In this day and age, businesses can’t survive without digital marketing. A core component of digital marketing is search engine optimisation. Investing in professional SEO agency services can direct more traffic towards your company’s website, thereby making it more visible in the search engine results.
As digital marketing has grown in complexity, SEO agencies are responsible for covering multiple ends. Here are seven basic services that an SEO agency should offer:
Understand SEO Objectives
The first step an SEO company takes is to help understand the objectives of a business. An efficient company makes sure it understands the products and services you offer and the industry your organisation belongs to.
It is the responsibility of an SEO firm to evaluate the goals you have set and discuss if any readjustments need to be made. The SEO agency will then create an action plan to direct more traffic to your website, generate more leads, improve your brand presence, manage your company’s reputation and enable sales conversion.
SEO Audit
It is essential for an SEO agency to provide an SEO audit. This involves evaluating the features of your company website to identify its weaknesses and understand its performance from an SEO perspective. This eventually helps to develop a customised strategy for your brand.
There are several technical and non-technical aspects involved in SEO auditing. Issues such as load speed, mobile-responsiveness and site indexability are important considerations. To deliver an improved user experience, an SEO agency will take into account heat mapping, A/B testing and surveys, better keyword usage, etc.
Competitor Analysis
Analysing your competitor websites is another job of the SEO agency. The firm will look for offline and online competitors to take advantage of their weaknesses and make improvements to your strategy accordingly.
This will produce noticeable results by getting more traffic directed to your website and enabling your brand to stand out. An SEO agency devises tactics to help a business’ website rank higher than its competitors in search engines.
Strategy Development
A personalised strategy is one of the most important aspects of SEO services. A well-thought-out strategy will help your business maximise the return on investment (ROI) from SEO.
Creating a good custom strategy entails understanding your business, your server and website, competitors and conducting a thorough SEO audit.
An SEO company isn’t doing a good job if it follows a cookie-cutter approach. This means that the company provides similar packages to different clients, without keeping their specific requirements in mind.
With this approach, your website is unlikely to show up on the first page of search results. As a result, your website would end up with considerably less traffic as only 25% of users tend to go beyond the first page. To maximise your ROI, you need to look for an agency that provides a customised strategy for your business.
On-Page Optimisation
Search engine algorithms tend to favor well-designed websites over poorly managed ones. They claim that they promote websites that are structured well for the benefit of the users. Some important indicators of a well-constructed website include:
- HTTPS: The “s” at the end of HTTPS signifies a secure website, which is preferred by search engines.
- Analytics tracking: This helps an SEO agency to trace where leads and sales are coming from.
- Sitemap: A sitemap is a list of all the pages on your website that a search engine should be able to index.
- Indexed status: Pages that are indexed will be more visible on search results and direct traffic to your website.
- Keywords: An SEO agency is responsible for conducting research on keywords and using relevant and valuable keywords for your website.
- Speed and usability: Your website must load fast enough to provide a comfortable experience for the user.
- Meta elements: you need to make sure that the meta elements are optimised enough to improve your website’s ranking on search engines.
- Internal linking: Your website should have efficient internal linking to allow the user to explore it smoothly.
- Conversion optimisation: SEO agency services should deliver a smooth user experience by testing contact forms or links on the website and discovering the ones that work best.
The right SEO agency will ensure these structural aspects are well taken care of for the benefit of your business. A firm that doesn’t offer on-page optimisation is, in fact, not providing SEO services, at all.
Off-Page Optimisation
Off-page optimisation revolves around the optimisation elements outside your website that affect its search engine ranking. It generally involves influencing the audience’s and search engines’ perspectives about your website. Here are some ways to go about it:
- Better presence on social media: Your website’s image needs to improve in terms of quantity (getting mentioned by the maximum number of people) and quality (having relevant influencers and bloggers notice your brand)
- Getting reviewed: This includes good reviews on websites, such as Google Maps and TripAdvisor.
- Shares on social media: This involves ensuring better content to increase shareability.
Transparent Reporting
Did you know SEO results can be tracked and measured? Ask your SEO agency to provide a monthly analytics report for your SEO campaign and understand how SEO services are adding value to your business.
Transparency is important to make sure you are working with an agency that you can trust. A report may take into account aspects, such as organic traffic, conversion rate and search engine ranking. It will help you gauge the results of your SEO strategy.
Your SEO firm should also offer the services of a specialised account manager with who you can have regular meetings. Your team should be able to ask them relevant questions and discuss reports with them. Examples of analytics that an SEO agency can provide are traffic volumes, sources of traffic and search engine positions.
SEO agency services involve understanding the nature of your business and building a customised SEO strategy for it accordingly. It is crucial to choose a company that covers all important SEO aspects and produces measurable results.
