I am in need of an SEO expert

So I've turned you into a strawman stereotypical small medium size business owner for the sake of arguement.

I'm sure not ever one of these applies to you but in my experiance almost every guy matches the list pretty damn well. (this is why they have the word small before the word business)

  1. You have absolutely no business hiring an "seo", you need to be looking for someone to sell you leads, or a fully integrated agency. (You really need both considering your long term customer values.)

  2. Your attempts to short circuit the marketing process by playing do it yourselfer are costing your business a fortune. Don't you think its awfully arrogant to say you've "got it covered" in the ppc and site building department. You're basically claiming you can extract more value from a complicated verticle then some guy who's spent years of his life and probably 10s of millions of dollars because you can figure out how to bid on a couple of adwords terms.

  3. A lot of small and medium size businesses think the milking parlor is some kind of horrible place. Getting taken to the milking shed is not always a bad thing. Good agency partners take skilled tradesmen and grow them into monstrously fat cows. Being a fat cow is awesome.
    These agencies don't sit in their office and count money all day while talking about what suckers their clients are. They work insane hours sitting around devising more ways to get you more customers. L

They're leveraging their vast experience from working on large numbers of clients with similar sets of problems to offer you enormous value you could never hope to build from working in a single niche. (google economies of scale)

  1. Digital marketing in niches like yours is expensive. At its core its about finding ways to spend money to make money. There is always some turkey willing to pay more a few more cents to earn that dollar. This is why it gets so expensive so fast.

  2. I don't know the exact details of your niche, but I'm sure you get pitched all the time by people trying to sell you leads.
    You know why this is? Its because these specialty lead companies are freaking good at marketing. You think your ppc campaigns good? They got a guy who manages millions in ad spending and knows every trick in the book running their ppc. O and their web site, they probably built a dozen different versions and tested 100s of variables to figure out exactly how to extract the maximum amount of value from their traffic. This means at any time, they can jack the price of buying traffic so high that you can't Guess what else they probably own 100s of sites in your niche and most of the front page is just a massive white lable operation directed to their call center.

/r/SEO Thread