What Does An SEO Agency Actually Do For My Business?
November 18th, 2021 by
Key Insights
- Good SEO agencies focus on your website with the same vigor and attention-to-detail that you have with your brick and mortar.
- Expertise, authority and trust (E-A-T) is the foundation of a good long-term SEO plan. If your website doesn’t have these factors, it is impossible to rank well in search engine results.
- SEO agencies help their clients develop a long-term plan by auditing their site, pinpointing keywords and building E-A-T, which comes with a unique set of challenges because it cannot be directly measured.
Any good SEO agency knows that owners and executives are protective and calculated when it comes to businesses and their bottom line. Because of this, agencies know they must instill trust and deliver results. However, as a business owner/leader, that doesn’t mean you will know exactly what those results should be and how they improve your business results.
SEO agencies may vary in their approach, but their overall goal for your business website is to present it as a resource search engines will want to show searchers.
An SEO Agency Should Help You Understand Your Website’s Strengths and Opportunities
A good SEO agency will first familiarize itself with your website, typically done by conducting a website audit. With an audit—which generates performance metrics surrounding your site’s visibility, speed, and traffic—an SEO agency can pinpoint opportunities and highlight success areas!
Once your agency knows where you are thriving and where you can grow, they can begin forming your long-term SEO plan. This plan will align with the business goals you’ve set and can be a major tool in helping you reach them.
An SEO Agency Should Identify Relevant and Authoritative Keywords
Even those unfamiliar with SEO may have heard the terms “keywords” or “long-tail keywords” tossed around in conversations or articles. In simple terms, keywords and long-tail keywords are the phrases found on your website that match a person’s search query. Without optimizing your content with relevant keywords, Google (let alone searchers) will not be able to find it. This fact alone makes it a key priority for your SEO agency.
While defining the term “keyword” is simple, deciding which keywords to focus on in your SEO plan is not as cut and dry. An SEO agency familiar with your industry and business will be able to successfully conduct keyword research to pinpoint phrases that your customers and potential leads will use to find your content. More than that, they will know how to strategically implement those keywords across the pages of your website for the best impact.
An SEO Agency Should Enhance Local Relevance
Local relevance measures how well your content matches a search query that includes or intends a location. This refers to searches like “urgent care near me” or “restaurants open now.”
A huge chunk of daily searches look for you using locally relevant search results. Recent research done by Russ Jones, the Principal Search Scientist at Moz, found that “58% of people search for a local business on their smartphone daily.” The more your business website is locally relevant, the higher you will rank in those search results.
Jones’ study additionally found that “50% of local searches on mobile lead visitors to a store within one day.” This means more foot traffic to your brick and mortar, not just your website.
An SEO team that knows this will complete tactics customized to your business/industry specifically geared to building local relevance. These tactics should include:
- Maintaining your Google My Business profile
- Creating local listings by promoting NAP (name, address, phone number) consistency across multiple websites—sites that may show up in search results before your business’s actual website. Creating local listings also ensures that Google doesn’t generate and automatic listing for you, which could show potential customers the wrong information.
An SEO Agency Should Establish Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness
An agency looking out for your business’s best interests will prioritize your website content’s expertise, authority, and trustworthiness, otherwise known as E-A-T.
What makes E-A-T challenging is that it is not something you can directly measure and it’s not a direct ranking factor that you can pinpoint. However, a good SEO agency will have the knowledge and experience to establish and influence your E-A-T through various channels.
These tactics include:
- Regularly updating your site with rich content
- Organizing your site’s structure to make the most sense for your customers and industry
- Ensuring that your site is secure
Your site’s show of expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness are essential factors for your existing customers, potential leads, and Google. In fact, it is heavily referenced in Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines because it is the sites with the best apparent E-A-T that Google awards the most visibility to (i.e., those on the first page of Google’s search results).
An SEO Agency Should Improve Expertise
Showing expertise is all about showing what you know and how you know it. It is crucial for SEO because it communicates to searchers and Google that you know what you’re talking about. Not establishing expertise leaves you at risk of being left out of search results.
How do SEO agencies improve website expertise for clients? Through the content on your website. But it is not enough to simply post any ol’ content. Experienced SEO agencies know that the content on your site should do two things:
- Answer the questions your customers ask. You know your industry and customers, and your SEO agency does too. They will have learned both your industry and target market so well that they know exactly what your potential leads need to know from you. This may be done in blog posts or a frequently asked questions page.
- Showcase your qualifications. This will look different depending on your industry. For example, a doctor will add where they went to medical school or completed residencies. This might be done on your About page with a written biography or videoed introduction.
An SEO Agency Should Build Authority
Authority refers to your brand’s reputation within your field.
The list of reputable, authoritative brands on the internet goes on and on. And despite these websites aligning with different industries, they all have one thing in common: Searchers seek them out for specific things. Google notices this and rewards those sites with top rankings because of it. Because those websites have proven to be knowledgeable and reliable resources, their authority is strong and hard to compete within search engine results pages.
An SEO agency will map out exactly how to build your authority in topics you already show expertise in. You can accomplish this by aligning yourself with authoritative experts in your industry with guest blog posts or building up your backlink profile by developing content authoritative experts will want to link to.
Above all, an SEO agency will ensure that all of your content can be fact-checked. The fastest way to damage authority is to share false information.
You may also hear the term “domain authority” thrown around in talks about website authority. The term refers to a score of how likely your site is to rank over competitor sites.
This score, created by Moz, is “based on data from [their] Link Explorer web index and uses dozens of factors in its calculations.” While it is different from E-A-T website authoritativeness, pointing your SEO plan towards E-A-T will help you increase your domain authority.
An SEO Agency Should Increase Trustworthiness
At the base of relationships—personal or business—is trust. If your website and its content can’t be trusted, Google will likely shield searchers from it.
Your SEO agency will show trustworthiness through on-site optimizations that include:
- limiting the number of ads that display at once.
- installing an SSL certificate (the lock icon that shows next to your URL on most browsers).
- ensuring you have a user-friendly, attractive-looking website.
They will also show trust through your site’s content. This means completing tactics like clearly displaying your contact information, reviews or testimonials, and privacy policies.
An SEO Agency Should Make Sure Your Customers Can Find You
Your customers are on the internet and they are looking for you! Your SEO agency’s job is to make sure that they can find you. Contact Search Influence today to learn more about what an SEO agency can do for your business, your customers, and your bottom line.
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