Is SEO Worth the Investment in Today’s Competitive Search Engine Market?

Many people like myself have been struggling with the whole concept of SEO these days. It is a strange business to be involved in because the rules always seem to be changing. It is the search engines such as Google and Bing that keep changing these rules, and it can really hurt someone’s business after investing thousands into their SEO campaign. It certainly begs the questions of whether or not it is worth investing in SEO as part of your overall online marketing plan.

Are Doing Your Own SEO?

If you are doing your own SEO, then this is probably a bad idea unless you are 100% committed to it. I found trying to do it alone left my website wide open to mistakes, and I just could not keep up with the changing algorithm parameters that kept coming around. I mean to know exactly what changes are needed you need to be constantly reading SEO websites and blogs.

Next, you need to separate the BS from the real analysis. It is fair to say that you need a lot of time to decipher what is ‘really’ happening in the world of SEO.

As I said, you need to be 100% committed to knowing the business of SEO if you want your website to rank and pull in organic search traffic from Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

Link Building Using Your Own Analysis

The other issue is getting other websites to publish your content. There are so many offers out there that say, ‘hey put your content on my website’.  You look at the metrics and think great! You put your content on there, your rankings improve a bit, then drop dramatically later on.

This happened to me. When I looked back, half those sites I had written and placed content on were now deindexed – as in Google no longer recognised them as a website (basically labelled them as cheats).

When I Had Enough, I Hired an SEO Agency

Well, I thought I knew everything when I hired an SEO agency in Essex, however, my mistakes were soon pointed out to me. I had been placing content on sites with good metrics for sure, but when I was shown the ‘backlink profile’ of these websites, I realised where my inexperience had let me down.

Do Not Make the Same Mistakes I Made

Many of the websites I thought had great SEO metrics via MOZ and Majestic (the two tools I was using), did have great metrics – this was true. The issue was the relevance of the backlinks to those sites. On the surface of the website, it looked to be a gadgets site. All the content was about gadgets and tech. The site looked good too. However, the backlink profiles on some of the sites were:

• In Japanese or Chinese
• In other languages
• Keywords leading to these websites were not about gadgets
• They used www versions, but the HTTP version has irrelevant backlinks and vice versa

Another issue was my on-page SEO and the website I was using. My website came from a website builder, which was not too great and giving me the correct parameters to set for SEO. Often the site would enter two titles on the same page – well I had no idea because all I thought was that because there was a title, then everything was great.

Now with a better understanding of how to write content, and how Googles Algorithm works thanks to my own research and the help of my digital agency, my SEO is back on track. I am also always writing content such as here on Techsling in the hope that people will come here and read my experiences with technology. I do not only write about SEO but web development, how to stay safe while browsing the internet and many other topics.

I will continue to keep on writing more. Watch out for my next blog because I have started a vacation rental business. While setting this business up with some ups and downs along the way, I have found a great time hack that I will share with you once I get around to writing about it.

Thanks for reading!