There’s a lot to SEO and search engine marketing, and rather than try to do it all in-house, hiring a SEO company frees up resources so that you’re ready to wow the leads and customers that your SEO efforts bring.
Investing in SEO can provide a great ROI, but it’s important to note that not all SEO companies are created equal. When doing a cost analysis to help you decide which SEO company is best, you should look deeper at what they offer, whether their practices are considered white hat or black hat, SEO guarantees, contract periods, deliverables, and so forth. Here are some basics about what you might be able to expect an SEO company to do for you.
Analyze Your Current Site and Make Recommendations
Missing factors on your business site could be costing you. There are SEO tactics that are helpful and that are essential. An SEO audit will help you ensure your efforts to get found by your target customer aren’t missing the mark and /or hurting your rankings. An SEO company looks at your existing site layout to help determine whether or not search engine bots can easily crawl and read your site.
Note: The technical SEO elements need to be there, and you also need to be sure you’re working to appeal to visitors that are sent your way. Click-through rates and conversion rates are measured by search engines. If they send you a slew of traffic and that traffic doesn’t find your content useful, you’ll quickly lose rankings. You need to optimize for search engines and for people.
Technical Aspects to Make Your Site “Spider” Friendly
An SEO site audit helps you ensure you’re doing all the right things with site structure that can get you noticed and get your site ranked. It can help you see potential gaps and areas for improvement.
Some basic technical things SEO companies look at include:
- Meta data
- Permalink structure
- Unique (non-duplicated) content
- Breadcrumbs SEO
- Image tagging
- Page load speed
- How your page looks on various devices (i.e.: mobile-friendly SEO, voice search, etc.)
- Content layout
- Keywords and keyword optimization
- And more…
On Page and Off Page SEO
Effective SEO strategies include optimizing in many ways, including both on-page and off-page SEO. A good SEO company does both. Things happening on your site as well as things that point to your site all factor into your site’s SEO-friendliness. Ongoing activities in both areas are essential to bring you rankings and help you not only achieve them but also to maintain them.
An SEO company will recommend ways to boost your off-page SEO efforts while also maximizing your content marketing / inbound marketing efforts that bring quality backlinks as well as drive traffic and boost authority.
Content = Opportunity
Every time a new page is published on your site, search engines will crawl that page. They’ll measure technical elements to determine how to rank that page. It’s a smart goal to publish search engine optimized content regularly that’s useful to both your SEO efforts as well as your relationship-building and lead generation efforts. Each page you publish should be optimized with all the right technical elements as well as written in a way that will convert your visitors into buyers or leads. Not all SEO companies offer content writing services, but some do — and can help you plan and execute a highly effective content marketing strategy that will bring you targeted traffic and better rankings.
Other factors in off-page SEO strategies can come into play, too, such as directory listings, press releases, article marketing, video marketing, and more.
Looking for a trusted digital marketing agency to help you with SEO, social media, PPC, and more? Contact Idealysis today to learn more!
