Want to move up the Google rankings? How to choose an SEO partner

For any company with an online presence, an emphasis on SEO (search engine optimization) is necessary to gain more visibility, leads, and ultimately – revenue. But because SEO can be confusing and complicated, many companies opt to get outside help, usually through an agency.

Content quality

It is often said that content is king. This is true in regards to both your on-site content (product pages, FAQs, About us pages, etc.) and your off-site content, which is often a blog dictated by a content marketing strategy. In both areas, high-quality content comes from extensive research and impactful copywriting.

A good SEO agency will make certain that you’re targeting high-intent keywords that are as relevant to your audience as they are to your organization, and will develop a keyword strategy to match. They will advise you to concentrate on keywords that you can rank for, depending on your geographic location and level of competition.

They’ll also ensure that your material is as optimized as possible in terms of presenting the information that your target audience is looking for when searching for your keywords. Without being flowery, a copy should be detailed and intentional.

A poorer SEO partner, on the other hand, may not take such a tailored approach to assist you with the quality of your content. They can provide you with a list of broad keywords that aren’t relevant to your business. They may also recommend modest copy changes that will not improve your audience’s search intent.

Link building

Another measure that will help your website rank higher is increasing the quality and quantity of off-site links or backlinks. These are links coming into your site from other sites. These links are crucial because they “are a significant signal to search engines that others vouch for your content,” according to Moz.

A competent agency will conduct an audit to see who is already linking to your site, and who should be linking to your site. Good backlinks come from sites that have high authority (meaning they are trusted and high-ranking) and are relevant to your content. For instance, if you wrote an article about the best French restaurants in town, a link from an HVAC company’s site won’t be overly helpful to you.

But more importantly, a good SEO partner will research, write and publish articles that link back to your site from high domain authority websites, allowing trust to flow through the link to your site. Conversely, a less polished agency might tell you who should be linking to you, but not how to get them to do it.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is probably the aspect of SEO where a good agency can help you out the most. SEO guru Brian Dean, from Backlinko, identified more than 200 factors that Google uses in its algorithm to determine where websites should rank. A lot of those factors are about content quality and backlinks, but others are more technical (hence “technical SEO”).

The optimization of elements like site structure, loading speed, and mobile-friendliness require true subject-matter expertise. This is even truer for more intimidating-sounding factors like XML sitemaps and robots.txt files.

Each of those elements will be examined by a good SEO firm to see where improvements can be made. Regardless of your SEO experience, they’ll be able to fully explain each of these to you and assist you in putting them into action. An inferior agency, on the other hand, may lack the competence to comprehend all of these factors, as well as the motivation to treat each one individually.