Brain Surgery or SEO

Looking at my five-year business plan, it is time to tweak it and consider the always present need to bring in more clients. For the past couple of years I have sort of had a sole proprietor / Harriett-Business-Owner attitude – the I-can-do-it-myself adage. Most of the business is a one-woman show. Me, me, me and me. For the most part that has been all that was required, but things seem to be amping up on the Internet. I admit (though it is hard) that there is much that is over my head. And when one reads more about programming, software, and SEO literature than hypnosis books, that is a bad sign. Hence, it is time to reevaluate my methods.

Yes, the dreaded search engine optimization(SEO) no longer makes any sense to me, nor does ranking. No longer is it about great meta tags (descriptive words the search engines use to find you) or just adding links to your site. You should have this type of link and not that one. You need to do this, you need to do that. Good grief. But I do understand its importance.

And it seems like it could be very expensive to dabble in this. The return of investment (ROI) could be a shallow pool rather than a deep lake, and I want the deep lake. But in this case, I know I cannot swim in those depths. So maybe, just maybe it is time to hire someone who can swim it for me – someone who can handle any Internet campaigns with programs like Google Adwords and even keep the results of the search engine’s high through organic optimization.

I do know however, that I am not ready to bring on new employees (business seems to get a lot more complicated when you do this) and as good as it would be have a marketing person in general, on the monetary side of things that may not be the best choice. So, I am more towards the camp of hiring companies who specialize in various aspects where I need the help. It is sort of like seeing a general physician for brain surgery. Who would you chose? The brain surgeon has all the resources you need. Best to just go that route.

USWeb, a search engine marketing company, could be a really good brain surgeon. LOL. That is, they specialize in SEO and though they are a large company and for all that they offer, their fees are competitive. In this instance, bigger may be better. Though their reviews say that when you use them, it feels like you are dealing with small company, you have the advantage of a lot more resources.

So, that is what I am contemplating at the moment.