What does an SEO company do?
What makes up SEO services? You may be considering an investment in marketing and are asking yourself that question.
Or, maybe you are wondering how you can do what an SEO company does because you have no money to allocate to marketing.
Regardless of your situation, this post is for you.
What Does SEO Do For a Company
There’s more to SEO than just ranking number one on Google.
The objective of an SEO company is to increase the visibility of a website on search engines for keywords that are relevant to your business.
By increasing visibility, your website will generate more high quality visits from prospective customers who are interested in your products or services.
An increase in quality traffic will result in an increase in leads or sales. And, an increase in sales helps fuel a company’s growth.
So, what does an SEO company do? A good SEO company helps build sustainable and predictable growth for a business.
How Do SEO Companies Work?
How do SEO companies build sustainable and predictable growth? Let’s break things down into what an SEO company actually does.
There are three main areas of focus for an SEO company: Content, Digital PR, and Technical SEO.
Content: all words, images, and meta information shared with website visitors and search engines. Creating Blog posts, landing pages, and optimizing page title tags commonly make up the majority of content activities for an SEO company.
Digital PR: internal and external links that direct visitors and search engines to different parts of your website. Anchor texts, referring domains, and link quality are common elements of Digital PR.
Technical SEO: website and server optimizations that make it easy for search engines to access, crawl, and index information from your website. Page speed, mobile usability, redirects, and indexing are common elements that make up Technical SEO.
The short answer of what an SEO company does is optimize content, promote your website, and communicate with search engines to help them find your content. However, let’s dive deeper into these areas.
What does an SEO Company do for Content?
Optimizing content is typically approached in three phases by an SEO company. First, there’s the strategy. Then, the deliverables. And finally, the measurements of success.
Content Strategy
Content starts with the creation of a content marketing strategy. This strategy typically starts with an SEO audit, and then extends to the following activities:
- Keyword Research for primary & secondary pages
- Page Title Tags & Meta Descriptions for primary & secondary pages
- Optimizing Images
Related Articles:
How To Optimize a WordPress post for SEO
Content Deliverables
The main deliverable you can expect from an SEO company is a quarterly Content Strategy guided by keyword search volumes, difficulty scores, and replacement advertising costs.
This strategy will define what content to create and which keywords to target.
Finally, the deliverable will be (daily, weekly, bi-monthly, monthly) SEO optimized pieces of content targeting high value keywords to increase organic traffic and conversions.
Content KPIs
There are typically seven SEO KPIs that determine whether SEO is working.
Content KPIs include Organic Traffic, Organic Impressions, Click Through Rate (CTR), Average Position, Increase in Organic Keywords, Leads, and Sales.
Measuring these KPIs and tracing them back to content creation is an ongoing effort by SEO experts. This analysis is key. If something is working, then a SEO company should recognize the trend and adjust their strategy accordingly.
What does an SEO company do for Digital PR?
Digital PR is simply promoting your website and helping search engines find your content.
Digital PR Strategy & Activities
A good Digital PR initiative will start off with an audit and extend to the following activities:
- Identify external backlink opportunities on high-quality resource pages as well as guest posts
- Conduct outreach to websites to get backlinks to high authority pages
- Monitor unlinked mentions to identify link opportunities
- Build internal links to other pages with SEO-friendly anchor text
As a result, a Digital PR audit will produce a well-thought out strategy to increase domain authority. By having a high domain authority, content can outrank competitors.
Digital PR Deliverables
The main deliverable from a Digital PR initiative are backlinks from relevant and authoritative websites.
All links will need to meet minimum requirements such as:
- Minimum Majestic TrustFlow of 10+
- Minimum Ahrefs Domain Rating of 20+
- All links will be “DoFollow”
- Links appear within an editorial context with diverse anchor text
- Publishing dates of the links will be spread out over time
- Links will be unique with respect to their sites
Digital PR KPIs
Digital PR KPIs include Backlinks, Referring Domains, Domain Rating, URL Rating, Increase in Keyword Positions, Increase in Organic Search Traffic, and an Increase in Leads.
SEO companies will also use SEO tools to assist in measuring the quality of a backlink, and there are metrics built within these tools that should be considered as well.
What does an SEO company do for Technical SEO?
Many SEO companies won’t touch Technical SEO, as it’s too complex for a non-tech savvy team to handle internally.
However, a good SEO company knows that Technical SEO is the foundation to build from. Without Tech SEO, Content and Digital PR will have a minimal difference. Technical SEO truly is a necessary piece to the equation.
Technical SEO Audit
Similar to Content and Digital, Technical SEO starts off with an audit.
To do an effective audit, a Technical SEO company will:
- Utilize all the top SEO tools for insights and tracking, including Ahrefs, Majestic, and Moz
- Leverage all the SEO tools provided by Google for monitoring and measurement, including Search Console, Analytics, and Tag Manager
- SEO audit analysis critical on-page and off-page elements like site speed, ALT tags, mobile optimization, SSL, robots.txt, sitemap, and more
Technical SEO Deliverables
The deliverables for Technical SEO are diverse, as every website is unique and faces different technical issues preventing for an optimal search ranking.
However, there are a few key deliverables you can expect from a Technical SEO company.
- Manage Local SEO listings on the top local directories
- Technical SEO Audit Reports of Top Pages
- Check Google’s Search Console for crawl errors, duplicate content errors, missing titles and more
- Monitor and fix all 404 errors
- Optimize for Google Page Speed & Mobile Optimization
- Sitemap formatting, submission, and monitoring
Technical SEO KPIs
Technical SEO KPIs include scores around site speed, number of errors, and overall Website Health scores from SEO tools.
Related Articles:
Recap
So there you have it. All the activities and key focus areas that an SEO company spends time obsessing over.
In conclusion, an SEO company primarily optimizes content, promotes your website, and communicates with search engines to help them find your content.
When done correctly, your website should appear more often in search engines for keywords that pertain to your business. The end result? Sustainable and predictable traffic from people who are interested in your products and services.
Still interested in learning what an SEO company does? Contact us, or review Google’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide.
