What You Should Demand From Your SEO Services Provider?

These days we find the majority of businesses competing online for higher rankings on SERPs (search engine result pages) and nurturing their virtual presence over the internet. This is where the services provided by an SEO company can greatly help you develop a strategy in the long run that can provide you with viable results and greater ROI (return on investment).

However, if you are new to SEO and its broad implementation approaches you might feel lost as to what should you expect from an SEO services provider. If that is the case, then there is no need to fret as here is a quick guide to help you know what they should be able to offer you.

A Complete SEO Audit

When it comes to professional SEO experts and mavens, they typically have a quick list of technical SEO items to check off when looking to solve ranking and indexing issues. If you are working with an agency you should have an understanding of some basic ins and outs of what an SEO audit should comprise, including but not limited to:

• Analyzing backlinks, referring domains and their authority, and spammy anchor texts.

• Checking to see if your website has a responsive design and is mobile-friendly.

• Examining the overall site structure, integrating sitemap, and resolving UX (user experience) challenges.

• Finding and fixing any broken links and 404 errors.

• Getting rid of structured data errors and incorporating schema content to produce rich snippet results.

• Improving the speed of your website with faster loading times for your landing pages.

• Making sure that search engines like Google have indexed only 1 version of your website.

• Performing sophisticated On-Page SEO including targeting the right keywords (plus LSI keywords and long-tail keywords), meta tags (titles and descriptions for each landing page), and internal links.

• Solving URL problems such as too long URLs that are not user-friendly.

• Usage of robots.txt files that inform search engines what you want them to crawl and what not to crawl on your website.

• Website crawling concerns and fixing technical errors such as removing duplicate content, indexing issues, alt-tag mistakes, redirects, etc.

Detailed Content Creation and Renewal Requirements

Content marketing is a crucial part of SEO and this relates to all types of content for your website, official blog, and off-site content. Moreover, content marketing is focused on creating, distributing, and publishing content for targeted audiences online. It goes hand in hand with your SEO campaigns. However outdated and irrelevant content has the oppostive effect and needs to be renewed periodically.

Content can come in a variety of formats and this can include but is not limited to articles, blogs, case studies, e-books, guest posts, infographics, photos, podcasts, videos, and white papers. Reader-friendly content also complements your website’s user experience. You should be able to offer useful content to your visitors that provides more than enough knowledge on topics and subjects of their interest in order to enhance engagement.

In-depth Competitor Analysis

Regardless of whatever industry or market niche you are operating in, as a business, you will be facing rivals that will indefinitely compete with you to take your spot on SERPs. This is where you should perform an SEO competitor analysis which involves researching the content and other elements such as the links and keywords that they are targeting and using.

This can also include digging into the competitor's backlink profiles, identifying future competitors, evaluating keyword difficulties, and looking for new keyword opportunities. SEO competitor analysis is an effective approach as you don’t have to start from scratch and start targeting keyword gap analysis and top content analysis from the get-go. This will aid you in understanding where you lag behind and what areas you need to improve.

SEO Forecasting

Perhaps the first thing you should mandate SEO service providers is to offer you a comprehensive SEO forecast. This is a vital part of any SEO plan or strategy through which patterns can be identified and help predict future results with the help of data analytics from previously collected search traffic.

This in return can aid your business to determine the approaches and tactics needed to improve outcomes and provide the best output for your invested time, effort, and capital in their services. SEO forecasting will assist you in setting more achievable goals and targets as well as determine the cost and timeframes required to accomplish them.

Final Word

To sum it all up, SEO is an umbrella term and encompasses a lot of different activities plus a holistic line of attack is required to achieve best results. You can find a lot of SEO checklists online to get accustomed to and become familiar with various techniques so that you know what you should ask and request from SEO service providers. I hope this post was able to offer you the understanding needed to make an informed decision in the future.