SEO fatigue anyone?

As a former owner of an SEO Agency, I can say a few things about SEO market.

1. 80% of SEO offers are run by people that have only a basic idea about the process. Working with them is giving you maybe 20% of a chance to get good results. You also risk, that they will screw something so badly, that it will take months to recover.

2. Price is not a guarantee of quality at all. I have seen a well known high-end agency, that was ranking customer for misspelled keywords for a few months before he figured it out (they misspelled dictionary words!). They refused to refund (gave him only for last month, said it was his responsibility to QC) and blocked him from communication channels. This happens often (errors, not misspelled keywords). The new guy you hire will have a tough job to fix this, so...

3. ...if someone screwed a job before your new SEO guy, he might not want to fix it. It's to much work and you will not see immediate results - to lower the risk of losing customers, he might change the keywords all together. This will bite you in the future.

4. The majority of SEO guys are resellers, no matter what they say. The majority of them buy from forums and marketplaces that are accessible to everyone. What those SEO guys are doing is quality control + (rarely) expertise.

5. I have seen whole agencies build on Fiverr, presenting themselves as professionals, and selling $5 gigs for $XXX to their customers. If you buy the content of some kind, ALWAYS check if it's unique and not a copy-paste.

6. Very few SEO guys do a proper research job before starting working on your site. They will work on it like on any other website. They will do it after a few months when your site is not ranking and you lost your $$$$ and start complaining.

So yeah, it's tough to game.

Well whatever you're doing definitely seems to be working, so I'd double-down on what you're doing, scale it out while optimizing it.

Plenty of us would murder for a pageview chart like that!

You have a very good trajectory from the looks of it. SEO is all about turtle vs the hare and long-term compounding wins.

I like auditing my content and SEO performance every quarter to fix lagging content, add new keywords, and refine my overall plan.

In terms of outsourcing, it can be tough. I'd look for freelancers or agencies that have great case studies, testimonials, and proven results.

I never did figure out how to make SEO work for me. So, I've tried to focus on creating good content that reads well instead.