Small scale SEO — is outsourcing worth it?
Reflections on a developer’s marketing mistakes.
I may be allergic to SEO. I just don’t like it. It seems tedious, and ideally, I should be able to handball it off to someone else. That way, I could go back to what I really love: writing code (and sometimes even English).
And so, I’ve embarked upon a journey to discover the SEO antihistamine; the cure for these pesky marketing allergies.
Any google searches for ‘outsourcing SEO’ bring up an abundance of results, from (not so) cleverly crafted ads, blogs and articles with click-baity titles such as “always do foo” and “never do bar” to “5 things I’ve learned doing x”.
I did manage to find some potentially helpful articles about outsourcing SEO and hiring marketing agencies, but they were all tailored to companies bigger than Vessels, with actual budgets.
Instead of forking out hundreds of dollars on setting up SEO a website that cost me nothing to build, I decided to explore the web for some smaller scale solutions.
The Hunter (or the hunted?)
My first port of call was fiverr.com and upwork.com. I’ve heard of people hiring SEO people overseas on the cheap, and so I thought I might be able to easily find someone that could help me get started. How wrong I was.
A quick search on fiverr.com revealed that there was no easy way to filter out the snake oil salespeople. I don’t doubt that there are some excellent professionals working on fiverr.com, I only doubt that I could ever find them through all of this noise.
A little less confident in my master plan to outsource all of the marketing, I went to upwork.com, and browsed around for a bit. It seemed a little less… well scammy. I signed up and posted a job, ‘SEO for landing page’. I set my budget to (a modest) $50, and sat back and waited for the responses to come through.
And come through they did. But not in the way one might expect. In total, I received about 5 emails from Upwork about the post, and 11 scam emails, who just so happened to notice my upwork post, and get in touch ‘personally’.
It certainly feels like I’m being hunted!
Empty Handed
In the end, I abandoned my search, and removed the post from upwork. I had a couple of legitimate replies to my ad, but it still felt like I was walking into a trap. Looking back, I could have:
- Written a more specific job listing, which would have required me to have:
- Done more research into marketing and SEO, to actually know what I should be looking for.
For growing companies like Vessels, we don’t have the budget to warrant an actual marketing and SEO person, so I will just have to roll up my sleeves and do it myself. Which is not to say that I can’t outsource bits and pieces of this job (which I intend to do in the future), but I think I need more of a hands on approach at this stage.
Update:
It’s been about 6 months since I first wrote this piece, and I never got around to hit publish! In originally abandoned it because I thought it had little real value- but perhaps others might learn something from my fruitless journey. Let me know in a comment below if you did or didn’t!
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