SEO, also known as Search Engine Optimization is one of the most essential terms in digital marketing. An SEO refers to the optimization of your website with search engine crawlers or spiders.
Do you know that most of the popular sites gain 70% of the traffic only from search engines from which 80% from Google? These stats prove the only way to get regular and unique traffic on your website is through search engines like Bing, Yahoo, or Google.
If you have an e-commerce store and your website has perfect optimization with a respected search engine then your website must appear on SERP. That’s how through search engines you can gain leads.
However, optimizing your website for search engines is not an easy task. It’s not just one component, but several components of your website are included that affect’s SEO score.
Manual SEO optimization vs Service based SEO optimization
Manual SEO:
If you’ve just developed your website recently and your set-up is incredibly new, then you should focus more on the SEO of your website. Ignoring this process from your website is just like shooting in the dark. You’ll work on your website without considering the actions to gain traffic to your website.
Now, if you do the SEO of your website manually, it would consume your time. Moreover, not all of the people who’re reading this are expert SEO optimizers and most likely, instead of increasing the score, you end up ruining your entire website.
Service-based:
Service-based SEO optimization for your website provides you with a premium service that efficiently helps you to increase the SEO score of your website. It involves the skills of a person(s) who’s an expert in search engine optimization and works on your website to remove any kinds of errors or bugs that could decrease the SEO score of your website.
However, it can be a person or an agency that includes a group of different experts in the same field. They make sure that your website’s SEO is greatly enhanced. The cost of an agency is much higher than hiring an individual specialist, but authenticity and professionalism are always seen in the work of an agency.
Below we’ve written an ultimate guide on Engaging the right agency for your website. So let’s get into it!
Why engaging with an SEO agency is better?
After all of these points, the question that appears here is why would you use an SEO agency for your website? As many other individual freelancers provide the same service far cheaper than agencies, then why agency?
We’re going to prove this below, but in simple language, the agency is far better than individual freelancers! However, the price may be higher, but it would be worth the purchase! Read the section below:-
Expertises
Agencies have highly qualified and expert SEO people for your website. They care about their brand and quality, that’s the reason they never allow any non-expert or un-qualified person to be a part of their company.
Whereas, in the case of individual freelancers, no one can guarantee you about their expertise and it may be possible you’ll end up wasting your money or at least time to be sure. With the expertise and professionalism that you get from an agency, a single individual could never do that.
Latest Information
One of the main benefits of using an agency as your website’s SEO manager is you only get the latest up-to-date strategies. We’re already told you earlier, agencies always want to keep their brand name on the top and that’s why they provide top-notch quality.
For quality purposes, they need to have the latest information about new strategies. On the other hand, an individual merely has this feature. Especially in the case of SEO, it’s important to use up-to-date information, because using old-school strategies is just like playing in the dark. That’s why we recommend agencies because they provide all the services with the latest trending strategies.
Fast response and delivery
Suppose you hire a freelancer, if he already has pending orders in the queue then most probably you’ll get your work late. But in the case of agencies, they always deliver the work on time unless there is a serious issue. However, according to their pricing, they should be punctual as they charge much higher amounts than a person or freelancer. About 70% of the people only use agencies because of their punctuality and on-time delivery.
Services that an SEO agency should provide
Now that you know the proper definition of SEO and the difference between the agency and individual experts who offer SEO services. As we’re talking about an ultimate guide on engaging with the right SEO agency for your website, we must mention those services that an ideal agency should provide you.
When you pay an agency more than an individual, you expect them to be different. Below we’ve mentioned some services that you must expect from an SEO agency.
SEO Audit
SEO audit is the priority that we would highly prefer in every agency, in fact not a priority, it must be a compulsory service even in the cheapest agency. Through an SEO audit, the experts can take a very deep look at your website’s code, its loading time, and the images or graphics contained in your website. Besides, they also understand the current strategy you’re using in your website, even if you don’t have it yet. The experts provide you with a proper custom SEO strategy dedicatedly for your website.
Yes, some automated software can provide you with the SEO audit, but you know a bot can never do what a human can. Those bot’s based tools never provide you a customized SEO audit or strategy, because they work according to a script that is the same for every website. Every agency must provide an SEO audit service. If not, it shows the lack of expertise of an agency, and of course what would be left behind then?
Competitor Analysis
The competitor Analysis service is a process of tracking all of your competitors. The agency provides you with detailed data about your competitors and even shows the main keywords on which they are playing. Moreover, this service is extremely efficient to know which keywords have less competition so that you can get better results on non-competent keywords.
However, no agency can provide you with completely accurate data, but at least it will be good to know the status of your competitor. If the agency is advanced and uses high-tech paid tools, then they could even provide you a ratio between your competitors’ paid and organic traffic. Most of the SEO agencies provide this service even in their basic packages.
The research and data in basic packages may be lesser as compared to the premium and flagship package. In this service, the agency keeps tracking all of your competitors and gives you the report as long as your membership is running with them.
On-page SEO optimization
On-page SEO optimization is an essential thing for your website after the website audit feature. In simple language, On-page SEO of the website refers to the updating of the source code of the website and diagnosing all the errors and bugs from your website to make it more optimized for search engines.
For example, this service includes meta tags and meta titles that are maybe written on HTML, backlinks and internal links of your website, developing the site map, and many other tweaks to increase the overall SEO of your website.
Furthermore, the main thing that should be included in on-page SEO is the reduction of the website’s loading speed. In most of the agency packages, on-page SEO is the focused part. However, in our vision, if an agency isn’t providing this basic service, they are not worth buying even at a cheap price!
Off-page SEO
Although this service isn’t compulsory and most of the services may not offer this service in their basic package. Off-page optimization the actions taken outside of your website that could affect your SERP’s ranking and increase the ranking of your website in SERP. If you’re an SEO expert or you’ve ever done some small tweaks in your website for SEO, then you must know that search engine optimization is mostly related to actions taken outside of your website.
It may include backlinking, outbound links, link building, and many other things we don’t know because we are not SEO experts. In our vision, off-page is a bit easier than on-page, but not compulsory, you can even do it yourself later. However, if an agency provides this service then it’s good to go!
Conclusion
Engaging and using an agency might be expensive, but it’s worth the purchase! Most of the large websites that cover a large audience, always use agencies because such websites usually have a high budget and are looking for professional and premium services. For premiums and effective SEO services, no individual expert can beat the work of the agency. However, in our vision, we would not recommend you to use an agency unless your website starts getting rankings and traffic.