SEO is a well-established industry that continues to grow, one that is seen by most as a necessity in the digital marketing field. SEO stands for ‘search engine optimisation’, which looks at strategies to help increase your search engine ranking.
In essence, they make your website come up on the front page (or close to it) of Google. You may be interested in hiring an SEO agency or maybe you already have, so it’s important to know what they do exactly.
Here are five functions that SEO companies actually perform:
1. Social Media Management
This is certainly not required, but as social media proliferates, so does the necessity to utilise and operate accounts on the various platforms. It is unlikely that you are interested or knowledgeable in social media management and ergo, SEOs are great for provided such services. The best search engine optimisation businesses will provide:
- Accounts on multiple websites, not just one
- The ability for daily posts
- Reports and analysis of the social media
- Content on your social media that is actually relevant to your company
- Progress Reports
It is vital for you to understand how their work is progressing and how your business’s SEO is being developed. Weekly or monthly reports are sent that detail many things, such as:
- What keywords are best for your business
- The rate of keyword usage
- How many people visit your website from backlinks
- How often people visit your website
- How many sales you receive from backlinks
Some companies will also provide you with access to software that lets you monitor the progress and statistical intricacies of the SEO practices
3. Website Optimisation
While some SEO will redesign your website, web optimisation is not web design. Rather it is the editing of your website to make sure that you are properly maximising your SEO potential, specifically through the utilisation of keywords. For the best optimisation you would expect to have relevant and useful keywords in your meta-tags, H1s, image tags and a few other specific areas. It may be the case that you have incidentally done this to a certain degree, but web optimisation will make sure your website appears in Google’s search algorithms.
4. Link Building
Link building is the creation of content on third party websites, then placing a backlink (a link to another website) over a keyword, so that your website has greater association with the relevant keyword. Firstly this attracts people to your website when reading articles related to your company, as well as, for example, creating a greater connotation between ‘flower delivery’ and your business, ‘Blue Bouquets’. Link building is a key component of SEO, but you don’t want a company that focuses too heavily on it, as after recent Google updates, this has lost a lot of power.
- Content Management
Much like with social media, a healthy presence on your website, with consistent content from your blog is very important to demonstrating activity to your customers. Furthermore the more content you produce allows for a greater presence of other key SEO practices and allows the pre-existing techniques to be more efficient. As part of content management, many SEO businesses will provide you with unique and well-written weekly blogs personalised to your websites content.
Every SEO agency varies in the specifics of what they do, many of which specialise in certain areas of the field. Either way, these are 5 things you’d expect an SEO company to do.
