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SEO coaching: is it a good fit for your business?
Peter Cady • September 18, 2020
It comes down to time, money and personnel
Are SEO coaching services a good fit for your business?
You may be looking for an SEO consultant online and see one advertising a monthly coaching service for a low rate, or maybe you got a call from an SEO professional who told you that your website was underperforming and that he could
help optimize it.
Either way, if you have stumbled upon this post, then you are probably in the process of determining whether coaching services will be of any benefit to you.
In essence, here is what this comes down to is money and time.
Theoretically speaking, you can learn SEO yourself and perform the services yourself.
This book
by Adam Clarke (free with a Kindle Unlimited membership) and other ones offered on Amazon will teach you all of the relevant basics, and the fancier stuff can be picked up via Google searches.
Obviously the price of one book is a lot less than the $200 or so monthly price of SEO coaching.
Of course, the tradeoff here will be time.
You will need enough time to get through the book, and at least 3-4 hours during the day to perform the relevant tasks.
A typical day for an in-house SEO professional may involve analyzing Google Analytics, optimizing a page’s text, writing a 500-plus word blog post, and posting to social media.
Here is another tricky part about SEO coaching: they will tell you what to do, but you still need someone to perform the tasks for you.
One benefit of an SEO coach is that they will conduct the research and audits for you and determine what needs to happen for your site’s traffic to increase.
However, in most cases, an SEO coach will not do the heavy lifting for you.
That is left up to you or one of your employees (One option here is to hire a freelancer on Upwork to do the grunt work for you).
Here’s my experience with SEO coaching:
It works great if you have an in-house employee who is good at following directions and implementing them.
I got my first start in SEO under an SEO coach who told me what tasks I needed to do and how to do them.
If I or a similar employee was not there though, then the SEO coaching would have been pointless, as there would have been no one to implement the strategy.
Therefore, an SEO coach is great as long as you or someone at your company has the time to do the work that he recommends.
If you don’t, then you are probably better off hiring a consultant who will do the work for you for a little extra, or reading a book about SEO, determining what steps you need to take, and hiring a freelancer on Upwork to perform them with your supervision.
In conclusion, it is important to remember that anyone can learn SEO simply by reading a book or online articles.
Thus, you may be able to be your own coach.
Honesty and communication are key
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