If you are a business owner or have a personal website and want to improve your visibility online, you have to do search engine optimization (SEO).

What Does an SEO Agency Do?

You can do this in two ways: doing it yourself or hiring an SEO agency like strategicseosolutions.com.

Of course, if you are busy or don’t understand SEO, you should hire an agency.

Wondering what does an SEO agency do? There are plenty of things the agency does. The most common ones being:

Audit your site

When you hire an SEO agency, the first thing they will do is audit your site to understand the weak areas and the available opportunities. To do this, the agency will need access to your site, your Google Analytics account, and your Google webmaster tools account.

During the analysis, the agency will pay attention to the website’s structure, the content on the website, the current conversion rate, the off-page online elements, and other relevant details.

If you haven’t properly set up your site, the agency will help you do it.

Understand your objectives and come up with a plan to achieve them

After the analysis, the agency will come back to you and let you know about the areas on the site you need to work on and the low-hanging fruits (opportunities) you can easily optimize for and start minting from.

The agency will also seek to understand what you are looking to achieve with your website. Are you looking to increase your visitors, sales, subscriptions, or any other metric?

From your objectives, the agency will come up with a strategy on how to achieve them. For example, if you want to increase your website visitors, the agency might research the most popular topics in your industry and market them.

If you want to increase subscriptions and conversions, the agency might develop a strategy to target the bottom-of-the-funnel topics in your industry. While the content won’t drive much traffic, it is buyer-focused, increasing the chances of increasing sales and subscriptions.

Before the agency proceeds with the next step, they should share their strategy to achieve your objectives. And this is an important part to watch out for.

If an agency starts working on your website without asking about your objectives and putting together a plan on how to achieve them, chances are they don’t know what they are doing, and you should save your money and time and stay away from them.

Undertake keyword research

Keywords are everything, and they can make or break a strategy. Depending on your objectives, the agency will undertake thorough research about the keywords people are using to find your content. The keywords the agency focuses on solely depend on your objectives.

As mentioned above, if your objective is to increase your conversions and subscriptions, the agency will concentrate on the bottom of the funnel content that won’t have much traffic but will be buyer-centric.

On the other hand, if your interest is to increase your website visitors, the agency will concentrate on top-of-the-funnel content with a lot of searches hence having higher chances of increasing your website visitors.

Competitor research

Although it’s good to work on yourself, it’s always wise to look at the competitors, and what they are doing as if something is working for your competitor, chances are it will also work for you. After understanding your business, the agency will start researching who your competitors are and their strengths.

The agency will pay attention to their site’s design, target keywords, backlink profile, and any other relevant details. The essence of studying the competitors isn’t to copy them but rather to find any strategies you might have missed that might be of value to you.

Redesign the website

Although rare, the agency may have to redesign your website. Some of the reasons the agency might decide to give your site a complete overhaul include: your website design is outdated (if the site still has the 1990s look), has poor code, has poor customer conversions, and the cost of fixing the flaws is higher than starting from scratch.

Content creation

Content drives SEO, so the agency will create high-quality content for your website. Unlike a decade ago when you could rank with a mediocre 400-word article, things have now changed, and the search engines are preferring original, expert-level content.

A good SEO agency shouldn’t simply hire content writers to craft the articles. It should hire experts in the different industries to create the content. If it can’t do this, it should have expert writers interview the experts and professionally write the content.

The content can be anything from blog posts to comprehensive infographics. It doesn’t matter as long as the content is high quality and will attract people to link to it either organically or via outreach.

Link building

For your website to have a good reputation in Google’s eyes, it needs to have high-quality, relevant backlinks.

With millions of websites online, you can’t create content then sit back and wait for backlinks to roll in—you need to be aggressive and look for them. Thankfully, there are plenty of ways to do it. Read this guide on ways to get backlinks for your website.

While backlinks are vital for your SEO success, you need to be cautious about how you do it, as you can be slapped with a Google penalty.

SEO optimization

This makes your website more attractive to the search engines, and it’s often three-pronged: on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO. You can learn more about each here.

Are you looking to hire an SEO agency?

Now that you know what an SEO agency does, you can hire one if you feel it will be of value to your business. To get the most from the agency, don’t hire just any agency, hire the best SEO agency.

The agency should have seasoned internet marketers, know how to execute a highly effective SEO campaign, and report the SEO results in an easy-to-understand, non-technical manner.

It also doesn’t hurt working with marketers with great personalities. You don’t want to spend time with a gloomy person, do you?

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