3 Reasons to Supplement Your Existing Staff with Outsourced Expertise

Statistics published by US Small Business Administration showed that 56% of US small businesses have fewer than 5 employees. For really small businesses, this might be enough. But what if your employees cannot handle all the work that comes in? You can easily hire more people, but if you’re a small business, this may not be the best option for you. So what can you do to bridge the divide between work and human resources and earn more revenue? One solution is to get outsourced expertise. Here are 3 benefits to supplementing your existing staff with outsourced expertise.

Access to an Ocean of Knowledge

In this age of the Internet, outsourcing expertise means you have the whole world to look for help even if you’re just a small business. This actually levels the playing field and allows your company to be competitive against the big ones. You can get access to many niches of knowledge without having to hire a dozen people locally. This is but one of the many reasons why 43% of IT companies in the US outsource expertise offshore.

Accelerate Output Turnover Time

If your small business is here in the US, then you can hire someone for a specific project on the other side of the globe who’s ahead 12 hours or more in the calendar. This means you can, in principle, give the instructions today, say for an SEO-friendly article, and get the output on the next day. This work time is equivalent to having a full-time employee working overtime (overnight) without the loss of productivity due to fatigue.  Output turnover time for projects is reduced.

Cost Reduction

Let’s face it, professional work rates in the US can dampen the expansion hopes of small businesses and limit growth. This is a primary driving factor why the outsourcing of workers and experts offshore has grown so fast. For less than the minimum wage in the US, you can hire someone in India or The Philippines (both English-speaking countries) to work on company projects that would otherwise cost you five times as much or more if you hire a local expert. Paying fees lower than US standards to such workers and experts is possible because the price of the dollar in these countries is still high.

Given that the total number of US jobs outsourced offshore is 2,637,239 in 2013, you could be missing out on the advantages of outsourcing expertise offshore if you’ve not made it a part of your business planning. With outsourced workers doing the critical customer- or product-based output for you, you can focus on company management which is essential for you to grow your small business. 

Don’t Leave Your Google Ranking Up to Luck: Top 4 SEO Strategies

Effective SEO uses tried and tested strategies to optimize your chances to come out on top of search engine results. Don’t leave your Google ranking up to luck. Employ these 4 basic strategies to direct the organic searches of your target market to your site.

Place the Right Keywords in Your Content. Keywords enable your target market to find your site. So basically these are the words your prospective customer would type into a search box that the search engine should be able to match to your website, blog article, Facebook page, and other sites, to land you a good spot on its search results list. But it takes more than just good guesswork, second guessing, or even logic, to choose the right keywords so you get picked up. Every search engine has rules concerning keyword usage, such as relevance to content and number of mentions, and if you deliberately break these, you could end up not found, marked as spam, or blocked by the search engine.

Place the Right Keywords in Your Metadata. Well-placed keywords in your metadata (the text elements describing your document that are part of the page but not of the actual content), act pretty much the same way as keywords in the text of your web page. These are just as important to your content getting picked up and are also subject to the same search engine rules.

Build Links that Go Back to You. Link building to up your Google ranking is basic SEO practice. It works if you can get backlinks to your site inserted in other relevant sites—let’s say your published comment with your URL in someone else’s popular blog—that is do follow.

SEO through Rich Content. This is the best strategy in the online battle for rank supremacy. By using rich content that gives to your audiences and keeps on giving (useful information and sought-after content), you can build your business online. Google has said it time and again… Content is king. If they say so, it must really matter.

Don’t forget to keep monitoring changes in search engine rules, because these are bound to affect even the tried and tested SEO strategies such as relevant keyword use and backlinking.