“You should really hire an SEO professional for your business.” is something you have probably heard one time too many, much to your displeasure. But have guaranteed given more than a second thought over the period of time. The question remains, do you really need one? And the answer remains, it all depends on the type of online business you are running and the kind of SEO results you are expecting. However, whatever be the case, if one or more of the following things have been putting your goals off track, it is time you finally get an SEO professional to do the dirty work, so to speak, for you, at once.

1. Your Website or its Pages aren’t Indexed

There are many reasons why Google isn’t indexing your website or some of its pages. It could be as simple as something that is not allowing Google to crawl your website or something as complex as structure of your website or URL parameters or even some codes gone rogue. An experienced SEO professional would know exactly where to look and how to fix it without wasting any precious time. Any issue that causes your website to miss out on the search results entirely is best left to the expert, lest you end up making it worse.

2. You’re Thinking About Site Migration or Major Redesign

Any significant changes to a website—redesign, restructure, domain, navigational, or CMS platform—come with risks attached, one of the most obvious ones being losing out on your hard-earned rankings and traffic. It is advisable to not undergo any significant design changes without keeping a thorough SEO professional in the loop. As far as site migration is concerned, it is something that absolutely cannot go through without professional SEO supervision, after taking all the technicalities and risks into consideration. Remember that after the migration, the site needs to be under constant observation for an indefinite period of time to watch out for any anomalies that may arise, something only an SEO professional who has handled multiple migrations in the past can do.

3. Organic Traffic to Your Site is Constantly Declining

It is quite natural for every website to experience changes in traffic inflow several times during its lifetime. It can happen for a lot of reasons and isn’t always easy to pinpoint. But it is important to know that these drops can easily be reversed, which is why getting an SEO professional on board with your internet marketing strategy is always a good idea. Whether its seasonal trends or algorithmic fluctuations, technical glitches or penalties, an SEO professional will be able to review your traffic and detect the cause of it all and start working on reversing it in no time.

4. You’ve Received a Manual Penalty

A manual action can set off significant traffic fluctuations and it can be a daunting task to get the penalty removed, especially if you are on your own or in the hands of somebody that isn’t familiar with the process. Enters, an SEO professional, with all the experience in place to tackle a manual penalty, get it removed and resume normal services. He or she will not only be able to review and isolate the reason(s) why the penalty was imposed in the first place but work on the issues one by one (if there is more than one, that is) and provide an unofficial reassurance to the search engine that the same mistake won’t be repeated again before submitted a request for the penalty to be removed.

5. Below Par Results from Your Current SEO Strategy

If you are not getting the kind of results you expect from your current SEO strategy, there may be many factors behind it. For starters, you may be following a DIY guide to SEO, that isn’t always the best way to go about to begin with. Or simply put, your current SEO professional may still be on a learning curve on his or her own. Or worse, the learning curve in his own profession may be colliding with your brand ethos and expectations and may need more time, something you may not have more of given the competitive environment of online businesses. In times, pun intended, it is best that you get a different SEO professional on board that has the experience you are looking for to bridge the gap between your business goals and SEO results.

Depending on what kind of a situation you find yourself in, it is best to go with a dedicated SEO professional who has previous success stories handling cases like yours, measures SEO results thoroughly and shares them with the management, has a cost that fits in your budget, but more importantly, is in tune with your brand values and business goals.