By David Lee Cummings, Top Dog Marketing Group

Cincinnati – SEO (or, search engine optimization) is a technical and time-consuming undertaking. As a small business owner, should you take the time to learn the art and science of SEO? Or are you better off hiring out this essential Web marketing task?

To help answer this question, let’s look at some numbers involved with SEO.

Since you own a small business, one of your primary goals is obviously to make money. Your time is extremely valuable and cannot be wasted away on ineffective tasks. Therefore, it’s imperative that you focus your precious time on the competencies that are most profitable for you, whether you do business nationally, internationally, or locally in Columbus or Cincinnati.

Is SEO, therefore, a profitable activity for you to take on yourself?

SEO—The Breakdown

Let’s assume that your time is worth $100 per hour. Here’s how the value of your time breaks down when spent on the SEO efforts of about a 10-page website:

• Time to teach yourself how to conduct bare-bones adequate search engine optimization—40+ hours.

I am estimating on the low side here. It took me, a guy who earned a perfect GPA in grad school (I’m not bragging, just making the point that I’m no dummy), many more excruciating hours than 40 to learn SEO sufficiently enough to do it right. And I’m still constantly learning, because the field of SEO is constantly evolving; as well, to be the best, one must maintain a competitive edge over other SEO specialists.

• Time to research and analyze keywords—3+ hours.

• Time to integrate keywords in HTML code—4+ hours.

• Time to integrate keywords in website copy—12+ hours.

This time could be even greater, because keyword phrases can be very awkward in syntax and therefore difficult to incorporate gracefully into the text. It takes a master wordsmith to do this task well.

• Time to obtain sufficient inbound links—4+ hours (per week).

This task is an ongoing one that requires much time and careful effort to do right. Today’s best practices advise building links through time-intensive manual efforts. Trying to take shortcuts, such as by employing automated link-building software, can actually cause the search engines to penalize and degrade your website.

• Time to keep website content fresh—4+ hours (per week).

The world’s #1 search engine, Google, loves new and frequently changing content. So, you’ve got to keep your website consistently updated. But you can’t just slap on any website copy: it has be both appropriately keyword rich and compellingly valuable to your visitors.

• Time to conduct all other various SEO tasks—8+ hours.

SEO—Final Analysis for Your Business

Okay, so in total all of the time required to conduct effective initial search engine optimization is at least 75 hours. Furthermore, add at least 10 hours per week of ongoing work—really powerful SEO work can easily be a 40-hour-per-week endeavor—to keep your website at the top of its SEO game.

So, 75 hours multiplied by $100 per hour (the value of your time) equals $7,500. Is this not-so-insignificant sum of money worth your time to spend learning and executing SEO on your own?

Before your answer, also consider the fact that the 75 hours plus 10+ hours ($1,000+) per week you spend conducting search engine optimization is also taking you away from the things you do best to make money in your business. Moreover, if you do a lousy job on your SEO work and end up essentially no better off than when you started, it’s like taking you away from your business and core competencies for 150 hours (75 hours on SEO plus 75 hours of lost time that you could have spent on more lucrative activities), or $15,000. Is that risk and expense—including the $1,000 per week, or $4,300 per month, in ongoing work—worth it?

For significantly much less than the $7,500 (or $15,000) initial cost of your time plus $52,000 annually (or $104,000) in ongoing cost of your time, you could instead hire an expert search engine optimization firm—like Top Dog Marketing Group—to do your SEO dirty work. That firm would do a far better job than your novice efforts could likely produce, thereby saving you many thousands of dollars and much frustration if you inevitably yield miserable results on you own.

With time and patience, the SEO firm will move your website up in the search engine rankings—effective SEO is no overnight gimmick—and manifest a flow of quality leads to your business. If you have a solid sales department in place, many of these leads will then convert into customers.