Search Marketing -- Advantages of a Professional

A major point of contention in many firms is the decision to use internal staff for search marketing and others who argue it should be left to the professionals. So if I may borrow some thoughts from Rand Fishkin's excellent write-up, here I summarize and restate what he says:

Advantages of Working with a Professional SEO

• Diverse Experience -- Professionals with years of SEO experience can help you learn what to expect from the search engines as you conduct the optimization process. They can also interpret and understand rankings data and "hiccups" in results that may indicate trends or strategies that should be implemented or avoided -- preventing expensive mistakes.
  
  
• Pre-Existing Relationships -- SEOs have many contacts inside the SEO industry with folks who have important skills (e.g. press releases, article distribution, directories, etc.) that can have a great impact on the success of your efforts.
  
  
• Link Building Knowledge -- The fastest and most reliable way to get results is though high quality links. Professionals have the ability to quickly identify the most important topical communities -- saving considerable time. SEO's will also have extensive experience with link acquisition -- so they know how to meet requirements and avoid problems.
  
  
• Identifying Linkable Content -- SEO's are often masters of crafting and launching content. Not only can they identify the content most likely to get links from a specific web community, they're also experienced in packaging and promoting it.
  
  
• Fixing Possible Problems -- Professionals deep experience makes them expert at identifying and managing issues that cause a lack of indexing, low rankings or penalties from search engines. This is a skill that can be very hard to develop without years of practice and experience. If you have a ranking issue, an SEO can be of great value.
  
  
• Time Savings -- SEO can be a very time-consuming endeavor. An experienced and talented SEO has the processes and systems of optimization down to a science and can use those to provide better results in less time.