Quick jump to:

Work With An SEO Agency.

What is SEO and what to expect while working with an SEO agency?

Drive More Qualified Traffic To Your Site With Proven SEO Tactics.

It’s proven, most people never browse past the first page of Google when looking for product or services. Our SEO experts will optimize every part of your website to increase your chances of capturing organic traffic.

Keep reading for more information on search engine optimization and what it means to work with an SEO agency.

What is SEO?

SEO is a digital marketing strategy aimed at increasing the quantity and quality of organic traffic to your site. With an SEO-friendly website, more people will see your site in search results, and will, more likely, click on your link.

To really understand what SEO is, you first need to learn about search engines. A search engine is simply a search tool designed to search, save and archive information available on the web and relay this content to users based on their queries. Bing, Yahoo, YouTube, Amazon are a few popular ones, but Google is unquestionably the search engine king.

Search Engines try to provide consumers with the best possible content by ranking search results by relevance, based on multiple criteria (Backlinko lists more than 200 of them!). Search engines attempt to understand user intent when they enter a query. They analyze the keywords and suggest the appropriate content. The choice of keywords greatly influences the proposed content; for this reason, keywords are crucial to SEO. But they are not the only factors affecting search engine ranking: user experience, page speed, mobile responsiveness are also a few factors to keep in mind. We’ll get to those in a minute.

How Does SEO Work?

As mentioned, good search engine positioning is based on three aspects: basic SEO techniques, quality content and authority. These three pillars dictate how we, as a digital marketing agency, develop Search Engine Optimization strategies for our clients. Discover our approach toward technical SEO, content creation and online authority below:

Technical SEOTechnical SEO

Technical SEO is often seen as a low-hanging fruit when it comes to Search Engine Optimization because one distinctive quality of the technical SEO pillar is the high degree of control we have over its optimization. Canonicalizing duplicates, making your meta tags more concise or submitting sitemaps can be done quickly and have a major impact on your SEO.

By the way, Google offers free tools to assess your website’s performance and help optimize your site for search engines. Google Search Console is highly valuable and should be connected to every website. You’ll have access to valuable reports and insights on how to improve your search engine optimization. It’s a must.

Let’s dive deeper into some of the technical aspects of SEO that, when optimized, can considerably increase search engine ranking.

Site Maps

A site map is a list of all the important pages on your site. They are 2 types of sitemaps: an HTML version and an XML version.

The HTML version is easily accessible to the users. It helps his experience on your site as he is able to find the exact page he’s looking for, quickly. The XML version is specifically made for search engines. This type of site maps helps search engines crawl your website and offers specific information such as priority and change frequency.

Still not clear? Here’s a simple metaphor: You get to a city you’ve never been to before, you want to know what stuff to go see, museums, restaurants, festivals, parks. What you need is a tour guide to tell you where all the good stuff is so you can explore the city, in the right order. Simply put, this tour guide is to you what a sitemap is to a search engine bot.

Make sure your site map is optimized and contains as much information as necessary to help search engines crawl your site and correctly prioritize your pages.

Page Speed

This one is a no-brainer, but one that can take some time to resolve. If your page doesn’t load within three seconds, more than half of your visitors will leave. There are many ways to increase your page speed. You could rebuild your web pages with AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), work to minimize HTTP requests, compress images on your website or reduce your server response time. We suggest using Google’s PageSpeedInsights to get insights on how to improve your loading time.

Mobile Optimization

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: offering a great mobile experience to your website visitors is a must, not only to improve user experience, and therefore conversion rates, but also to rank higher on search engines. Since 2018, Google’s algorithms is ranking search results based on the mobile version of a website — not its desktop version. And, search engines like Google see how customers respond to and engage with a search result, and rank sites accordingly. Learn more about how usability fits is an inherent part of mobile SEO.

If you are looking to improve your mobile experience, there are a number of improvements to look out for:

  1. Read Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines
  2. Increase your page speed
  3. Adjust your content for mobile
  4. Fix mobile errors mentioned in Google Search Console
  5. Optimize for local
  6. Use AMP

Get more information on the SEO tactics mentioned above, here.

Indexation

An index is a database used by search engines to classify every available page on the web. If your website’s pages aren’t index, the search engine users won’t be able to find them. Technical issues with a website are usually the reason why a page wouldn’t be indexed: malware, duplicate content, stolen content, bad user experience, etc.

Take a look at the pages indexed on your website through Google Search Console. Any missing page that should appear on search queries should be added.

Migration and Redirections

Talking to an SEO expert is essential if you are thinking of migrating your site to a new Content Management System (CMS). Broken links and new URLs need to be taken care of when migrating your content. Errors and issues happen frequently in those situations and they can greatly impact user experience and conversions. Ensuring a smooth transition to a new CMS is essential to keep your current organic traffic.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is a piece of content created to educate or entertain with the goal of marketing a brand, product or service. It doesn’t directly sell, though it may recommend or feature the brand, product or service. As such, content is often longer and more complex than a straight-up advertisement; it may be featured on a brand’s channel or media website, meaning marketers don’t necessarily pay to place it.

Although content marketing spans a range of mediums such as YouTube videos, conferences, white papers and podcasts, we usually suggest starting a content marketing strategy with a blog.

In terms of content and digital marketing, having a website blog can help you stand out from your competitors. It allows you to draw more traffic to your site by showing your expertise on a given subject.

By regularly posting content on your blog, you can connect and create stronger ties with your audience. And by constantly feeding their databases, you can improve your search engine positioning.

Blogs have a number of benefits such as:

  • Develop your company’s reputation
  • Position you as a credible source of information
  • Grow your network of visitors
  • Better position yourself in search results pages of search results

As an SEO agency, we follow these five steps (strategy, planning, content creation, distribution, and measurement) when working on content marketing for our clients.

Marketing Content Strategy

Before deciding what kind of content needs to be created, a content marketing project begins with strategy. In fact, the content strategy phase is as critical as the content itself. During the strategy phase, our content marketing team takes time to understand the objectives of the project, who the audience is (find your buyer personas), and how we can engage users. Key to this phase is determining what kind of content will appeal to an audience — how to speak to it, and how to measure any response.

Planning

Once we define who’s our target audience, it’s time to start planning: how many pieces of content will need to be created? How are we going to distribute them, what is the timing, and how will we promote the content? What is the budget, and what resources will we need to create and distribute your content?

Content planning should always start with in-depth keyword research. Specific SEO tools can help you determine relevant high-volume keywords you should try ranking for depending on your location, your brand, and your industry.

Also, it’s important to take a look at the competitors. Who is ranking on the first page for those specific keywords? What type of content is ranking well? With this information, we’ll be able to find gaps and opportunities.

Creation

The planning and strategy team create a brief that outlines exactly what will be created and why. It profiles the audience and delivers the key ideas, objectives, specifications, and timelines for the project. Then the brief is handed out to a creative copywriter, who creates the content management piece: words, storyboards, images, code… and so on. When writing SEO friendly content, there are a lot of factors to keep in mind such as tags, metadata, headers, etc. Optimizing those elements for search engines is essential to growing your organic traffic.

As an SEO agency, we mostly focus on the strategy and less on the copywriting. That being said, we work closely with high-quality writers to create unique and specialized content for our clients. All our copywriters follow our copywriting best practices.

Distribution

It’s one thing to create a strong piece of marketing content; it’s a whole other thing to get our client’s audience to notice and enjoy it. While the content is being created, we go back to work determining how and where the content marketing piece will be distributed. Your content will probably live on your blog, and perhaps, this blog post will be shared on social media. Or maybe you will buy advertising to generate interest in your content. As a digital marketing agency, we have also had the capability to share your content through boosted posts on social media, display ads and other advertising opportunities.

Research done during the strategy phase will help us understand how, where, when and how much you want to spend distributing your content.

Measurement

Once your content marketing piece goes live, it’s time for us to measure and optimize its traffic and performance. We’ll use key objectives and metrics to measure how well your content is meeting these objectives. During this phase, will watch and measure where your traffic is coming from, how many people consumed your marketing content, and how your content is contributed to brand recognition and/or your bottom line. And of course, we’ll be able to optimize, tweak ad campaigns, landing pages and any other distribution channels that contribute to the content’s success.

Online Authority

As you might know, Google’s ultimate goal is to offer relevant and credible answers to a user’s search query. To do so, Google focuses on a metric called EAT (Expertise – Authority – Trustworthiness) to rank relevant websites. Here are some ideas of how you can increase your EAT metric on your website:

Expertise 

Google is looking to see if your site is a credible player in its industry. Showcasing awards and certifications are a great way to present your website as a relevant source of information.

Authority

Your online authority is greatly affected by what others think of your business. Google looks at the reviews posted on a list of well-known rating directories such as its own Google My Business and Yelp to determine a website’s reputation. Well-rated websites are more likely to rank higher on search engines.

Also, a big part of showing your EAT is getting mentioned and linked on authoritative websites. Acquiring links is part of a well-known SEO strategy called “Link Building”. Infamous in the SEO world because of its subjectivity, link building means increasing the number of external links to your site. The more links there are, on sites certified as credible by Google, the more you will be seen as a source of credible information, therefore improving your website’s ranking.

Although some companies prefer buying links (we would never recommend such practices), our SEO specialists suggest creating partnerships with other businesses or online
media to acquire link in an ethical way.

Trustworthiness

Google needs to make sure your website is reliable and supported by other companies. A secured (https) website is a great place to start in order to show your site’s trustworthiness.

Why Invest In SEO?

Brands can sometimes push back their investment on their website’s SEO because:

  1. They don’t have required technical skillset to truly understand what’s impacting their search engine traffic
  2. Implementations are often technical and require dev work.
  3. SEO Ranking factors change regularly, it can be hard for brands to keep up.

If you are feeling these pain points right now, working with an experienced SEO Agency might help you start your SEO journey. Here’s what SEO could do for your business whether you are just starting out, or have been around for a long time:

Help You Outrank your Competitors

When is the last time you’ve looked further than the first results page after searching for information on Google? You probably don’t do that very often. In fact, 75% of people do not look beyond the first search result page. In fact, But, ranking on the first page for every keyword slightly related to your business, is unnecessary, time-consuming and pricey. Identifying long-tail high-intent keyword is key to outranking your real competitors, especially in a crowded or local market.

For the latter, local SEO is key to appealing to more users in your local area. Learn more on Local SEO here or read our interview with a local SEO specialist here.

Bring Great ROI

When Search Engine Optimization is done right, results don’t typically happen overnight. That being said, SEO can be a long process, but it also offers long-term results. You’ll notice the continuous impact of SEO initiatives long after you are done investing in them.

Build credibility

Not only does increasing your ranking on SERP (Search Engine Result Page) increase your ability to generate leads and sales, it also increases your brand’s credibility. Users tend to see the first few results as credible sources of information and leaders in their industry.

Overall, a successful SEO strategy will bring an increase in revenue. Isn’t that what every business is looking for?

Why Hire An SEO Agency?

There are many options offered to companies looking to optimize their search engine ranking: hire an in-house specialist, externalize SEO work to an SEO agency or a freelancer. Which one is right for your brand? There are many things to consider in that matter.

On one side, hiring an in-house SEO specialist can get pricey, you’ll pay a full salary and other perks and your brand will need to invest in SEO-related tools (which aren’t cheap!). On the other side, in-house SEO specialists will know your brand like the back of its hand. You’ll have full control on what gets done and when it does.

SEO freelancers is another popular option in the SEO world. Although freelancers have access to less support from third-parties like Bing and Google, they usually charge less than agencies.

SEO agencies could be the best bet for your brand if you are not ready to internalize your search engine optimization strategy. Here is why:

1. Access to an Exclusive Toolbox

SEO teams split the costs of expensive tools across their client base, which is something an in-house team wouldn’t be able to do. That means SEO agencies have access to a remarkable array of software tools to analyze and measure search engine optimization tactics.

2. Diverse Industry Expertise

SEO agencies usually work with a wide variety of clients such as startups and enterprises from different industries. So, if there is a problem with your website, chances are, and SEO agency, probably already faced it and resolved it. Plus, SEO agencies employ usually more than one SEO specialist. It’s easy for SEO teams to bounce ideas off of each other and share knowledge and previous experiences.

3. SEO Agencies Stay Up to Date and Relevant Through Exclusive Partnerships

For example, as an SEO agency, we are lucky to partner with a multitude of specialized SEO businesses developing cutting-edge tools and platforms. OnCrawl, SEMRush, Google, SweetIQ are a few of Bloom’s current partners that come to mind. By working closely with these companies on some of our clients’ account, we are able to offer the latest features and the current best practices to achieve the best possible results. Freelancers and in-house teams, usually don’t have access to such exclusive deals.

What to Expect When Working With an SEO Agency like Bloom?

If you’ve decided that an SEO agency is the right choice for your company, there are a few things to keep in mind. Here is what you can expect from working with an SEO agency:

Questions. A Lot Of Questions.

To provide the best possible SEO results, an SEO agency needs to truly know your business. What are your current projects, your pain points, your industry specifics… what’s your vision, your mission, your business goals… who are your team members, your target audience, etc.

That way, you’ll build your partnership with your SEO agency on a strong foundation and they’ll offer SEO services that align with your business.

In-depth Audits To Determine Competitors, Keywords, Metrics And Objectives

One of the first steps we do as an SEO agency is running an SEO technical audit to identify your site’s technical weaknesses to improve its general infrastructure. A site free of technical problems (for example, architecture, internal network, or page loading speed) is favored by search engines.

We use technical tools such as OnCrawl, Screaming Frog, Google Search Console, Google PageSpeed Insights and Google Analytics, to get an in-depth view at your website’s performance on search engines. Our audits are split between five major topics: Crawl and Index, SERP performance, User Experience, Link Equity, and Reporting. After thorough analysis, your website gets an overall score on each topic, and we are able to determine where your website is lacking and what needs to be done to increase your site’s ranking on search engines through technical SEO.

While it is true that we have an 80+ points technical SEO checklist for our clients, you’ll notice that not all of the 200+ factors stated by Backlinko and other sources are covered in our audits. Simply put: we don’t have control over most of these ranking factors and we choose to focus on what’s more actionable.

Honesty And Transparency

In terms of SEO, it’s important to set realistic expectations in order to get results: Appearing on the first page of search engines within a few days, isn’t a realistic goal. SEO agencies collaborate with their client to lay out pragmatic expectations and tasks, to help you get where you want to go. At our agency, we don’t beat around the bush and we are always transparent about what needs to be done, missed opportunities and problematic initiatives.

Regular Communications and Check-Ins

You should always expect regular communications and check-ins from your SEO agency. At Bloom, all our accounts are managed by an account manager who acts as a link between our agency and our clients. This is a common practice in the agency world.

Measuring and Reporting

SEO initiatives are meaningless when they aren’t measured and reported correctly. Reports should be concise, easy to digest and focused on your business objectives. Common metrics include organic sessions, keyword ranking, page speed, organic engagement metrics such as time on page and bounce rate, and organic conversions.

Long-term And Exponential Results

As mentioned previously, SEO focuses on long-term, but exponential, results. That’s why SEO mandates are usually longer than a few weeks. For best results, you should be ready to create a meaningful long-term partnership with your SEO agency.

How to Choose the Right SEO agency?

Choosing the right SEO agency can be stressful and time-consuming. In order to help you make the right choice for your brand, we’ve laid out a few elements to keep in mind when hiring an SEO agency.

1. Consider Your Budget

According to eMarketer, cost was the second most important factor, closely following overall reputation, when choosing an SEO service provider. Brands are price-sensitive when it comes to hiring external help, which is totally normal, but we wouldn’t recommend automatically going with the cheapest option. The infamous sentence ‘you get what you pay for’ totally applies here.

Most SEO agencies offer different packages depending on what you are willing to invest to boost your search engine ranking. You should know that prices related to SEO services fluctuate greatly depending on your various factors such as your CMS, your business type (e-commerce vs lead generation) or the number of URL on your site.

2. Past Performance and Expertise

Make sure the agency you’ll work with is certified by search engines like Google and Bing or other SEO-focused third-parties. For example, look for an SEO agency that’s a Google Premier Partner. Such certifications prove that these agencies are up to industry standards and follow best practices.

Also, working with an SEO agency that already has experience in your field of work is a powerful benefit. Take a look at their current or previous clients and look out for case studies.

3. Ethical Practices And Realistic Offerings

Don’t be afraid to ask SEO agencies about their own practices. Anything that sounds unethical, manipulative or too-good-to-be-true should be an immediate red flag. Ethical SEO companies will have no problem answering questions about their practices and processes.

We’ve said it before, but we’ll say it again: Search engine optimization is constantly changing and an ongoing process, which means, results can never be guaranteed. Be wary of:

  • Guaranteed rankings
  • Overnight growth
  • X number of new backlinks

Questionable SEO practices (also known as Black Hat SEO) could damage your search ranking negatively and it could take years to reverse. In our opinion, these practices are simply not worth it.

4. Clients Review and Testimonials

Word-of-mouth and reviews are usually a great way to assess a company’s credibility and trustworthiness. A well-rounded company should have a bunch of clients ready to discuss their experience working with them.

5. Cultural Fit

We are not going to lie, the SEO world is a crowded place. With freelancers, agencies, and consultants, choosing the right partner for your brand, can be overwhelming. At the end of the day, we think cultural fit could greatly impact your partnership with your SEO provider. Pick a company that aligns with your values as a company.

We hope this article helped you demystify SEO and why it’s necessary for any business focused on growth and expansion. We would love you hear about your projects and objectives. Start the conversation and get your proposal.

Let’s work together