Welcome to my very own guide to becoming an SEO “Expert”. This “guide” is based entirely on my own experience and is to be used or abused as you wish. For the record, I am not an SEO expert just YET, but I now know what it’s going to take to become one, and I thought I should share this with anyone interested in taking on SEO as a career choice.

I’ve been involved in online marketing for about 3 years now, having started out touching on SEO at a price comparison website. After that I moved on to become a project manager at an online marketing company and was bitten by the SEO bug. I moved to MediaVision to leave the complicated world of project management and get started with pure SEO work.

What a great decision! A year on and I have four of my own clients who are flourishing thanks to the knowledge I’ve gained in SEO, conversion analysis and effective copywriting. Here’s how I got to where I am now as an SEO specialist…

Unless your online business is already a household name, we all know that the only way to poach consumers away from your competitors is to ensure that you have a well SEO’d site that ranks well in Google. Simple enough! The big debate however, is whether or hiring an SEO company is worth it or whether you should simply do your own SEO optimization.

This blog post focuses on the top 5 reasons why hiring a professional SEO company is a much better idea than doing your own SEO. Let’s take a look:

If you find you have a high bounce rate or people are trawling your site but buying none of your products, you’ll have to face the fact that your website is simply not ‘doing it’ for them. You have all the SEO strategies in place to drive people to your site but what they find when they get there is confusing, long winded or plain boring and bland. It’s like inviting people to a party at your house and giving perfect directions, but when they get there they find the house unlit, the gate locked and a snarling Rottweiler glaring at them.

I’ve been banging on about the different budgets spent on PPC vs. SEO, so the latest Hitwise report really caught my eye. For those who haven’t read it, they reported a 26% drop in paid search traffic from last year, albeit in the US. A lot of people will link it to the credit crunch and overall reduced spending and I’m sure that is the case. What I’m really hoping for is that it’s a sign of change in marketing manager behaviour.

PPC seems to be the Linus Blanket for marketing managers. I’m not 100% sure why, apart from it being a certain thing. I suppose if you choose an SEO agency that doesn’t perform it seems like the safe bet. We have internal battles for the cost per visit from SEO and PPC and I’m proud to say the SEO wins the most, by a serious margin. (Navigational/Brand search taken out of course )

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is one of the skills in demand at the moment, as it’s one of the only growth industries in these tough economic times. Google, the public’s search engine of choice, saw growth in the first quarter of 2009 with revenue up 6%, while other US companies only saw blood.

Study after study shows that companies in the UK and around the world are spending more of their budgets on online advertising. Now that marketing budgets are being slashed, SEO offers a longer term and more affordable option that PPC (Per Per Click) and has started to gain ground on PPC advertising. Currently, around 60% of UK online advertising budgets go to PPC, but this number is predicted to decrease as companies become more tech savvy and begin to understand the benefits of SEO.

I always struggle to explain what I do to people that aren’t in marketing or IT. I usually get the “Search Marketing? What on earth is that? Do you search for marketers?”

I think the most concise response is that we help companies market their products or services in Google. I suppose Google Marketing is probably more accurate in the UK due to the search engines’ vast market share. We help client’s with their Google search marketing plans.

Most people get that fairly quickly with the odd few saying “oh the ads on the right?” Well no, we help our clients in both areas with some pretty amazing return on investment.

There are two main places to market your products and services within Google, The paid listings (top and right) are referred to as PPC because you Pay Per Click. The results on the left are natural listings often referred to organic listings.

The last 6 months or so have produced a plethora of blogs by internet marketers stating that the obvious way to remain visible and in touch with your audience is via online marketing and all that entails. SEO is crucial, online PR essential and social marketing vital, so why have we, as SEOs, not been flooded with requests from established companies, home businesses and large-scale enterprises? Why have we, instead, had to read about an increasing number of business closures and staff cuts and listen to people, who are generally thought of as smart, blame the credit crunch for diminishing profit margins?

Answer to follow.

Just last Friday, Laurie Sullivan revealed that traditional brick-and-mortar retailers are still very, very SEO-shy. She was citing a three-year Retail Search Presence study by marketing firm Internet-Engine, which tracked holiday season search engine traffic from the big three (technically, the Big G and two also-rans) – Google, Yahoo! and MSN Live. And the news isn’t good for the retailer on the street.

After reading the 2009 search advertising outlook from JP Morgan (thanks Graywolf) I was disappointed to see no references to organic search and the forecasting thereof. In fact they blatantly cover the click through rate of paid search (22%) without even thinking where the other 78% of clicks are coming from.

It’s not a secret that Google sees 80% of its clicks through natural search whereas paid search enjoys 80% of the budget assigned to search in the UK. What fails me is this message seems to be falling on deaf ears. If I were an FD (and by qualification I could be although my life expectancy would drop by 50 years ) I would be demanding a comparison of all marketing methods, stripping back on the non-accountable methods to ensure I get maximum ROI for my pound. Surely right now is the time to ask the difficult questions?