People, and particularly business people, always want to save time and money. And that makes sense, because it means businesses become more profitable. However, sometimes you have to spend money to make money and not spending that money can have devastating consequences. The same could be said for outsourcing your search engine optimization.

To Outsource or Not to Outsource

Startup businesses in particular have to find ways to save money, so that they can keep more revenue. As a result, they must implement money saving measures, but it is vital that they do not do this at the cost of expertize. This is true for startups and Fortune 500 corporations alike. When companies do this, employees are having to take on different roles, outside of their own, multi-tasking their way through.

This is a bad thing because the workers may be unskilled for that additional task, and because they simply don’t have the time. The result is that the things they were hired to do, and the things that they are good at, will suffer as well. Essentially, this causes a downward spiral.

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization – SEO – is one of those areas where companies often think outsourcing isn’t necessary. After all, it isn’t a protected profession and anyone can call themselves an SEO expert. This also means that anyone can look up the necessary information online to become an SEO professional themselves. Unfortunately, this isn’t true at all.

Another thing companies worry about, is that if they do outsource their SEO, they are giving away certain trade secrets, as an outside organization will then know how they operate and why. This can easily be avoided, however, by doing a little bit of research into what each company does, and how others have received their work.

Yes, SEO costs money, sometimes a lot of it. However, not outsourcing SEO can be far more costly. Through proper SEO, you should be able to gain more traffic to your website and, therefore, more business exposure. Ultimately, this will lead to increased revenues. As such, good SEO should be able to offer you an excellent return on investment. This clearly is one of those occasions where you need to spend money to make money.

Not outsourcing your SEO is a terrible decision to make. If you don’t engage in SEO at all, people won’t find you, so you may as well not run a business. If you do engage in SEO but you do it yourself, you could make matters even worse. You could break one of Google’s rules and end up getting penalized or even barred from the search engines. Furthermore, you could end up with a negative reputation if people who do know something about SEO, which is most people who use the internet, make fun of your feeble attempts to do it yourself. Clearly, the question “to outsource or not to outsource” is answered by a resounding “to outsource” if you want to make it as a business.