Is paid search an inbound marketing technique? I’d say no but others have argued it is. Is copywriting for web pages part of SEO? How about analytics? Or maybe conversion tracking?
So when marketing agencies offer inbound marketing as either a product – maybe based around a dashboard – or a service, what’s actually included? As usual, it depends upon your definition, of both inbound marketing and of SEO as a key part of the inbound marketing mix.
There are so called “software” solutions, which would have you believe that if you subscribe to their services, “you don’t need to hire that SEO expert”, and as if by magic, some keywords and link tracking will bring you all the targeted visitors you’ll ever need. As if a single report can tell you everything that you need to do to get better and better at attracting and converting visitors. It just isn’t that easy!
Now I don’t want to put down these systems; they are excellent as tools in the right hands. The only thing is, if you want the right hands, you’ll need to spend some serious amounts of cash on training how to use the tools, how to interpret the results and, most importantly, how to best implement the recommendations and measure the results, leading to incremental adjustments ad infinitum.
So here are five reasons why you need to hire expert SEO skills if you want to get the best from your SEO, despite the output and guidance from software tools: