What is an SEO company, and what can they do for me? This is a common question that we often hear a lot when talking to people from across the world. This is the question that is on everyone’s lips: what is it and how can it help me with my projects.
So to answer these questions, we’ve written this complete guide to SEO companies. It will hopefully break down everything you need to know about SEO companies, regardless of whether you are just looking for a company, or are actively engaged with a long term SEO relationship. As an active consultant in the world of SEO, I got you covered.
We’re going to answer the following questions:
What is SEO?
What is an SEO company?
What does an SEO company do?
What metrics are associated with SEO companies?
Should I hire an SEO company?
What makes a good SEO company?
What questions should we ask before hiring an SEO company?
What is SEO?
SEO is short for search engine optimization. It’s the process of increase how your website ranks in organic search results. The aim is the rank highly for queries(keywords) that are relevant to your business to drive more traffic and ultimately generate more business.
Stat about the importance of SEO
What is an SEO company?
An SEO company or SEO agency is an organization that works on behalf of another company to help them to increase their search presence. The goals can be slightly different depending on the client.
What does an SEO company do?
This area is usually where the disconnect occurs. What is it that an SEO company does? How is what they do differently to what you can do yourself?
First, let’s look at what it is that an SEO company does:
Site security
A crucial part of search performance is the security and setup of your domain. Does it support HTTPS, or is it HTTP. These technical issues can affect your search rankings as research suggests that search engines use site security as a ranking factor. There are a lot of technical common SEO mistakes that business can make, a SEO company helps to avoid these.
Mobile friendly
SEO companies will spend a lot of time talking about mobile-friendliness. They do this for a good reason, X amount of searches are performed on mobile.
Google has now published information on its mobile-first web
As more searched are made on mobile, it’s important to make sure that your site loads quickly and is optimized for viewability on a mobile screen.
Site speed
SEO isn’t just about links and content. Search engines love sites that run quickly and provide a better user experience. Because of this, SEO companies help a business to improve SEO speed of their website and the content that users see.
Content analysis
The internal structure of the content can very quickly become messy. Internal linking, link building campaigns and other factors can help to rank pages without any off-page activity.. SEO companies help by analyzing which content ranks for specific keywords. Consolidating content and speccing out links is a large part of this process.
Content writing
To rank a page on the first page of search engines, you must have great content. You can’t just build links to a sub-standard piece of content. SEO companies help to identify content that matches your business intentions and can help to write the content in a way that can get it to rank for the terms that matter to your business.
Rankings
The simple thing about SEO is this – the higher you appear in search, the more likely it is that you will get more traffic from people searching that term.
That’s why such a big part of the work an SEO company does is aimed at getting your site and pages to rank. It’s better to have a single page in the top position than 100 pages on page 10.
Backlinks
SEO companies are experts at outreach. Building backlinks, securing guest posts, and building relationships is a massive part of the SEO process. SEO companies help by building natural, trustworthy links back to your site.
Keyword planning
You might have an excellent service or product, but many people can’t match this up to the right search keywords. What do people search if they are trying to get to your product? This is the question that SEO companies will ask. They will provide a detailed plan based on keyword difficulty and business potential to provide targets to rank for.
Local SEO
For businesses that depend on a higher proportion of local businesses, it’s essential to rank for terms that include locality. Mastering the art of ranking for ‘near me’ terms or terms with a specific geographical marker is something that SEO companies can help with.
Metrics associated with SEO companies
When working with a company on SEO, it’s essential to understand these key terms:
Rankings – this refers to where your pages (not site) are positioned in search results
Traffic – the number of users that click through from a search page to your website.
Leads – a person that has found you via search and completed a desired action on your site
Backlink – a link on another website that points back to a page on your site.
What services should be included in an SEO partnership?
Should I hire an SEO company?
So you understand the value that an SEO can bring, and you have an idea of what an SEO company does. But should you hire an SEO company?
To make this easier, we have come up with some questions that you can ask yourself to understand if you need to seek outside SEO help.
Is my website contributing to my bottom line?
Most companies don’t understand the relationship between their website and the effect that this has on their bottom line. SEO companies help to understand the connection and can identify areas where the site traffic is driving business. From there, they can help by identifying opportunities and allowing these areas of your site to rank.
Am I looking to expand into a new market area or launch a new product?
Launching new products or services that are separate from your core offerings can be difficult as it might require a completely different approach or target a new audience across new search terms. SEO companies can help to lay the groundwork and promote your new product faster.
This allows you to save money from paid advertising or using paid channels to reach new customers. Best of all, search is consistent; once you rank, it provides a constant source of traffic and leads.
Do I want more leads and sales?
The role of an SEO company is to identify the search terms that are relevant to your business. Then they get your pages to rank for these terms. This means that you will generate more traffic. More traffic means more conversions or leads, and this means more sales and more revenue.
It’s that simple; if you can make money through your website, then you should be actively engaged in SEO.
Do I want to steal my competitor’s business?
Another thing that SEO companies are good at is understanding competitor success and identifying areas where this can be hijacked.
This might sound a little harsh, but it’s just the process of understanding what has worked for others and then improving on that.
What makes a good SEO company?
So how do you know what a good SEO company looks like? Well, SEO is a long game. Anybody expecting results overnight will be sorely disappointed. SEO can take a while, depending on the competitiveness of your niche.
But when the payoff comes, it is incredible. Taking the time to do it properly is vital as search engines can hand out penalties for breaking the rules.
Therefore any SEO company offering instant results is probably providing sub-standard service.
Black hat SEO
Black hat is the name used to refer to underhand tactics that are banned by search engines. These usually involve purchasing low-quality links from suspect sites.
Search engines like Google change their algorithm daily. Eventually, black hat tactics are identified, and the sites using them will receive penalties, and sometimes slip out of the rankings altogether.
So while these black hat tactics might work today; eventually, you’ll get caught, and the sites using white hat tactics will take your position in the rankings.
Questions to ask before you hire an SEO company
What are the terms of my contract? Always ask what is included and when the contract ends.
What happens if I cancel? Always good to check, especially if the company is building you a website from scratch.
How often will we communicate with each other? This is important to set early on. How regularly will they update you? Will they provide reports or SEO dashboards?
What are your guarantees? It’s usually impossible to guarantee results, but make sure you are having detailed discussions about your goals and where you want to be.
What other work have you done? Always check the industry and results of the SEO company. Have they worked with genuine businesses or just a dubious looking website?
About us
SEOtagg is your friendly SEO company. We help you identify the value you can get through search, and we help you get there. We offer detailed reporting options on all of our packages, and we like to operate more like a friendly in house team member than an external agency.
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