It's so tempting to want to hire someone to do all the work for us. After all most of us can only maintain a few core competencies at a high level. So why not hire someone to do the things in an are where we don't believe ourselves to be an expert? This train of thought is highly evident when it comes to websites and internet marketing. Today I'm going to share with you five reasons you should resist the temptation to outsource one of your most important marketing channels in the digital age -- SEO.

1. You know the keywords and phrases customers are likely to use when searching for your products and services better than anyone you can hire.

If you hire a firm or contract a person to do your SEO they're not going to know as much about your products and services as you do. Chances are you've committed a good chunk of your time to speaking to customers and helping them with your products and services. It's only natural you're going to know which keywords and phrases they're typing into a search engine to find you. If you outsource SEO the person you hire is not going to have this type of intuition about your business.

2. They don't have a vested interest in your return on investment. They're going to want to be paid whether they're getting your better search engine ranking or not.

This is a big problem I personally have with the SEO game. When you hire someone they charge a lot because doing SEO is a lot of work. But just because they're doing a lot of work and charging a lot for it doesn't make that work valuable. That SEO firm or contractor wants to bill you whether you see a single cent of traffic increase. That's just no way to run a business.

3. If they make a mistake and get your site penalized by Google they can move onto the next customer but you're left with the damage.

Google is cracking down on black hat SEO practices like never before. Doing SEO is starting to feel like navigating your way through a mine field. If you get someone linking to your website that lives in a so called "bad neighborhood" online it can result in your site getting a penalty. If Google thinks you may have purchased a link to their site they can penalize you. If you outsource an SEO person and they make one of these mistakes they're not going to have to live with it - you are. And for that reason it's better you're in the position to make these decisions than a design firm.

4. There are few truly good SEO people in the world and they do SEO for their own businesses because it's more profitable.

It only makes sense that if you're really that great at SEO you'd promote either your own products or someone else's. There's a lot more money in it and a lot less work. Being on the top of the search engine in like having your own personal ATM. If an SEO person is that good they're not going to want to to deal with people calling them all the time wondering why their search engine ranking isn't good enough.

5. They don't understand your customer base and therefore can't create the truly compelling content people will want to link to.

At the end of the day SEO is more about getting high quality links to your website than any other factor. If you outsource your SEO the people you hire aren't going to be experts in your business and are not going to have the ability to create the content that attracts  high quality links to your website.