A Marketing Agency Can Help You Increase Your SEO
Ever wonder how some businesses and brands are so lucky that they end up at the top of search engines? The truth is, it definitely isn’t luck. Ranking high in search engines is the result of a lot of strategy and hard work—it’s a process that’s referred to as search engine optimization, often called SEO for short.
SEO involves a combination of practices that aim to set your website up as one that’s perceived by search engines like Google to be reliable, accessible, usable, and informative—in other words, the type of website that users want to visit (and in turn, the type of website that Google wants to send users to). Think about it: If search engines were sending people to websites with unreliable information or that frequently overloaded and crashed, then people would very quickly stop using those search engines. That’s why search engines send users to sites of a certain quality.
How to Improve SEO
“Well, that’s great,” you might be thinking, “so how am I supposed to know what a search engine wants to see in a website? How can I improve my SEO?”
Here’s one reality about SEO that should be addressed early on—it can be a tough undertaking. You can adopt all the best practices of SEO, but it could end up being a time-consuming and overwhelming endeavor. This is why many brands turn to a marketing agency to help them improve their SEO. Marketing agencies provide services that, yes, you as a business owner could focus on yourself if you had the time—but bear in mind that SEO, like other aspects of the digital world, frequently changes. Therefore, it helps to have the assistance of experts who are consistently staying up to date on the latest methods and practices.
Although approaches to SEO change and develop, several key aspects always remain, including:
Keyword Research
When you go to a search engine, you type in a few words or phrases that you want to learn more about, right? If you want your website to show up in search results, you need to start by using those words and using them frequently. So if you’re an electrician, there might be words and phrases related to your business that your potential customers could be looking up: electrical services, electrical repairs, wire installation, circuit breaker repair, etc. When you use these words in your website content—especially with a regularly updated blog—you increase your perceived value to these search engines. A marketing agency can help you research trending keywords, determine which ones will be most effective for you, and generate content that uses those keywords.
Link Building
If your website links to another website, especially a website that’s perceived as reliable and noteworthy, then it increases the SEO of your site. When you’re generating content for your website, look for opportunities to link to other websites, such as when you’re citing statistics or crediting another website for information. Along the same lines, it also boosts your SEO to have other websites link back to you. A marketing agency can help you not only determine which websites are good to link to but also earn you high-quality authoritative backlinks through outreach, guest posting, or content promotion with other brands.
Technical SEO
Then there’s the technical side of your website. Does it load quickly? Is it mobile-friendly? Is the data structured properly? If you’re not a tech-savvy person, you might not know how to fix these fine points of your website. But they play into the overall user experience when somebody visits your site, and if your website crashes frequently, those visitors will not be happy. Ultimately, search engines won’t send traffic your way. A marketing company can take a look at the technical aspects of your website and help you repair or rebuild it in a way that is better for SEO.
Many business owners try to handle SEO themselves, although this often means taking time and energy away from other aspects of running their business. For example, let’s say you want to maintain a blog to improve your SEO. Do you have time to research the keywords and build in the backlinks? Would you have time to reach out to other brands you’re friends with to see whether they’re interested in building links to your website from theirs?
A marketing agency can bring expertise to this aspect of your business the same way an accountant can bring expertise to handling your finances or a lawyer can bring expertise to your legal concerns. SEO requires an in-depth understanding of an algorithm that’s always changing. It means thinking through strategies to stand out in an increasingly competitive online scene and then analyzing the outcomes of your strategies to see what was effective and what needs to be changed in the future. Working with a marketing agency can provide great ROI by effectively improving your online presence.