There's a good article over on Forbes this week that talks about small businesses and whether or not they should be outsourcing their search marketing or hiring a search marketing consultant. They cover the common concern of how much (or how little) time really needs to be spent to keep a small business afloat in the online marketplace and offer up words of advice from a variety of well known search marketers.

From the article:

Two things about this concern me.

First, if you are spending a third of your working hours on search who is running your business? Why not outsource that work to someone that can do it in less time? Or better yet, train someone on your staff to do it as part of their job. This whole business of CEOs being responsible for search marketing seems silly to me if we're talking about a company large enough to have employees. After all, isn't one of the first things CEOs do is relegate projects like HR, billing, payroll, and marketing to professionals or employees so that they can focus on what it is that they do best while the CEO focuses on building the business?

Second, any business that gains 90% of their customers from search engines needs to get on the ball and do some serious work toward diversifying their traffic sources. Anyone that was doing business online during the Florida update several years ago should have learned a powerful lesson about the old "putting all your eggs in one basket" scenario. Search is great, but the traffic that comes in via search should be used to build up e-mail marketing lists, repeat business, referral business and new links. If losing any one source of leads can sink your business, your business is not stable. It's a basic business mistake that gets repeated time and time again as small businesses see (and latch on to) the low cost success that organic search marketing can provide.

While it's true that most small businesses are quite capable of handling their search marketing in house, it is generally a good idea to at least consider hiring a consultant for a little perspective.

It's pretty common for small businesses to think they need to focus on one set of keywords while the majority of their business will actually come from another. It can also be difficult for small businesses to understand how to set up and track search analytics. That makes it hard to justify those outgoing dollars or even to know where additional funds need to be spent.