How could thousands of new monthly site visitors change your business?

That may sound like a pretty bold question, but far too many business owners are missing out on thousands of leads by leaving SEO out of their marketing strategy.

You've probably heard of SEO (search engine optimization), in which you write website content tailored to Google search engine results pages, or SERPs, so that it’s most likely to appear in organic search results. 

Not only is it a solid strategy for growing brand awareness and improving website rankings, but when done right, it will also increase your pool of potential customers. 

If you’re considering launching an SEO strategy for the first time, you have two options: Do the work yourself, or outsource an expert SEO consultant.

Before you go the DIY route, make sure you're prepared to learn the craft and put in the time to see results. SEO is a marathon, not a sprint, and you need to be in it for the long haul. 

If you're on the fence, here are three reasons why you might skip the DIY and hire an SEO strategist based on real-life examples from Growth Machine clients.

1. You Want to Grow Your Traffic, But Lack the SEO Technical Expertise

Most business owners understand the value of improving their online presence and moving up the ranks in organic search results. However, many lack the technical SEO know-how to launch a content strategy that delivers meaningful results.

An SEO expert understands that the best approach is much more nuanced than stuffing a landing page full of keywords — a strategy that has not succeeded in decades! Instead, they know a professional digital marketing strategy pulls several levers to increase organic traffic, including:

Improving Site Architecture to Improve Domain Authority

Before developing a content marketing strategy, you need to invest in a solid website architecture.

In the eyes of Google, a website with a confusing site map, slow site speed, sub-par core web vitals, or poor user experience isn’t a high-quality resource. As a result, Google won’t prioritize that site in its rankings. 

At Growth Machine, we begin each project with a technical audit and periodically monitor our clients’ sites for technical issues that could undermine their ranking potential. 

Oftentimes, these are technicalities the average small business owner won’t recognize, such as:

• Is it easy for Google to crawl your website?
• Are redirections properly set up?
• Is your sitemap accurately submitted to Google?

Investing in Keyword Research to Drive Conversions

A trustworthy content marketing agency knows that keyword research isn’t limited to the most obvious concepts. In fact, there may be very good reasons to avoid targeting the most recognizable keywords for your business. 

Instead, an effective content marketing plan achieves the right balance of:

• Highly-competitive, short-tail, top-of-funnel keywords to increase domain authority
• Less competitive, longer-tail, bottom-of-funnel keywords to increase your conversion rate

This two-pronged approach helps build your domain authority while ensuring your blog captures new potential customers (not just readers). 

For example, Growth Machine recently implemented an online marketing strategy using this framework, tailored for a client who operated in the highly-competitive personal finance space. The result? The client now ranks #1 in Google search results for more than 250 keyword phrases — many of which the client had never considered targeting within their content strategy.

2. You Want to Launch an Effective Content Strategy, But Lack the Bandwidth

Remember our marathon analogy? Seeing significant results from your content and SEO strategy takes time. (If another SEO agency tells you otherwise, run fast and far from this red flag.)

SEO requires time, patience, and consistency, which your in-house marketing team may not have. In particular, you need enough bandwidth to ramp up an aggressive publishing schedule and cover all aspects of marketing — not just SEO — to increase link building and your overall domain authority.

At Growth Machine, we tell clients to expect it to take anywhere from 4-9 months to see significant, sustainable growth in their site traffic. 

Why Your Publishing Cadence Matters

If you’ve never invested in a content or SEO strategy, a consistent publishing schedule is the best way to tell Google, “Hey! You can count on us to post valuable content over here — start paying attention to us!” That’s why any good SEO consultant will encourage clients to stick to a rapid and consistent schedule, publishing anywhere from 8-12 new blog posts each month.

For example, when a Growth Machine client set an ambitious goal of reaching 100,000 monthly visitors in six months, we implemented an aggressive plan to increase domain authority as quickly as possible. This involved a rigorous six-month content plan and banking content weeks before the site went live. 

To do this, we had to rely on our team’s ability to scale quickly by engaging a small army of freelancers from our network of subject matter expert writers, and relying on the project management support of auxiliary SEO strategists and copy editors in addition to the dedicated PM and project editor. 

Without the support of an agency team that is built to flex like we did, writing such a high volume of content would have been a full-time job for a single marketer.

As a result of the brand’s — and our — diligent commitment to the content plan, the site went from zero to 19,000 monthly organic sessions in just six weeks; hit 60,000 monthly sessions by month four; and hit its six-figure traffic goal right on schedule.

Why You Can’t Just Focus on SEO (And Ignore Other Marketing Channels)

SEO is a powerful, often-underutilized tool to capture new potential customers. But SEO will never succeed in a vacuum.

An in-house marketing team can’t just focus on SEO content for six months, ignoring other vital channels like PR, social media marketing, PPC ads, events, and web design. Why? Because all of these marketing channels support SEO growth — particularly when it comes to link building.

Backlinks are external links across the internet that point back to your website. Backlinks are critical to your search engine rankings because they tell Google you are a high-quality, trustworthy resource. 

Press, social media shares, and hosting events help increase backlinks to your website. 

A recent Growth Machine client saw results within two weeks of publishing their first article because of their existing authority from prominent press mentions. This is where an in-house marketing team and an SEO specialist's mutually beneficial relationship pays off. The divide-and-conquer strategy helps increase on-page SEO, and SEO visibility, in turn, builds brand credibility that the PR team can leverage in their work. 

3. You Want to Capture New Customers but Lack the Connections 

A worthy SEO marketing consultant doesn’t just have SEO knowledge — they have the connections to put a plan into action. At a minimum, an SEO consulting services firm should have connections to two groups of people to launch an effective strategy:

A Database of Subject Matter Expert Writers for Content Creation

In most organizations, it’s unlikely that in-house marketing team members have the bandwidth to publish 2-3 pieces of high-quality content per week. Therefore, you need connections to freelance writers with deep subject matter expertise within your industry to keep the content plan on schedule and on topic.

At Growth Machine, we work with hundreds of writers each month on client projects and maintain a writer database in the thousands. This vetted network represents years of experience writing for websites in a broad range of categories and industries. 

In fact, if a client can’t afford to hire us for an SEO campaign, we always recommend that they handle the content planning but find the budget to hire a freelance writer. Trying to take on the writing on top of planning, optimizing, editing, and publishing on top of other marketing duties is a surefire recipe for failure.  

A Network of High-Quality Publishers for Link Building

You need backlinks to increase your domain authority, but how do you convince other sites to start linking to yours? Well, sometimes you ask them.

But if you’re just starting out, your outreach is as cold as it gets. Imagine if a friend called and asked you for a small favor. Would you do it? Probably. But if a stranger called you from a number you didn’t recognize and asked you for the same favor — what then? Well, you probably wouldn’t even pick up the phone. 

That’s the best metaphor for the value of working with an established network of vetted publishers versus trying to reach out yourself to a list of cold leads. 

Just as a PR company will have deep-rooted relationships with the media, SEO experts have established connections with internet marketing influencers. Access to this network improves their clients’ visibility online through services like press outreach, broken link building, guest posting, roundup articles, and similar tactics that ultimately get clients to the first page of Google faster. 

Hire an SEO Consultant With the Time, Expertise, and Connections to Get Results

Executing an SEO strategy requires bandwidth, considerable knowledge of SEO best practices, and connections to freelance writers and other publishers. It’s unrealistic to expect the average in-house marketing team to have the time and skills to pull all of this off consistently and over the long term.

An experienced SEO company like Growth Machine can take on the heavy lifting to efficiently move you up the ranks in search engine results without derailing your time and attention from other work. We’ve helped dozens of companies like yours reach 100,000 monthly site visitors and increase their traffic six-fold in six months. Is that the kind of result you can achieve on your own? 

To learn more about how Growth Machine can increase your organic traffic, let's chat.