You and your team have been debating for months on whether to hire an SEO agency. You know you need to start improving your rankings, increase leads and customers and lower overall marketing costs. After much deliberation, you’ve finally got all hands on deck to make the move. Now for the serious questions; where do you find the right agency and how can you know what to expect from them?
Before we dive in to what you can expect from an agency, it’s important that you fully grasp what differentiates it from an SEO consultant. While a consultant can provide personalized service, a great SEO agency can fill the role of the SEO consultant while simultaneously providing a wide array of other resources to help leverage your brand. Opting for an agency that is completely integrated and does it all under one roof means that you won’t have to deal with numerous vendors that you may fear you’ll lose track of. Instead, you’ll be able to form a long-term relationship with a select group of people who will handle all the nitty-gritties and take a holistic view to your search engine optimization strategy.
SEO consultants are called consultants because they only specialize in one area, and if you’re ready to get your business off the ground and running, you need a whole team of integrated experts to take it to the next level.
So, with that being said, what can an integrated SEO agency, like Stream Companies, do for you? Here are some of the major tactics we do for our clients that choose our SEO package.
SEO Consultation:
Prior to starting a client-business relationship, we always take the time to make sure our clients have a solid understanding of their SEO strategy approach, what services they will be receiving and what results they can expect. We extract your specific online goals and aspirations to help our SEO team put your ideas into fruition. Whether your goal is to completely revamp your website or simply build a stronger online presence, our SEO consultations build that foundation to formulate tailor-made plans specific to your needs.
Website Development:
As an integrated agency, you can choose to have a website built from the ground up, have an existing site revamped, add graphics or simply just opt for standard SEO work. The beauty of it is that you have Whether you decide to make site changes within your first interaction or 5 months down the road, working with an agency is flexible and you don’t need to keep track of certain vendors or particular contracts.
Complete SEO analysis/technical audit:
Before we can begin any work, we’ll scan your entire site and jot down every nook and cranny that can be improved to better increase user experience and search rankings. That includes, making sure there are calls-to-action on a majority of pages to increase the opportunities for users to convert, that each page has meta data (the title and mini paragraph that appears in Google’s search results), no technical issues, such as 404’s, 503’s etc., internal linking is evenly distributed across all pages, all images contain alt text and so forth. Our final job of the SEO analysis is to build out a list of high search volume keywords and filter them accordingly throughout your site.
On page optimization:
SEO is not a one and done job. Google is constantly tweaking and updating their algorithm. What was once acceptable two weeks ago may now be considered a penalty today. Therefore, our SEO team will skim your site weekly to check up on pages that may not be performing well and infiltrate current strategies to increase those rankings and attract qualified traffic.
Create new content:
Your website is a living, breathing entity and every update you make on your site once it’s live plays an important role in its interaction with visitors and search engines. With that being said, a website with no fresh content being regularly added may be viewed by search engines as “dead” – with nothing new to offer. Stream’s SEO package includes options from 5 to 10, or even more, pieces of content added to your site monthly in the form of articles, downloads, new web pages, etc. The more frequently you update your site, the more Google will stop by, giving you the opportunity to achieve higher rankings based on the content you provide.
Social media integration:
Weaving social media into your SEO strategy can be extremely transformational because it not only ranks well on search engines, but you’re essentially spreading virally by online word-of-mouth news about your business. Stream has an in-house social media team that will work closely with the SEO team to develop strategic strategies that will generate impactful results.
Link building:
Link building is one of the most important skills for SEO – and don’t let anyone tell you this tactic is dead! If you want to rank higher, you have to play by the search engines rules, and the rule is: more quality backlinks, the higher the rank. It’s actually quite simple, the more links you have pointing to your site means the more people are referring you for something you excel at. Unfortunately, links aren’t that easy to get. But luckily, our trained PR coordinators have perfected their approach to pitch only to businesses who they feel will find value in your businesses offerings.
At the end of the day, whether you’re a dealership that sells cars or an email platform selling a service, your main goal is to sell more and you’ll do whatever it takes to get there. Getting there, starts with an integrated SEO agency. If the SEO company you’re considering isn’t doing all 7 of these tactics listed above, it may be time to rethink your direction.
Stream’s Kick-Start Step
SEO is a long term process and it’s rarely enough to launch a website and wait as the leads trickle in. If you’d like to rank for competitive keywords, there’s no better time to start than right now. Put together a long term SEO strategy with clearly defined and measurable goals, milestones and objectives.