Not every company needs to hire a search engine optimization specialist. Chances are if you have a well seasoned and mature domain, a good number of other industry relevant and reputable sites linking to your site, frequently changing content, and competitive number of pages in your site, you are probably just a few tweaks away from being able to achieve some reasonable goals.

If you fall into this category, you probably just need to focus your efforts on optimizing the content on your homepage, your title tags, and your metatags.

Keyword research is your next step. There is a tool called Keyword Discovery that can help you focus your efforts on the most appropriate keywords. The key is to start broad. For example if you are a company that provides a service like career counseling, you should start your keyword research with a broad term like "Career". This broad search will show you every variation of keyword phrases using the word "Career". The reason for doing this is that while you might refer to your service as Career Counseling, you may find that Career Counseling actually gets less search traffic than Career Coaching. By researching broader terms you will stumble on other phrases that consumers use to find your service than you refer to it just as an industry professional.

Once you come up with 2-3 keyword phrases, make sure to place those keyword phrases in the first few positions in your title tag and provide links from your homepage to relevant content using those keyword phrases. Additionally if it is possible, request those companies that already link to you to change the words on their site that are actually linked to your site to a keyword phrase you are focusing on. For example instead of linking to you by just using your company name, have them link to you using for example, "Career Coaching with Company Name".

If you find you can't achieve your goals after addressing these key areas, you may need a professional firm to help you establish a link building or content building campaign.