Small business owners are all about saving money by trying to do everything (including SEO) by themselves. And, hey, I can totally understand and relate, but here are some reasons why and when you're better off investing in hiring a professional, instead of diving into learning the basics of Search Engine Optimization.

SEO Scenario #1

First of all let's determine what kind of business you own and what your goals are. Is it a small operation that brings you some additional income, keeps you busy and gives you an opportunity to learn new things? Well, in this case, doing your own SEO probably is a very good idea. If you have time and desire, you can learn SEO. And by time I mean, that you are ready to patiently wait when your site, maybe one day, will finally appear in Google. See, SEO is a long and tedious process and it takes time for a site to start ranking well, and if you are going to take your time learning all the SEO tricks, it will take even longer. Although what you could do to get you started is to get an SEO assessment of your site, to see where you stand and what needs to be done. This will help you to get on the right track, and you could continue your SEO journey on your own.

SEO Scenario #2

You are a small business now, but you have plans to grow and to become a not-so-small business one day. You do not have an official marketing budget, and you are not sure if you need SEO at all. A simple example of how SEO works is that if you have a site, you must optimize it for Search Engines, like Google, Bing, Yahoo!, etc. so they know and understand your site. The thing is with the number of web sites being launched every day, Google has too much work to do, to crawl all of them. That's why by making your site more SEO (meaning Search Engine) friendly, you help Google to index and to show your site in its search results faster. And if you don't have your site optimized, then it's like applying for a job, and not bringing your resume with you, or going to the airport and forgetting to bring your ID. You have your ticket, but have no ID. So, you can't really use your ticket until you show your ID. Think of SEO as your site's ID in a certain way.

By hiring an SEO company you will make your site visible to search engines and will attract more targeted traffic and more clients. A knowledgeable SEO company will create a proposal for you explaining how everything works and what initiatives they are going to undertake. This is where your skill of being able to delegate comes into place. As a small business owner at times it's hard to delegate, as you are so used to doing things yourself. But this is exactly it - a small business mentality. In order to grow you need to utilize all resources that are available to you, so you can concentrate on actually growing your business and not on learning SEO.