These days a lot of businesses are trying to decide if they should handle their own SEO or hire a company to do it for them. In today’s economy everyone is trying to save money but when it comes to SEO sometimes when you think you’re saving money you could really be losing money. Handling your own automotive SEO can be a difficult undertaking so you have to ask yourself: do you have enough time to devote to it? And do you know what you’re doing?

First of all, at a bare minimum you need to be able to work with simple HTML. Proper SEO can require some more advanced knowledge sometimes, but in general you at least need to know how to make bold and italic text, and how to build a link. Changing formatting, renaming images, and working with javascript can also come up, and if your site isn’t SEO friendly you may have to learn to do a lot more.

Optimizing a site to be search engine friendly can be extremely time consuming. Does your site have 100 pages? 200? 500? More!?! All those pages will need individual attention and uniquely optimized content. You need to do a no nonsense assessment of the time you have available and really ask yourself if you have the time to devote to all this.

As I said in my earlier point all the pages on your site are going to need individual attention both in the backend and with unique, optimized content. If you aren’t a skilled copywriter this can be a very arduous task, not to mention you could hurt your company’s image with poor writing or typos. Writing optimized content isn’t just about throwing in some keywords here and there, you need to be able to compel people to read on and/or take action while naturally weaving in some keywords.

You also need to remember that SEO is not a once and done activity. It is a constant struggle to keep up with search engine algorithm updates and changing technology. Doing proper SEO for a company can absolutely be a full time job and depending on the size of the company it can require a team.

With all of this in front of you you have to ask: What is you time worth per hour? Which option would really be more cost effective? Are you prepared to commit to educating yourself on everything you need to know to successfully run an SEO campaign?

Original article about the difficulties of SEO posted on Wikimotive's blog under the title So You Think Your’re Ready To Do SEO On Your Own?