Working out the kinks of an SEO campaign can be really challenging. That’s especially true if you’re doing it on your own.
You’re a small business owner trying to find more customers. You’ve got expertise in your field, and the last thing you thought you’d be doing was researching target keywords!
It can take up a lot of time, and there’s a big learning curve in digital marketing. It might be beneficial to get a little help.
We’re going to explore the reasons that working with a professional SEO company can be more effective than going through the process alone. Hopefully, you’ll see that there’s a way to get great results and free up a lot of time for yourself to do the work that you enjoy.
Let’s take a look.
The Benefits of Hiring a Professional SEO Company
The best way to appreciate the value of an SEO company is to understand the fine points of an SEO campaign.
As you start to see what the process entails, you begin to appreciate how much room for error there is. Additionally, you notice how long the process can take and the amount of knowledge that goes into getting results.
It’s easy to think of digital marketing and online methods for sales as simple. There’s a myth that you just have to get yourself online and the results will start to flow in. It’s all algorithms and luck anyway, right?
While there are scattered success stories of people who have happened upon fortune through digital marketing, the reality is that there’s a lot of competition. Plus, just like any other method of sales, there’s an element of skill that comes into play.
People online are still, well, people. They’re thinking through decisions and making choices based on the information presented to them. They’re not, as some marketers would have you believe, “bound to make the purchase!”
Any company that guarantees sales or a certain amount of results is pulling your chain. Instead, the previous results of companies should be your indication as to how well they’ll help you.
The point is, there’s an art to good digital marketing. A business has to toe the line of optimization and persuasiveness. That’s a hard thing to do when you have little to no experience with digital marketing.
Overview of Optimization
Even if you have a good idea of digital marketing already, it doesn’t hurt to have a little refresher from time to time. For those who aren’t familiar with how it actually goes, the following information should help fill in some blanks.
Search engine optimization is a process that helps websites rank in SERPs (search engine results pages). Search engines operate with the use of an algorithm that indexes and ranks websites based on around 200 different factors.
SEO uses what we know about those search factors to tailor websites and increase rankings. Before people started to value search engine rankings as a way to increase business, it might have been easy to slip a few optimization methods into your site and see your results soar.
Now, however, many businesses in your niche are using optimization to compete for the same results as you. That means that some effort has to go into matching or exceeding their efforts to achieve results.
We’ll now go through some of the essential points of digital marketing, exploring how an agency can improve your results compared to how things would go if you did them alone.
Keyword Research
The keyword is the central point of any Google search. Google needs the keyword to reference its archives and find the sites that best match it.
While it may seem trivial to the user, it’s very important to be specific with the keywords that you optimize for. Slight differences of terms can lead to big changes in rankings, audiences, and more.
It makes sense, then, that SEO starts with keyword research. You have to figure out what you’re trying to rank for before you can start optimizing. There are a number of sophisticated keyword research tools that allow you to see what users are doing on Google.
When you know your target audience, you can reference that group in the keyword research tool and see which keywords are popular in your niche. Odds are that there are a few very popular keywords followed by a group of less popular ones.
The trick is finding terms that are popular enough to draw traffic, but not so popular that the results are bogged down by industry titans. In most cases, the most popular term in a niche has pages of spots that are held by big companies that are hard to compete with.
As a smaller business, you can still see a lot of growth from optimizing for less popular terms. There’s a lot of traffic to go around, and you’ll be able to rank well enough to generate rankings.
How Agencies Can Help
First off, agencies know how to seek out terms in the popularity sweet spot. Based on your target audience, niche, location, and more, they can identify the terms that you’ll rank best for.
Additionally, they can determine which terms best suit your business. By examining holes in your niche or adjacent niches, a company can help you expand your business reach.
Let’s say that you run a coffee shop. You’re doing good work optimizing for your local niche and you’re present in most rankings. An agency might notice that there’s a gap in the rankings for nearby bakeries.
While you’re not a bakery, your business can still reasonably rank for bakery-related posts. Breaking into that niche will help you draw a number of clients and increase your domain authority.
Domain authority is basically how important you are in your niche. When that goes up, the reach of your rankings extends and you start to improve results naturally.
Back End and Site Performance
Another huge factor in optimization is how well your site functions. Google values quality websites that are easy for users to engage with, so how well-oiled your website is makes a massive difference.
The tricky part is, managing the back end functions of your site is a challenge. There’s a little coding, a little analytics, and a little tech-savvy that comes into play. You have to think of things like link health, site architecture, site speed, and usability.
The links on your site should all work and be ordered logically. Site architecture refers to the way users can move through your site. Is it well-ordered or is it complicated and hard to navigate?
In most cases, a person should be able to enter your site and get wherever they want to go in two or three clicks. It may seem easy to manage, but it gets more complex as you produce more and more content.
Further, usability isn’t something that can be intuited. It might feel like user experience can be judged by a quick run through your site, but there’s data that suggests otherwise. You can look at Google’s data on your site to determine how long people stay on your site, where they get caught up, and how you can improve those statistics.
These things are all unique in how they’re treated, so there’s a lot of knowledge that goes into figuring them out.
How an Agency Helps
The first advantage of having an agency for site features is the fact that they already know what they’re doing. The learning curve is gone, and they have experience managing these factors well.
That experience goes a long way when you’re managing something as important as your business website. If you were to do it alone, you might make a mistake that could cost you a large number of rankings.
Google is very particular in the way it ranks, so small adjustments could actually be negatives. In severe cases, those mistakes can get you unindexed.
In other words, Google takes you out of its archives. That tends to happen when you’re clearly violating the terms of service or trying to cheat the algorithm in some way. So, while you might not be unindexed for small mistakes, you still don’t want to lose ground on little things.
Content Creation
The main force of your SEO campaign comes from content creation. It’s essential that you refine your home page and service pages, but the content is where a lot of the work goes.
It’s difficult for your primary pages to rank on their own without a number of secondary pages to lift your site up. This is because all pages do better when one page is succeeding. Alternatively, single pages that might struggle alone rank well when the site is successful at large.
It’s sort of a “rising tide raises all ships” sort of thing. The goal is to create content in response to as many popular keywords in your niche as you can. In most cases, this happens through the creation of blog content.
Blogs are excellent resources for optimization because they can be curated to any keyword and they hold a lot of opportunities for keyword placement. The difficult thing, though, is creating blog posts that are effective.
You should create blogs in response to keyword research. Many people think that blogs are opportunities to write about whatever they want to, or whatever they have expertise in. If your business niche aligns with your personal interests, you might get lucky in that way.
Otherwise, the content on your blog should address the question or concern outlined in the user’s keyword searches.
For example, keyword research tells you that “best breve recipes” is popular in your area. You can infer that people in your area want to know how they can make a great breve. In response, you can create a blog post that discusses breve recipes and uses “best breve recipes” in key areas throughout the post.
Repeat that process over and over, and you’ll see your website rankings soar over time.
What Agencies Do to Help
Content creation is one of the biggest advantages when you hire an SEO company. Content creation is a lot of work, and it takes a skilled hand to write optimized post after optimized post.
The on-page factors that go into a great post are numerous, and it’s a challenge to keep all of them in mind as you go through the process. Further, it takes time that you might not have.
Small business owners are notoriously pressed for time. It makes sense, too, considering all of the work that they already have to do. Researching keywords, writing posts, and refining optimization could take all day if you wanted to perfect it.
Then it would take all day the next day. Then the next day. You get the idea.
It’s worth it when you see the increase in rankings and sales, though. That said, you can’t spend all of your time doing work that doesn’t directly apply to your business and products.
You’re faced with the decision to either hire an in-house marketing professional or work with a professional company. In most cases, going with the company is the wiser choice financially, and you get the benefit of a full team to work with.
There’s also an advantage to having someone on your team who does the work day-in and day-out. Digital marketing agencies have copywriters who are trained at writing engaging, SEO-optimized content that gets results.
So, not only will you have a large volume of content, but you’ll also have a lot of content that’s enjoyable to read. That’s something that a lot of businesses cannot claim to have.
Interested in Learning More?
If you think that SEO services might be able to help you out, you’re in the right place. We’re here to help you learn more about working with a professional SEO company.
Explore our site for more insight into how to hire an SEO company, understand SEO services, and much more.
