Is relying on SEO offshore consultant a good idea? Think again.
We all see lucrative pricing and constant bombardment of spammy offshore SEO offers. No decent SEO company will resort to spamming customers. Despite the obvious too-good-to-be-true proposals, many still consider them part of their SEO strategy. In reality, outsourcing SEO offshore is a dangerous endeavor poised with a lot of risk and at best delivering marginal, not long-lasting result. In recent months, after Penguin updates in Google, SEO requires more and more content marketing and social media as well as building overall value of the website. Most offshore SEO companies in India, Philippines, Russia, Ukraine and other countries fall short of the total strategy required today to develop and maintain edge over competition. Building library of content assets is tightly connected to business development goals and overall marketing strategy. Good SEO expert will need to fully understand, analyze local competition total marketing strategy and propose efficient plan of action involving more then just blogging, link building and in page optimization. Optimization becomes part of marketing and website design strategy.
If your organization is seriously considering selecting offshore SEO provider, you must examine their strategy and maintain very tight control over their efforts. Most of the time companies simply do not have internal resources or understanding of implications of steps that some SEO firms still take.
Common problems outsourcing SEO offshore
By outsourcing SEO to inadequate consultant offshore, your organization is risking serious problems in ranking due to placing links in inappropriate websites thus associating your site with “bad neighborhood”. Spamming search engines with selected keywords or failing to recommend alternative combinations that can provide better response. Keyword research is a critical part of any optimization strategy. Keyword stuffing, buying links in useless directories, and not optimizing the right keywords are common. Oftentimes, offshore companies will request or rely on you to provide keyword combinations. This requires customer to guess what combination will work best. A professional SEO firm with local expertise will help customer to in fact identify matrix of keyword combinations with local and regional results. Inability to develop wide array of keywords for long-tail SEO strategy will limit ability to build wider base of relevant content. It has been shown time and time again that higher conversions are achieved when more descriptive long-tail keywords are used and optimizing for those requires painstakingly accurate long term content marketing strategy.
To summarize, outsourcing SEO offshore can indeed be problematic and cause major drop in rankings. Organizations should rely on SEO experts, who understand regional implications of SEO, have better understanding of business model and work closely with marketing teams to develop common vision which will lead to better websites and better ranking. Offshore or not, SEO consultant must help client develop appropriate level of expectations and vision of what to expect and where to try get to.