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Should you hire an SEO expert in your organization? Call us biased, but we know you can't do great, results-driven SEO with one or two people working on it in your company. Even if you hire the number of people and buy the right software it takes to do the work right, you're likely to find yourself more involved in the business of SEO than the business you're in now. After all, Google has about 20,000 people dedicated to search, building algorithms and defining what a popular website in your category should be. Keeping up with the changes takes constant work, a large staff and some pretty good software.

Many businesses try to get around using an SEO company by hiring an internal SEO "specialist." The ads on Indeed.com, Craigslist and others websites say things like "must have five years experience" and "work in a fast paced, team environment." Not one of the ads asks SEO "strategists" for the metrics that show their success record during their "five years of experience." SEO is metrics based. A good SEO expert should be able to show you the analytics that proves their record of consistent, high level achievement when it comes to ranking on the first page on Google. The same is true for an SEO company.

One is a lonely number—especially for successful SEO

Even if you're diligent or lucky enough to hire a true SEO expert to get you to the top on Google, if he or she is working alone, it's unlikely they'll get you where you need to be. They'll have a few basic tools like Google analytics to tell them where your site ranks and some of the keywords to use. But what they won't have is the number of people it takes to list your site on hundreds of directories. They also won't be able to backlink off-page content such as press release and blogs on the hundreds of relevant sites that tell the Google bots you should be climbing to the top of Google.

By John Decker