Should You Hire More SEOs?

I’ve been working online just long enough to have seen and heard a good number of small businesses make fatal mistakes with their Internet marketing. I’ve even made a few of those myself. Hopefully, I’ve learned from them. But I’d much more prefer to learn from someone else’s mistake. I hope you would too.

One mistake you should learn from is not to hire more than one SEO for each of your websites.

In other words, you only need one search engine optimization expert for each of your Web properties. Actually, let me rephrase that. For each of your SEO campaigns.

For the purposes of this illustration, an SEO campaign is defined as the total SEO effort that you put into a particular product or service whether it be for the short term or the long term and whether it involves one website or many. It represents your overall strategy for a particular online marketing and branding effort.

Why Just One SEO Per Campaign?

First, let me just say that I am not talking about specialists within the SEO realm. You might have one person working on your link building campaign and another performing on-site SEO while someone else specializes entirely on your blog content. That’s acceptable as long as you can make all their efforts work in tandem. That might require a manager to pull their efforts together. So what am I talking about then?

From time to time I’ll have a client who will e-mail me and say they have hired an in-house SEO or another SEO firm and that person or company wants to SEO the blog posts that I am writing for them or to add some SEO features to the blog. Now, blog ghostwriting is actually my main line of work – the work that I spend most of my time performing each day. SEO is a part of the work that I perform when ghostwriting blog content.

This is a really bad idea.

It’s not that I don’t trust other SEOs. And it’s not that I’m right and they’re wrong. But having more than one SEO working on the same property at the same time is simply a bad idea because their efforts could cross each other out. One SEO can undo something that another SEO has done or complicate the overall strategy of the first SEO without realizing it or intentionally doing so.

The True Nature Of SEO

Search engine optimization has become a bit of a secretive game. Not all SEOs are alike. You probably already know that.

One of the reasons we’re not all alike is because we keep secrets. Trade secrets. That may seem strange when you consider that you can Google “SEO” or “search engine optimization” and read all kinds of free content or buy an e-book that reveals everything you need to know about SEO in just a few minutes. It’s not quite that easy, but you know where I’m coming from. Information about how to optimize a web page is readily available all over the place. So why keep secrets?

There are a couple of reasons why SEOs are secretive. Many SEOs like to think that they’ve come up with some unique way of accomplishing a goal. It’s usually not the case, but that’s how many people in this industry think.

Another reason is because many SEOs, though they don’t like to admit it, will use tactics not approved by the search engines to help web pages rank higher for particular search queries. Putting aside the question about whether or not that is ethical, if one of your SEOs does use questionable tactics and your website is penalized in the search rankings for that, which one are you going to blame?

In some cases, the blame will be apparent, but it’s not always the case. I have seen clients hire other SEO companies only to come back and ask us to rescue them from the mess that was created. And a lot of times it is unintentional. Hire an inexperienced SEO and you could have just as many problems as you have by hiring a nefarious one.

A third reason SEOs have become secretive is because the search engines themselves are secretive. They don’t reveal their secrets either. I’m OK with that. But historically, when a particular search engine optimization tactic becomes popular and successful, it will tend to be abused. That’s when the search engines will tweak their algorithms and cause a big dance in the search engine results pages. Every SEO on the planet then has to go back to the drawing board and figure out how to help their clients improve their rankings again. As a result, savvy SEOs have learned not to share too much about what they do that works. This has led to a very competitive environment.

Your Business And SEO

The best strategy you can adopt for your business is to hire a search engine optimization company with a solid reputation and one that you can trust. That’s not easy. How do you judge a reputation?

One way is to look at their results. That is, the results they’ve achieved for their own websites as well as the results they’ve achieved for their clients.

Another way to judge reputation is to follow them on their social media profiles. Read the answers they give to questions posed on those sites, subscribe to their blog, and keep tabs on any company you are considering for a month or two to see if they are consistent in their message as well as their work habits. Do they post to their blog every day? Is their posting irregular? Do they practice what they preach?

If you already have an SEO company that you are happy with, I wouldn’t recommend that you change. You should only change SEO companies if you find that they have used unethical practices or unapproved tactics that might get you penalized in the search results, the company is changing directions and you mutually agree that they will no longer be able to help you (this could occur for a number of reasons), or your own business practices have changed and you feel you need an SEO company that can better accommodate your new direction, or you can no longer afford the SEO company you currently have.

There may be other reasons you’d change SEO companies, but you should not hire a second SEO company to work on the same website or SEO campaign with the one you currently have, and you should certainly not do so without telling your current company. You don’t want to create a situation where your SEO efforts are working against themselves.

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