It’s almost blasphemy for someone in my business (the internet marketing business that is) to tell a client that they could probably do that on their own, aka, without me charging you. But for most of the things I (and most other people in my business) do, they probably could. It might take more time, more learning, more resources, but I’m not doing brain surgery – just creating websites.
I should be looking over my shoulder as I write this, but most things that people in my industry do could be done with a little bit of research. That’s probably why there are so many people that claim to be SEO gurus & experts. They probably know more than the average internet user, so to them – they are experts. It’s like when I was coaching 5 & 6 year old soccer, to them I was Ronaldinho, when in reality I was an out of shape 24 year old. You can always sound like an expert when your audience doesn’t know anything about what you’re talking about.
Where things get confusing for web design, etc. is search engine optimization, or SEO (aka getting found on Google, Bing, etc.). Can most people do this on their own? Again – yes, but these days it’s more than just making the meta tags match the content on each page. There’s keyword density, negative SEO, link building, blogging and A LOT more.
I read dozens of articles a day on new strategies in SEO & website design, it’s what I do. I look at sites that do well in Google rankings, I evaluate sites that do horrible in Google rankings. I work with my clients to get the best bang for their buck when it comes to web advertising to help get ‘good leads’ to their website. And optimize their landing pages to make sure when the potential client gets there, they stay there.
If you want to spend your valuable time reading these articles, go for it – I’ll pass the links on to you. Make some websites up for yourself and test what works and doesn’t work when it comes to SEO. But you would probably be better served spending your time on what you do best. I’ll leave the brain surgery to you and you leave getting people to BrainSurgery.com to me.