SEO Services Necessary?

Being on a contract I don't think you have much choice but to let them do the work, unless you are willing to cover for the expenses for a new team. It is definitely a good investment most especially if you know you can't do it yourself or to even manage a team to do it for you. It might take you months to understand SEO itself and the processes involved if you are not well versed with it. On the other question if is it wise to stop the services; well if you feel that they are ineffective, yes you have the right to do that. On the effect on your organic traffic, well if SEO will be stopped completely, it might affect you since SEO is a continuing task... How dramatic could it hit you? Well if early termination of your contract includes consequences like; removal of all the services they have put on such as articles, backlinks and others...it will be huge. Just my 2 cents

vCr8..very direct reply. I appreciate the prompt and honest comment. I really dont have much choice on the contract side. I am glad to hear this is a normal process and I may be going about it the correct way. I I couldnt have asked for a more thorough answer!

It's good in the long run. A lot of SEO services promise results in 3 months, but I usually don't see any real traffic for 6 months. I dove in deep when I started my large eCommerce website, and while I was waiting those 3 months I went ahead and created 250 niche sites, and I ended up selling about 50 of them because I was getting nervous that I wasted about $10,000 on these 200 niche sites as my side project when I already had a lot invested in my larger website. It was also about the 3 month mark on my large site with about 270,000 products and my sales were minimal. I also had a lot of overhead with 6 salary employees in China and 2 in the U.S. - About the 6 month mark, most of my sites were getting traffic and my sales became consistent and it didn't take much time to get back what I put into it.

Point of my story: Most of the time, SEO is a long term thing.

Yes SEO Services are Necessary for a long term business.
After 3 month when you will achieve ranking then you will get back all investment from business.
After 3 month never stop seo work. When you will get ranking on first page then you real competition will be start then you need more and more work for stay able ranking in top.
I hope you will understand.

You shouldn't have gone for a contract deal right at the start. There are a lot of people who offer monthly SEO packages. You could have tried them. Now try to get as much as you can from the Contract guys.

SEO services is kind of like a black box - you just put money into a system and hope it brings out the results you desire. I had the same idea when trying out socialadr for my social link building. Then I realized that I was just being sold something I could do myself.

The problem is, if there is one link in the chain which you are not in control of, then your whole business is at the mercy of that.

I'd say try to do some SEO for yourself on micro niche sites and try to understand how to analyse the competition. It's worth the initial investment of time. You aren't going to make a whole lot of money to begin with anyway. Once you get a few sites ranked, then you will be able to see if the SEO company is worth their moneyl

Another thing, you may consider a better service after a few months, and things constantly change and the services you use may not be able to keep up with the latest Google updates - the latest being the EMD update.

I'm all for keeping control of the lifeblood of your site, so don't let your traffic generation be a black box, in other words - don't let somebody else be in control of your traffic generation - leaving you to throw money at them and cross your fingers!

They may be driving traffic, but do you know what type of traffic? Web traffic is not all created equal. As an example of socialadr, or other services, you just pay to get people to click or whatever.

If you don't know where the traffic is coming from, how will you know how to tweak it?

You need to ensure that the service is tailored to your specific business model to be able to succeed. Your SEO company should have given you some clear indication into their expectations of traffic volume and timeframes based on the keyword research that they would have completed for you.

Yes, you have a new site so it would not earn the money to cover the SEO expense to start with so your SEO company should be targeting some low competition keywords with high buyer intent. This would drive low levels of initial traffic which should hopefully have a high conversion rate on your site.

Some people say you need to do absolutely everything yourself to ensure there is no mystery in your internet marketing. The downside to this however is that SEO really is a full time job, it sucks up a LOT of time to do correctly. This time could be better spent on other components of your business. As long as you use an SEO service which accurately reports on your rankings and traffic movements on a regular basis with trending graphs to show you exactly where your business is heading then you will have a full understanding and input as to what is going on and therefore be able to work with your SEO service to tweak the traffic as you desire.

I personally prioritise SEO efforts. On a new site I like to drive traffic with Adwords and comparison sites (PPC). Spend a few hundred and see how you go. Scale up spending if its going to be profitable, make changes and optimise the site if you didn't sell anything.

Once you've run PPC for a bit then you can begin to see which products/categories/brands seem to be the best sellers. This is what you target with SEO.

I use this process to prioritise SEO efforts since good SEO costs a lot of time and money, and takes time to come into effect.