If you’re thinking about hiring an SEO in order to market your website online and get more visitors, then you’re reading the right article. There are many actions an SEO agency will take and we will now take a closer look at some of them so that you can know exactly what to expect. This will help ensure that you understand the process and get value for your money. It will also help you to determine the most important aspects of SEO and ensure that the SEO Company you’ve chosen is doing a good job.
The very first thing that an SEO company should do is a complete audit of your website. This is essential because it will show them the current state of your website which includes how much traffic you’re getting, what keywords you’re ranking for and their positions, which pages are generating the most traffic, how optimised your pages are, your backlinks, quality of your backlinks, domain authority, whether you’ve been penalised by Google, spam etc. These are all very important things to know because they won’t be able to execute an effective SEO plan without knowing them. You should also ask for a detailed report on the audit so that you can have documentation and know exactly what is wrong with your site, where it needs improvement etc. Once they have completed the audit, they will also provide a document which outlines their plan for improving your website and getting more rankings.
Next, you can expect the SEO company to do keyword research. Even if you have a lot of your content already written, keyword research will still need to be done. As a matter of fact, keyword research should always be done at intervals in order to find keywords that you may have over looked that your site should be ranking for. They will use a variety of tools to find long tail keywords such as SemRush, Ahrefs etc. Once they have found keywords, they will create lists of keywords for each page. In some cases, they may even reverse engineer the keywords of your competitors so that they can identify keywords that you should be targeting. These keyword lists will then be used for on-page optimisation.
Thirdly, on-page optimisation will need to be done where they adjust each page of your site for your keywords. This means that they will insert each batch of keywords in the relevant places on your page. The keywords with the most volume will be placed in the title, SEO title, headline, h2, h3, URL etc. Your other keywords would be placed a couple of times throughout the copy of your page.
Additionally, they will also optimise other aspects of your website such as your images. If you currently have over sized images on your site, they will reduce their size so that it reduces your page load speed. Page speed is important because it is a ranking factor and slow websites don’t rank highly in Google. They will also check for unnecessary plugins and other ways to speed up your site.
Next, they will work on your off-page SEO. This means that they will build backlinks to the pages on your site to increase your rankings. Now, you should be able to choose whether you want them to build black hats or white hat backlinks. You should definitely opt for white hat backlinks which are much safer. Black hat links have a much higher chance of getting your website penalised by Google.
The main type of white hat links are outreach links. For example, guest posts are a popular outreach link. Basically, they will create a list of websites in your niche or related niche, email them and ask if they can write a guest post with a link back to your website. This is very effective and you can get many highly relevant links using this method. Now, you should make sure that the guest posts that you get to your site are actually relevant and on sites that have a good deal of authority and trust. There are other types of whit hat backlinks such as broken link building, resource page links, infographics etc. You should make sure that the SEO company is getting links from a wide variety of sources.
Lastly, a good SEO company will also do CRO or conversion rate optimisation. This is where they increase the conversion on your products so that you get more customers for the same number of visitors. They will do this through A/B testing of your copy, landing pages etc. They will test the use of different images, colors, buttons and more.
In summary, we have just looked at what you can expect when hiring an SEO company to market your website. This is not an exhaustive list but it does cover some of the most important SEO services.
