Is there ever a time when you don’t need The Delaware SEO Guy to get started with your internet marketing or social media management? Are there companies which sometimes go it alone successfully? How do you know whether yours could be one of them?

Website Building

Let’s imagine you are building a website for the first time. This is a new business that has never had its own site and is not currently hosted online. Having decided to make an official announcement and offer products to a wider audience, you choose to build a website using an Open Source template, probably WordPress. A web hosting company offers WordPress support or management. All you have to do is drag and drop, engage some add-ons as necessary, and you are ready to reach the consumer universe.

Websites Can Be Tricky

A good website is a simple thing; a piece of art. The first page or landing page contain sufficient information to be enticing but not so much as to be overwhelming. It is well organized, thematically unified, tidy, and appropriate to the item being sold. After reading numerous examples, creating a site is a matter of deciding what pictures to use, where to put them, text to include, and where it should go. Websites become more complicated, though, when there are add-ons and dynamic features like audio and/or video.

What about content? Writing for a search engine isn’t the same as writing for an English teacher. The audience is an automated system which uses algorithms to find key words and current content. If you don’t include proven keywords and phrases or don’t set them to the correct density and you don’t update content often enough, Google and other search engines lower your rating.

Website Marketing

Say you understand all about that. Whether you chose to build a site using WordPress or to have one built from scratch, there are lots of content to disseminate. How many hits will your business generate during a search? More than the competition? Other tools like YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram come into play now. All social media is crucial to spreading a business name and a reputation, for better or worse. These pages invite people to publicize their businesses at a far lower cost than traditional advertising. They offer clients a way to engage with a company and its owners and, thereby, advertise these firms at the same time using photographs and comments.

Blogs are excellent sources of information, yours and others. Again, these pages give a search engine yet one more “hit” to assess in their ranking algorithms.

Networking on the Internet

Fine, you are great at using social media to your advantage. How are you at networking off-site, away from pages you control? Are you able to find other sites where business owners are willing to talk about your product with or without payment? Will affiliate marketers promote this product of yours using coupon codes in exchange for commission? Is there a firm whose website you post a link to on one of your platforms and vice versa? If so, then you are networking.

Counting the Money

After assessing every tactic applied to internet marketing, the final verdict as to one’s skill with SEO comes down to money. When the books don’t tell a happy story, it’s time to find out what professionals can do to improve profits. They have advice such as how to maximize a local presence; improving a website so that it is mobile friendly, tidier, is hosted by a better company with more uptime and faster loading speeds, etc. There is usually something the lay person hasn’t thought of and it could be costing a website hundreds, even thousands of visitors annually. That’s a lot of money which could have exchanged hands at the checkout.