What is an SEO Agency?

If you want to boost your online presence, traffic volumes, and overall sales, there are multiple avenues you can go down. You can try PPC and paid search methods that bring immediate results, or you may prefer to try content or email marketing. You could even try traditional marketing methods such as print ads, billboards, event marketing, or broadcasting. While these are all great methods, SEO is one of the strongest options you can opt for. However, what is SEO, what are the benefits, and what is an SEO agency? All these questions and more are answered below in a jargon-free way to help you boost your business.

SEO is a form of marketing that is all about getting more organic traffic to a website. It stands for Search Engine Optimization, a perfectly fitting name as you are optimizing both on and off your site to boost your ranking position on the search engines. Within the realm of SEO, you have 3 main types:

• On Page
• Off Page
• Technical

On page SEO is all about making your site perfect for your customers while also paying attention to what the search engines will be looking for when ranking websites. Making your site user-friendly, improving your internal linking and URLs, and optimizing for search intent are all reliable methods to help you rank higher in the search results pages.

Off page SEO will also help you improve your rankings, but this focuses on everything away from your site. It enables you to build up authority and credibility, both of which matter when Google is deciding where to put you. They are 2 of over 200 ranking factors as part of their search algorithm.

Technical SEO involves going back to your website and assessing whether it is meeting the requirements set out by search engines. The aim is to make your website easy for their search bots to find.

Other SEO types to know include:

• Local
• International
• White Label
• Mobile
• E-commerce

On a basic level, you’ll know that an SEO marketing company will carry out SEO campaigns, but what exactly does this involve? What do they do that helps you see this increase in rankings and traffic?

An SEO agency will learn about its clients, investigating their businesses and industries to gain clear pictures of the direction their SEO efforts will take. By doing this, they can benchmark the starting point, which helps you see your progress once the SEO starts to take effect.

Most SEO experts will then conduct keyword research and an SEO audit, with the latter looking for areas on your website that need optimizing or improving to aid your ranking possibilities. They will report all their findings to you so you can see how much work there is to do. The keyword research stage involves finding the keywords your customers are using to search for products or services you offer.

As the campaign gets created and executed, they will start to monitor for any changes. If nothing happens, they will alter the campaign until results are apparent. Just note this won’t be fast. SEO can take months to show any real improvements, but during these months, they will update you on any small changes.

There is plenty of information online that you could take the time to learn about SEO strategies and build your campaigns. You could choose to hire an in-house team to do this for you. However, while both are doable, they aren’t necessarily the best way forward, and these top 3 reasons show you why this is the case.

Reason 1: Money and Time

Whether you choose to teach yourself or hire a team, this requires huge amounts of time and investment. It won’t cost you nearly as much if you go to the best SEO agency, and you don’t have to worry about the hidden costs that come along the way, like retraining.

Reasons 2: Level of Expertise

You won’t be able to get to the same level of expertise that agency consultants have without some serious commitment on your behalf with your time and finances. Trying to reach the expert level or getting your staff trained means less time working on your campaigns and bringing results.

Plus, SEO is constantly evolving and adapting to new algorithm changes, meaning you or your team would have to have consistent training, which would cost you more time and money. If you choose not to spend this, though, you risk using outdated methods that hinder your ranking and traffic prospects. Turning to an SEO digital agency removes all this worry.

Reason 3: Scalability

If you or your team produce a campaign that brings in more traffic and a better ranking, the next step is improving as well as maintaining. Scaling up your campaign while continuing all the efforts you put in before isn’t easy unless you also hire more staff and are willing to invest in their training. SEO marketing agencies have processes in place that make it possible to scale up and down your campaigns as and when.

When you are ready to hire the help of an SEO agency, you must consider several critical factors. First, how reliable are they as a company? If they have lots of positive reviews about their SEO and customer service, this is a great indication of their reliability. Within these reviews, also see if past customers have commended their communication skills. Communication between you should be seamless. That means finding someone who listens to their clients and regularly feeds back information about how their campaigns are going in a way they understand.

Once you’ve read through reviews, you’ll need to consider the services each agency offers. Does it suit your needs? Do they have enough other SEO agency services that you could expand your efforts, such as international or local SEO? Do they offer different services outside of SEO, such as content marketing or PPC? Both are excellent when paired with SEO and enable you to sync your marketing efforts across the board to build a really strong online presence.

Next, you should investigate the results they can produce for you. Do they have case studies with real data? If they can’t find these on their website, ask them. They can either point you in the right direction or have a one-on-one meeting to show you previous results from past campaigns.

There are multiple benefits of using an SEO company for your campaigns, the best being that you can take advantage of their knowledge and experience without having to pay a huge amount of money or offer perks by hiring them in-house. As an agency handles any necessary training to ensure they are keeping up to date with SEO updates, you won’t have to split your budget between your campaign and training. More of your money goes into your campaign, which means higher rankings for you.

The other huge benefit of working with an agency is that you can scale your campaigns more easily. If you see an influx of money and want to pour this into your campaign, you can do so with an agency. They will have the capacity to produce quality results even if you add more to the mix, as they have established processes set up to handle these types of requests.

A critical ranking factor is authority, which you can boost with link building strategies. While you can do this yourself using blogger outreach, if you turn to an SEO digital agency to do this for you, you can enjoy another benefit: a reputation boost! Agencies have well-established relationships in place, meaning that their reputation is already very credible. By them building your links, you can enjoy higher quality, authoritative links much faster.