Based on the needs analysis of your company or your campaign do you need a fully managed SEO service, or just professional link building to increase qualified traffic to your web site? If you have everything in place, good SEO fundamentals, meta tags, site maps, advanced keyword research, user friendly web site structures and great content, then you should be looking for relevant web site links. If the rest of your web site and your target market could use the once over, you need managed SEO.
Managed SEO is more about the whole of your Internet marketing strategy than it is about building a link worthy web site and media buys. Managed SEO will look at everything involved in your online presence. Starting with your web site and going all the way through your social media profiles, and brand presence. Do you have dedicated staff in charge of your web presence? How often do you review your web site analytics? What keywords are generated the most traffic for you? How about your competitors? Similar to most marketing related activities, what you think is just a simple media buy, will wind up being a content upgrade, web site source code fix and social media launch. When the answer to the question “do your meta tags include your primary search terms?” is answered by “what are meta tags?” it’s time for a more comprehensive review of your online web presence.
At the very least you may want to have a comprehensive SEO_Audit completed and a SEO Blueprint created to lay out the work to be done. Once the SEO_Audit is complete you can better determine who should do the work. If you are a growing company, or getting ready to grow, do you know what you should be focused on? Should you be focused on SEO if you are not an expert at it now? Does it make more sense to learn it now, or continue to sell your expertise to your customers and clients? Successful companies focus on what they do best and outsource the rest. Anyone ask you about your SEO campaigns 5 years ago? What do you think they will ask you about 5 years from now?