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Is Hiring An SEO Agency Worth It?

Hiring an SEO agency is worth it, but only if you partner with one that takes responsibility for conversions and doesn’t report on vanity metrics like traffic and shares.

The reason we're so big on conversions is that it allows you to calculate the return on the monthly retainer you're paying.

For example, if, over the last 12 months, an SEO agency generated 50 sign-ups, each worth $1,000 and you paid the agency $24,000 ($2,000 per month), you’ll have made a return of over 100%. This doesn’t even factor in sign-ups that took place after these 12 months, when you might not be working with the agency anymore.

But if an agency is just reporting on traffic, it's very difficult to calculate your return because you won’t know how much of this traffic signed up for your product.

Below, we'll list out the major reasons why companies benefit from hiring conversion-based SEO agencies over alternatives like agencies and in-house staff that report on vanity metrics:

  • You generate product sign-ups that compound over time
  • You get exposed to motivated readers who are ready to buy your product
  • You become a thought leader within your industry
  • You find website errors that are harming rankings and conversions
  • It's cheaper and more flexible than hiring full-time employees

Note: If you’re looking for an SEO agency that reports on conversions, feel free to book a quick discovery call with us. We’ll provide you with a free bottom-of-the-funnel SEO strategy and walk you through our process for generating conversions.

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You generate product sign-ups that compound over time

The main benefit of hiring conversion-based SEO agencies is that you can generate reliable sign-ups for your product that compound over time. For example, our previous clients still bring in conversions from articles we published two or three years ago.

The problem with SEO agencies that don't take responsibility for conversions is that they might rank higher and generate traffic, but you won’t know how much traffic converted. This makes these SEO agencies not worth it, purely from an ROI perspective.

At SaaSpirin, it takes our clients as little as 1.5 months to generate SEO leads.

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So, during this initial stage, they are losing money. However, since SEO compounds over time, many clients can make back 3x to 5x the retainer they paid us.

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You get exposed to motivated readers who are ready to buy your product

When you partner with a conversion-based agency, there's a high likelihood that they will go after bottom-of-the-funnel search terms first.

This is because bottom-of-the-funnel keywords show that a reader is ready to buy your product. Readers are just looking for the best option. For example, if you sell bookkeeping software, bottom-of-the-funnel search terms may be, “best bookkeeping software for investors,” and “best bookkeeping app for businesses.”

An investor typing “best bookkeeping software for investors” into Google already understands the value of your product. You don’t have to educate them on what bookkeeping software is and why it’s important. So if agencies go after these keywords, they can generate conversions quicker than if they went after high-volume, low-intent search terms.

The added benefit here is that by ranking for these high-intent terms, you give your competitors less visibility toward motivated buyers.

So, while you might not be able to outright beat competitors who have been around for longer than you and built more authority, you're strategically putting your focus on capturing high-buying intent searchers, giving you more visibility where it matters.

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You become a thought leader within your industry.

Another reason hiring the right SEO agency is worth it is that they'll help you become a thought leader within your industry by publishing truly unique content that helps your audience overcome their problems.

This point is important because if you partner with the wrong SEO agency, i.e. an agency that rewrites the content of the first page of Google, you'll achieve the opposite effect. You'll sound the same as everybody else.

So, going with an agency with real-life industry experience and knowledge is really important. This will allow them to create thought leadership content that helps your audience, who are most likely knowledgeable professionals. An SEO agency with zero experience in your field won’t be able to write content that’ll help readers with 20+ years of experience.

For example, before we founded our SaaS SEO agency, SaaSpirin, we founded Belighted, a software development firm. This 15+ years of experience building, testing, launching, and maintaining software has given us a deep understanding of SaaS and software development as a whole, allowing us to publish articles on client websites that are actually valuable.

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You find website errors that are harming rankings and conversions

A good SEO agency will run a content and technical audit before doing anything. This gives you an idea of what content and technical errors you’re making that might be affecting rankings and conversions.

So, by hiring a good SEO agency, you'll immediately get a list of mistakes you’re making on your website and details on how you or the agency can fix them.

In our experience, this can help your website jump up search ranking within a matter of days. This is because your content is already ranking on Google, even though you're making certain mistakes; maybe you don't have a meta description, or your internal links are pointing to 404 pages. So if an SEO agency can fix these mistakes, you’ll rank faster than if you went after brand new keywords.

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It's cheaper and more flexible than hiring full-time employees

The final point we want to talk about is an SEO agency's impact on the financial side of your business.

If you build an in-house SEO team, you'll have to find employees for every aspect of SEO: technical SEO, SEO strategy, content creation, backlink building, conversion tracking, etc. A single employee is rarely good at every sub-section of SEO; they normally specialize in one and know a little bit about the others.

Hiring all these employees can get expensive as you're paying not only their salary but also:

  • Health insurance coverage
  • Perks
  • Employee training
  • Hiring expenses (background checks, recruiter fees, etc.)

Managing these employees is also a headache, as you'll constantly have to hop on video calls with them to discuss how everything is going. And if business is slow, it can be difficult to let go of in-house staff.

Compare this to hiring an SEO agency, where you know exactly how much to pay monthly. You also don't have to worry about managing several employees because the agency already has people who take care of every aspect of SEO.

And if business is slow, you can just pause your "subscription" and kickstart your SEO efforts when business picks up.

This affordability and flexibility allow you to do what you do best: create products people want to buy and not worry about hiring and managing in-house SEO employees.

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Partner with a conversion-based agency today!

If you're looking for a SaaS SEO agency that reports on conversions and doesn't emphasize traffic, social shares, and other vanity metrics, then book a discovery call with our founder.

During this call, we'll walk you through our process for generating conversions, which looks like this:

  • Run a website audit: We start by running an audit and identifying technical and content errors holding you back. Once we correct these mistakes, we typically see a rankings boost within a few weeks or even days.
  • Target bottom-of-the-funnel keywords first: Next, we'll build an SEO strategy based on bottom-of-the-funnel keywords within your industry. Our reasoning for this is that people typing these terms into Google are ready to buy; we just need to create a piece that resonates with their pain points and shows how your product solves their pain points better than the competition.
  • Write original, non-obvious content: Instead of regurgitating the content we find on your product page, we'll actually sit down with you, understand why customers buy from you and what makes your product better than the competition, and we use this information to write in-depth, bottom-of-the-funnel content.
  • Track conversions inside Google Analytics: We also set up attribution tracking inside Google Analytics so you can understand what articles people read before signing up. This gives you a clear picture of how many conversions we generated.
  • Build backlinks: The last step involves actively building backlinks to these high-converting articles. This helps it rank higher and generate more traffic, thus, more conversions. We don't want to wait 6+ months for Google to index your content.

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So if you’d like us to use this strategy to drive conversions for your product, book a quick call here.