As an e-commerce owner, you should understand the importance of driving organic traffic to your website to increase sales and grow your business. ElasticSEO focus heavily on working with e-commerce companies because the benefit of SEO is so clear in this space. Search engine optimization (SEO) plays a vital role in improving your website’s visibility and attracting qualified customers. However, one of the questions that most frequently arises is: “Can’t I handle SEO by myself, do I really need to hire an e-commerce SEO agency?”. Let’s explore both sides of the discussion and provide our insight to help you make an informed decision.
Starting with the obvious, one of the primary advantages of handling your own SEO is cost saving. By taking on the task yourself, you can save money that would otherwise be spent on hiring an e-commerce SEO agency. SEO agencies charge fees for their services, and if you’re a start-up company, cash can often be tight. For small business owners with limited budgets, this can be a compelling reason to consider a DIY approach. In our discussions, we always try to help point our smaller customers in the right direction to help them at least start the SEO journey because we believe it to be critical to long-term success. So, don’t let budget stop you from at least starting. On the other hand, rather than focusing on cost, it may be worth shifting the discussion to ROI as we discussed in our recent blog.
Beyond finances, nobody knows your e-commerce business better than you do. By doing your own SEO, you can leverage your expertise and deep understanding of your target audience, products, and industry. You have the advantage of making real-time adjustments and optimizations based on your business goals and customer behavior. This level of control can be very helpful in tailoring your SEO efforts to suit your unique requirements.
By a similar token, managing your own SEO allows for greater flexibility and quicker response times. You can implement changes and experiment with different SEO strategies without having to rely on external parties. This agility enables you to adapt to market trends, algorithm updates, and emerging opportunities promptly. As an e-commerce owner, being able to take immediate action can provide a competitive edge and positively impact your rankings.
In summary, the benefits of doing your own SEO are reduced spend and greater control. If you are already experienced with SEO (spoiler, more on this next!); these benefits could be enough to make it worth giving serious thought to running your own SEO initiatives. For those without an SEO background, we need to dig a little deeper.
Effective SEO requires a significant investment of time and effort. As an e-commerce owner, your plate is already full with managing various aspects of your business. Taking on the additional responsibility of SEO might spread you too thin and hinder your ability to focus on other critical areas. At the bare minimum, some of the tasks your SEO agency will conduct should include keyword research, on-page optimization, content creation, link building to other sites, and monitoring analytics. Neglecting any of these aspects can greatly undermine your SEO efforts. All of the tasks mentioned are typically performed by skilled and experienced professionals. For you to conduct comparable SEO efforts would undoubtedly require significant upskilling if your background is not in SEO.
In addition to this, while it’s true that you possess invaluable knowledge about your business, mastering the intricacies of SEO can be challenging. SEO is a dynamic field with ever-evolving algorithms and best practices. On top of the existing knowledge base within agencies, it’s critical that the SEO professionals stay up-to-date with the latest trends, techniques and algorithm updates meaning continuous learning and experimentation. Without a solid foundation in SEO principles, you may inadvertently make mistakes or overlook critical optimization opportunities. This could potentially result in suboptimal rankings and missed growth opportunities.
Moving on from the talent with agencies, e-commerce SEO agencies also have access to a wide range of specialized tools and resources that facilitate site optimization. These tools provide valuable insights into keyword research, competitor analysis, website audits, and performance tracking. By doing your own SEO, you might lack access to these robust tools, limiting your ability to gather crucial data and make informed decisions. The licenses for these tools can also be quite costly – agencies can justify their expense in serving multiple customers, for an e-commerce owner, it may not be worthwhile.
You may have read all of the above and concluded that obviously an e-commerce SEO agency such as ElasticSEO, would recommend e-commerce firms hire an agency. However, we completely understand the need to carefully consider all outgoing costs. We founded ElasticSEO because we believe SEO to be such an important area that e-commerce companies in UAE and Saudi Arabia are overlooking and we also believe most e-commerce owners simply do not have the time to learn and execute an SEO strategy independently.
So, what is our final recommendation? If you have the time, there are some simple steps you can take alone – create compelling content, build digital connections with trustworthy websites, and review the product descriptions in your online catalogue. These alone may help you enhance your website’s visibility and attract valuable organic traffic. Then if you want to commit seriously to turning your website into an important lead generation tool – contact us!
