest web design firms, I've learned a few common mistakes companies make during the web design process. One of the mistakes I often see is the timing of hiring an SEO specialist.
Every month we have companies fresh off a new web design approach us about SEO services. Sometimes it's a site we've designed, and sometimes it's a site designed by someone else. Either way, the mistake is the same. Companies will get all excited to launch a new web site. They'll invest tons of resources in designers, developers, and old school marketing professionals, but they will put off SEO.
Some of the typical reasons I've seen for not hiring an SEO specialist in the beginning stages of a web project:
- The company doesn't understand SEO
- The VP thinks it's a threat to their dealers or resellers. Meanwhile their competitors are cashing in on direct leads from the web and from resellers.
- They consider themselves a b2b, and they don't need to target people searching. That's fine, then just don't expect to be found.
- They are already paying for an in-house old school "marketing" professional, and they assume they are all set. Yeah I'm calling out the in-house marketing guy, or girl, with the degree from 1998 that tries to play SEO. There is nothing wrong with degrees, I have one in Psychology (University of Utah, 2003), but in most cases I've seen, they don't know web. They often don't know html, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, or even how to write a simple "a" tag or "title" tag. Not a likely SEO hero.
- Simple procrastination. They are going to sign-up for SEO, just not until the site is completed
Jumping ahead to the latter stages of the project. The web design and development have been completed, the site launched, and the business cards are getting printed. The site is awesome, and it looks amazing. But the phone doesn't ring. They pull up a traffic report after the first month, and bam only 25 hits from Google! And 20 were searches for their own company name.
Now they are ready for SEO. Too bad the site is done: content organized without significant thought, important text is locked away in images not readable by search engines, and typically no keyword research has gone into creating navigation titles, page names, image names, or copywriting. Now all this can be fixed, but it can take a lot of time and resources to do so.
Obviously you can still perform a lot of SEO tasks away from the actual site and as an after-thought, but hopefully this post finds you before you start your new web design project.
Ryan
