Why You Should Not Do SEO Of Your Website by Yourself
Are you thinking about doing your own SEO for your small business? I want to caution you and educate you on how much of a niche and there are so many pitfalls that if you do something wrong, you very well could get blacklisted by Google (or any of the other search engines). A blacklist punishment lasts up to 6 months and there is no way out of it. Google will not accept an apology or money for that matter, when it is done it is done and after the punishment is over, it is often difficult to clean up.
When we say blacklisted for 6 months, this means that Google (or whatever search engine whose rules you violated) will remove all your listings for a period of 6 months. This also means that they can pause your Google Ads as well for that period of time. Since Google controls around 90% of the search market, this translates to zero traffic for 6-months on your website. If you are local then you will need to 100% rely on other means of advertising, like TV, Radio, Newspaper, and Billboards/Signage. If you live in Fredericksburg, then TV and Newspaper are not going to work well for you as they are poorly represented in this area. The number of billboards and signage opportunities is small in the Fredericksburg area as well.
That leaves you with the radio and the dude on the corner flipping a sign for the local mattress company.
We are not trying to scare you about getting blacklisted, we have several clients who have hired us to clean up the mess that someone else caused with their SEO and got them blacklisted on Google for a period of six months. There wasn’t anything we could do to get them unblacklisted, but we could start the clean-up process and remove the offending items from all over the internet. It can take a year or more for that process as Google doesn’t tell you what you did, so we had to figure it out, then search for the locations of the offending items and then clean them up, which often requires us to work with owners of other websites.
Let’s say that you managed to not get blacklisted, good job, but how effective is your SEO going to be? There are many professional companies that will get you totally ineffective results, so it is easy to do and we recommend that you avoid those companies. In fact, if any company tells you that they will get you first on Google, you should turn away and run. That is not something anyone can promise and if they could, it would be like hitting the lottery. Imagine a company that gets any other company #1 on Google, that company would be huge and they would be rolling in the money for sure.
Seriously, the other thing you need to understand about doing SEO yourself is do you have the time to learn, perform and maintain the SEO yourself. It is not a set-it-and-forget-it type of thing, it needs to be massaged all the time in order to remain effective. It is also often a trial-and-error type of thing, meaning that you need to make adjustments in order to hit the sweet spot and what works for one business will not work for another.
You should that that time you are not spending on doing SEO yourself and reinvest that back into your business. There are always things that need more of your time. So hire a professional to do your SEO for you. Simply Web Services can do that and so much more, call today at 540-479-6350.