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A Complete Guide to SEO Reporting for Businesses

Whenever business owners or managers make decisions, they always place primary importance on one thing: return on investment (ROI). For these people, any purchase, partnership, or hiring decisions to be made should help propel a business to higher profitability. They’d also want to be able to quantify or measure the ROI that can be reaped from these business decisions.

This is what makes search engine optimization (SEO) reporting important, as it communicates the value of an SEO strategy to any company. Through the SEO report, you can keep your team in the loop with the status of the SEO campaigns you’re implementing to support their efforts. It also showcases the most significant milestones you’ve achieved at any point in the project timeline.

This is a standard expectation in SEO reporting since they’re designed to identify any loopholes and opportunities to help a website perform well in organic search. As such, data in your SEO report should cover metrics, site traffic, rankings, and more. You’ll also want to make sure that your SEO reports are really useful, not just a hodgepodge of quantitative and qualitative data in an effort to communicate what you’ve been doing throughout the project period.

Here’s what to aim for in your SEO report:

  • Comprehensiveness. Your report should include all the findings uncovered during the audit you’ve done on your website, including on-page and off-page aspects of SEO.
  • Clarity. For your SEO reports to be effective, they should be easy to understand on the manager’s end, and present information and insights in layman’s terms.
  • Visual. Putting too many numbers in your SEO reports can make them be overwhelming for the average reader, so try including graphs and charts to make your reports more visual and easier to digest.
  • Accuracy. Obviously, there’s no use creating reports that are riddled with inaccuracies, errors, and inconsistencies as these won’t help you determine whether they’re on track with their SEO goals, or which campaigns to discard and which ones to keep.   

What Your SEO Report Should Include

As SEO marketers, you’ll probably agree that the SEO department is far from being one-dimensional. With multiple areas to cover, you might find yourself having a hard time putting together an SEO report that shows the overall picture of the efficiency and functionality of your website.

To avoid this dilemma, focus your SEO reporting on these key aspects.

1. Website traffic broken down by page

One of the first things that managers want to know is how much traffic is coming to their website. As such, it would be good to show the amount of sessions or visits made by internet users using week-on-week, month-on-month, quarter-on-quarter, or year-on-year comparisons, depending on their requirements. Naturally, you’ll want the numbers to keep increasing regardless of the period intervals you’re tracking.

It’s also recommended that you report on web traffic based on page views. This part of SEO reporting can tell you a number of things—from the size of the audience you’re reaching and how active of a user they are to which pages they’re interested in.

2. Keyword performance by page

The right selection of keywords can help boost a company’s website ranking, so be sure to include which target keywords are delivering results versus those that are not.

Aside from showing the specific ranking of your client’s website using certain keywords, your report can also include data about the rankings of competing businesses or websites. This way, you can try to rank for keywords that are making your competitors land on search engine results pages (SERPs).

You can further customize the keyword performance section of your SEO report based on page optimization data. The idea is to pick a particular page on the website that you’re monitoring along with a target keyword, so you’ll know if that page is optimized for that keyword.

3. Conversions

While it’s a good sign when a website is able to generate traffic or engage users, the most conclusive proof that can tell you if the website is performing well is conversions. If the website has low conversion rates, it’s possible that you’re targeting the wrong kind of audience or the content on the site is neither relevant nor useful to its visitors.

Your conversion data should go beyond conversion rates, which is a measure of the percentage of visitors who take your desired action—whether it’s in the form of an inquiry, purchase, content download, app installs, or form signups, to mention a few. Instead, it should show where your numbers are coming from.

Are your conversions coming from mobile devices or from desktops and laptops? Once you see some patterns on which sources or channels are giving you more conversions, you can then start uncovering and resolving common issues that users from other platforms may be having.

4. Engagement

Google and other search engines rank websites based on various factors, including engagement—which pertains to how visitors are interacting with a particular website.

To help you measure and analyze audience engagement, you’ll need to include several metrics in your SEO report.

First on the list is the website’s bounce rate, which refers to the percentage of visitors who are leaving the site or navigating to another page without first interacting with its content. That said, your goal is to keep the site’s bounce rate low by finding out what type of content or information can attract users to the site.

Your SEO report should also indicate the average session duration and average pages per session, which will give your clients an idea if visitors are spending enough time or viewing different pages on your website, respectively.

The goal is for these numbers to balance each other out. If either of these metrics is too high, it could mean that visitors are having difficulty reaching their target destination on the site.

5. Landing pages

It’s not enough to report on website traffic without identifying which landing pages are driving people to your site. This is important since it’s the top performing pages that have the potential to add to a company’s commercial value.

Once you’ve identified the most visited landing pages, you can then track which keywords or query phrases people often use in their search and are helping those pages rank on Google, Bing, and more. Ultimately, this allows you to use the right set of keywords in your content resources.

6. Search visibility

With roughly 6 billion webpages on the web today, businesses need SEO now more than ever to attain search visibility. This pertains to how prominently a piece of content is displayed in organic search results.

A search visibility score of zero means you have no pages ranking on the top 50 spots in the SERPs, while a perfect score of 100% means you’re getting the top positions for all the keywords you’re targeting. Search visibility also provides an overview of how well a website is performing in organic search.

As such, it takes into account the number of search terms that your client’s website ranks for, the places or location where the website is ranking, how much search volume is attributed to certain keywords, and the estimated traffic that those keywords are expected to drive.

By monitoring a site’s search visibility score, you can then determine whether there’s an increase or drop in the website’s visibility over time.

7. Ranking

Ranking is an essential part of SEO reporting since search engines use this process to determine where a particular piece of content should go on the SERPs.

Closely tied to search visibility, search rank tells you where a website appears in the list of search results for a given keyword or search phrase. The more relevant a webpage is to a search or query, the higher it ranks on the SERPs.

Aside from showing your clients’ position on organic search, you’ll also want to use SEO reports to help them understand why there might be a change in their rankings, whether it’s from good to bad or vice-versa. Perhaps the website dropped from the top 1 to the top 3 spot because there weren’t any new backlinks created for a long period, for instance.

8. Link Metrics

When you incorporate link metrics in your SEO reports, you get to show your team the positive impact of building links to help improve their search rankings and visibility.

  • Domain Authority (DA)—This measures the trustworthiness, strength, or popularity of the site from where you got your backlink. A DA that ranges between 20 and 40 is considered average; if it’s between 40 and 60 it is considered good; and a DA that’s over 60 is considered excellent.
  • Referring domains—This pertains to how many different website domains have links pointing to your domain. For obvious reasons, the more domains you have referring to you, the more authority gets passed on to your website for that particular keyword. This does not take into account the quality of each link.

9. Comparisons and Trends

Metrics per se cannot show the level or quality of growth that a website has acquired, but having a baseline with which to compare current metrics can. This way, you can help your clients identify SEO trends and relate how these managed to deliver the most impact in improving the overall performance of their website.

For example, you can highlight the fact that after optimizing your client’s website for mobile, there was an improvement in the site’s ranking on Google, whose updated algorithms treat mobile page speed as a factor in ranking websites.

10. Recommendations

You can put in as much data as you want in your SEO reports, but with little to no useful advice for your clients, you’re not really helping them achieve their goals. The best way to do SEO reporting is to provide key data or metrics, interpret what they mean, and propose the next course of action especially regarding areas where improvements can and should be made.

SEO Reporting Tools

As you gather, track, and interpret crucial data points, you should be able to get help from the right software or tools. We think the ones in this list are the best in creating insightful SEO reports in a way that’s fast and easy for you.

SEMrush

What it is: Recognized as the best SEO tool in the USA and across Europe in 2017, SEMrush is hailed as a complete SEO toolkit for digital marketers.

What it offers: SEMrush is designed to help you assess a website based on metrics related to traffic and keywords. Its Search Console Integration feature is helpful in auditing the backlink profile of the website and even removing potentially dangerous backlinks on its own or through Google Disavow.

This premium tool requires the purchase of individual licenses for every user.

SEO Analyzer

What it is: This is Neil Patel’s proprietary tool for analyzing websites.

What it offers: Apart from analyzing websites, this tool helps with SEO optimization by performing an audit on various aspects of SEO—from on-page elements to site speed and backlink checker. SEO Analyzer lets you create your SEO reports for free.

Google Data Studio (GDS)

What it is: This tool from Google is designed to help you turn various data sets into interactive visual reports.

What it offers: GDS lets you access and integrate your data from third-party platforms, such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Google Cloud SQL into your SEO reports at no cost. It also integrates with other Google properties, such as Search Console, which is Google’s free service that allows you to monitor a website’s online presence on different search engines.

Moz Pro

What it is: The Moz Pro tool is ideal for reporting on keyword performance, site audit, and SEO optimization.

What it offers: Moz Pro has a Keyword Explorer function that shows what keywords drive traffic to a site as well as track if a website is ranking locally or internationally. It also has a Site Crawl tool that pinpoints SEO issues, as well as on-page optimization features that help a piece of content land on the top of SERPs.

Standard Moz Pro accounts cost $99 per month, while premium ones will set you back $999 per month.

Ahrefs

What it is: Ahrefs is a comprehensive SEO analysis tool that is used extensively in digital marketing.

What it offers: The Ahrefs SEO tool has the ability to create reports for SEO audit, rankings, traffic, domain rating, and a whole lot more. But what sets Ahrefs apart is its large index of live backlinks known as the Backlink Checker. Among the things that this tool does is to check on the number of times a website received backlinks and filter this metric according to the anchor text used, referring domains, and backlinks URL.

Ahrefs offers a 7-day trial for $7, with plan pricing starting at $99 up to $999.

Getting the Most Out of SEO Reporting

SEO reporting is an essential step in helping you find out what to optimize in a website and how to go about it. This is where the value of having a clear and comprehensive SEO report lies, as it paves way for a holistic assessment and necessary refinement of your SEO strategy.

SEO Company specializes in SEO reporting for website analysis and optimization. Our detailed and straightforward style of reporting guarantees that you get a concrete view of your website performance as well as subsequent growth brought about by our SEO strategies.

Contact SEO Company today for all your SEO reporting needs!

A Comprehensive Guide to Local SEO for Small Businesses

If you’re starting a small business, SEO or search engine optimization can be helpful in letting users know about your brand during their search for information. As traffic to your site increases and you build on a positive experience for visitors, you’ll become more successful at driving more of the right kind of traffic. That said, SEO is really important to increase your online exposure and grow your business, but this is easier said than done.

For one, you could be competing for popular keywords in your industry that are already being dominated by bigger, longer-in-the-SEO-business websites. Businesses of this status have had more time and experience in building and refining their content, which makes it difficult to compete against them 

Your relatively small size can also pose challenges in terms of getting enough media coverage. Since you’re still trying to build a name for yourself, brand recognition may not be strong. As a result, it may take a longer time before third-party sites find your business on the web or begin linking to your website.

You might also find SEO hard to execute for obvious reasons, such as lack of time, budget, tools, or knowledge on your end. Altogether, these obstacles can mean your website doesn’t get the attention it deserves. 

Fortunately, there’s a way for you to also land on top of search results, and that’s through local SEO.  Local SEO is the practice of optimizing your website for audiences in your geographic location. Some of the best practices in local SEO include optimizing for city name, near-me search phrases, or writing relevant content about a local area even if you’re not physically located in the same area (there’s a dedicated section for this later in this post).

In a nutshell, local SEO enables small businesses like yours to compete with heavyweights for SEO rankings as you’re able to harness the added power of geographical relevance.

What Local SEO Brings to the Table

The different facets of managing a small business—making projections, managing staff, or sourcing suppliers— may leave you feeling so overwhelmed that you lose sight of the importance of SEO in general and local SEO in particular. When you’re tempted to put off doing local SEO in favor of other processes that you think are more vital for your business, you might want to keep in mind the various benefits that local SEO brings to the table.

1. More exposure

Here’s a compelling stat straight from the horse’s mouth: 46% of searches on Google have a local intent. 

That being the case, you’d do well to utilize local SEO to make sure that your website gains local but high-level exposure amongst your target demographic. While a standard search enables you to target anyone in the world wide web, local SEO zeroes in on customers or prospects who are in the same area as your business.

2. Better rankings

Search engines are smart enough to know when users are looking for local businesses through the use of location-based keywords or other search signals with a local intent. By applying local SEO, it will be easier for search engines to index your website, so that the next time someone makes a local search, your business will show as a suggestion or recommendation on top of the others.

3. More organic traffic

Research is an important phase of the buyer journey. According to statistics, majority of customers prefer to search online before making a decision or purchase.

  • Among PC owners, 96% conduct local searches. For mobile phone and tablet owners, the numbers are also impressive at 79% and 81 percent, respectively.
  • 87% of smartphone users conduct a search on a search engine at least once every day.

The data above is a clear indication of how local SEO can increase organic traffic to your website as people conduct local searches to find information about products and services, contact a business, or get directions to a local address, among others.

It’s also worthwhile to mention that SEO doesn’t only lead potential customers to your website, it can also improve foot traffic to your brick-and-mortar location as local searches often result in purchases in physical stores. 

4. Better quality traffic

When generating web traffic, it’s not enough that visitors are discovering your site. You’ll want the right kind of people who will benefit from the information, goods, or service that your business or website offers to increase your brand relevance in online search.

Through local SEO, you’ve got a better chance at reaching the top search results listing, which is also called the “snack pack.” In this listing, you’re placed above the organic results so your brand is the first thing that users see.

Getting a top spot in the local listing also means your business belongs to the top 3 businesses with high authority and ranking. Ultimately, dominating local searches can give you more quality leads who are using the search engines to find things around them. These users are easier to convert given that you belong to the same demographic, location, or community.

5. Greater return on investment

Of course, company owners want the highest ROI possible, but knowing where to invest company resources is especially crucial since it can affect how quickly or how big your business will grow. Local SEO is one of those highly profitable investments you could benefit from, as it allows you to be more competitive by helping you build brand awareness, bringing high-quality leads and potential customers to your site. 

Tips for Small Businesses to Improve Local SEO

1. Get listed on Google My Business.

Google My Business is a tool that lets you share your business information with customers who are using Google services, such as Search and Maps. It’s a great way for you to control what Google shows in the search results when users type in your business name in the search box.

Here are the most important things to include in your business profile on Google My Business:

  • Business information—This should include your business address, contact numbers, website URL, business category, operating hours, product or service offerings, and basically any information that will describe to users what your business is all about.
  • Photos and videos—You can add images and videos of your products, location, office, or team members to add to your site’s engagement factor.
  • Posts—Whenever you have new blog articles, promotions, or announcements, you should add these to your profile to keep customers informed about what’s happening with your business.

2. Monitor your local citations.

After creating your profile on Google My Business, the next thing to do is to make sure that your name, address, and phone number (NAP) are consistent on any site where your business is listed. Also called local citations, your NAP is shown whenever your business is mentioned anywhere in the web. Any inconsistencies might confuse search engines and affect your site’s potential to appear in local searches, so you might want to consider using special tracking software to manage your listings and get rid of inaccurate details.

3. Perform local keyword research.

Your keyword research strategy has to mimic the type of search queries that local audiences are using. Go for long-tail keywords, using “near me” phrases or adding a location keywords. You could also look for variations in the way that people from certain locations look for information, so you could tweak your keywords accordingly.

4. Add schema markup.

Schema markup pertains to the metadata or secondary information that you add to your website’s code to make it more searchable or discoverable on search engines. By using schema markup, you can enrich what users see on the SERPs since there will be snippets that give visitors a preview of your website’s information or content. Then if they find it useful or relevant enough to what they’re looking for, they will head straight to your site, which gives you an extra opportunity to make a conversion.

5. Optimize your content.

Being a growing business presents you with the perfect timing to build your content assets. That said, you might want to come up first with content pieces that provide answers to questions that people may have about your business. Here’s where a frequently asked questions (FAQs) page may be handy, so you can let potential customers know more information about your business before they even call you. Use your FAQs to educate people about your business offerings, policies, common objections, and the like. 

To make it easy for search engines to find your content, you should optimize things like your keywords, page title, meta descriptions, headings and sub-headings, images, and anchor text. Think on-page optimization.

6. Be mobile friendly.

Once your website is up and running, you should ensure that the mobile version is as easy to view on a mobile device as it is on a desktop computer. Check for things like page speed and screen view to prevent people from abandoning your site. To optimize your website for mobile, make sure to compress visual media, remove unnecessary plugins, and minimize formatting issues.

Wrap-Up: Localizing SEO in the Age of Modern Marketing

Local SEO is a lot like organic SEO in that they’re both geared toward driving leads and customers to your website. Both types of SEO also involve knowing who your audience is, what they’re searching for, and where or how they’re searching.

The biggest difference between them is the geographical element that’s attached to local SEO, which allows you to have laser-focused targeting strategies for your business or location. Ranking high in local search brings your business closer to customers, so it’s really important that you build a strong local SEO foundation for your company.

Having a well-organized framework for your website is a good start since web design is one of the factors that can boost your search ranking on Google, Bing, Yelp, or Foursquare, to mention a few. You can also impress search engines by providing users with a positive experience as they navigate around your site. With more and more consumers using mobile devices to find the best businesses around them, your local SEO should cater not only to desktop search but specifically to mobile.

The bottom line is, implementing the best practices in local SEO can help secure your position in the digital marketplace. Even if you’re a small business, you can be on equal footing with other bigger businesses by being listed in the same search results where they’re also listed.

It helps if you have a dedicated team of experts who can study industry trends and implement updated strategies to address constantly evolving algorithms in search. When you regularly improve your business assets for local SEO, you’re maximizing your chances of gaining traffic, visibility, and authority in your niche.

In-House SEO vs. Outsourced SEO: Which Should You Choose?

In this era of growing internet penetration, businesses of all kinds can benefit significantly from having a strong online presence. In particular, search engine marketing—including SEO—has been proven highly advantageous for many companies.

If you’re one of these companies, you may be planning to build your own SEO team, but the question is, should you do it in-house or outsource SEO activities to the experts? 

It can be challenging to choose whether to hire professionals for an SEO team directly or to outsource it to a third-party firm. Both options have their advantages and disadvantages; plus, there are a plethora of other factors to consider. So, let’s weigh up the pros and cons to see which is the better option for you.

In-House SEO Teams

Having an in-house SEO team means directly hiring professionals to do SEO work for your company. This sounds like the ideal way to go, but depending on your SEO goals, nature of your business, budget, and many other factors, you might have to think twice about building an in-house team.  

Pros

  • Convenience

Having SEO Specialists in-house means you can easily reach out to them—and in person nonetheless—in case anything needs immediate attention. No need to communicate digitally and waste time waiting for a response. 

  • Knowledge about the business

Your employees should have an intimate understanding of your business even without having to do research, and that comes in handy when your marketers do other tasks related to SEO, like making Social Media or blog posts, bidding keywords, etc. It also helps in making their outputs consistent. 

  • Saves on costs

Cutting out the SEO agency would save your monthly budget, as you won’t have to pay set up costs, monthly retainers, or other hidden charges for hiring an agency. You can always provide an excellent salary package for your SEO specialists and save on your marketing spend as long as your process is efficient.

  • Fosters collaboration

The best SEO strategies involve teamwork, especially since it relies on different tasks to be carried out by different employees. No doubt this can be made seamless by having an in-house SEO. When your search team is close and understands the business as well as its overall direction, you will potentially discover more SEO opportunities.

  • Full control of the processes at all times

An in-house SEO team will give you some level of transparency regarding their techniques, procedures, and other information; but, they can also provide control over what strategies you want to implement and how. A third party may not be so transparent with how they do things, and might not follow the direction and guidance of their clients to the letter, especially if operations and practices aren’t easily movable. 

Cons

  • Knowledge decay

This refers to a lack of new information, updates, or improvements to your team’s knowledge about their tasks, and this often happens when they work on the same goals over and over again, always utilizing the same techniques. In-house SEOs can quickly sink into a systematic pattern of work that never evolves with the times, which could make your strategies stagnant.

  • Possible huge costs

The salary for a full-time, experienced SEO Specialist could easily be more than $3,000 a month, while some agencies offer low-cost packages that start for less than $1,000. You don’t need just one specialist, though, as SEO requires multiple moving parts and it’s impossible to find one who’s an expert in everything. More hires could mean more expenses, therefore further ballooning your payment.

That is why it is essential to look at all the costs and benefits thoroughly if you’re deciding between an in-house or third-party SEO team.

  • There’s little accountability

When something goes wrong or if the strategy fails, you can choose to fire your in-house SEO expert, though that doesn’t help that much to fix your problems and there’s little accountability beyond that. The worst part is, if you do take that person off the team, you’d have to take on the blame and fix things yourself. 

Outsourced SEO Teams

On the contrary, you also have the option to hire a third-party SEO agency. Since digital marketing is now acknowledged as an essential strategy for business growth, firms that offer such services have grown in number. As much as SEO is a quintessential part of any digital marketing strategy, you should first determine if hiring outside help is what’s best for your company.

Pros

  • Lets you focus on core business functions

When you hire an SEO partner that can genuinely help give you high visibility on search engines, you take that load off your shoulders and will have time to focus on other business functions that need your attention, which is especially helpful if you’re an SMB owner who still needs to plan out different strategies for growth. For larger businesses, it saves time spent on possibly going through multiple interviews to find in-house specialists. 

  • Cheaper cost 

For some organizations, hiring an SEO agency may make more sense because it generally costs less than paying for salaries and benefits of multiple professionals. Through an agency, you have access to a whole team of professionals with the right skills set, even those outside of SEO. However, you don’t always have to go for the cheapest one—remember that the cost of service often reflects the quality of work.

  • Offers a unique perspective 

SEO agencies have worked with other clients from different industries, so they are used to going outside of their comfort zone or thinking outside the box. Through this, they get to provide clients with fresh perspectives and avoid the paralysis that can sometimes happen from being too familiar with the brand and its products and services. This experience also gives them a unique outlook to provide insights from their work with other similar companies.

  • Accountability

To assure accountability from an SEO agency, you need to make sure that you reach an agreement that will oblige them to provide feedback based on what they have done each month. Doing this, and having them report to you regularly, will guarantee accountability, whether they’re doing a good job or not.

  • Expertise and resources

Experience also plays a big part when it comes to creating an SEO strategy for your business. An experienced agency that has worked with clients from various industries would have relatively more insights that can help you determine the route to take for your SEO. Aside from expertise, tools resources are also vital in SEO. Any established SEO partner should have a considerable toolset that you can add to your SEO arsenal. 

Cons

  • Finding the right one

SEO companies have popped out left and right over the last few years, making it harder to decipher which one really offers the best services for the buck. Merely looking at their websites won’t tell you if the agency is going to meet your needs or if the people working there are truly knowledgeable in the field.

There’s no denying that there’s a chance you might get “scammed” by some agencies, and this underscores the importance of doing your due diligence when looking for an SEO partner to trust. You can always read testimonials, reviews, and any information regarding your preferred company’s performance. Try to meet with them first personally before picking an agency. 

  • Cultural boundaries 

SEO is a global industry, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise if you end up setting your heart on an agency based offshore. Cultural differences should not be a turn-off, as long as you understand that there may be dissimilarities between you and the agency in some matters due to cultural boundaries. In some instances, it has led to issues, but it generally does more good than harm.

  • Additional expense

When it comes to price, quality should always be a factor to consider. Cheap agencies can be good or bad for your business, and so can the expensive ones. And although hiring a SEO agency involves additional monthly costs associated with service fees and retainers, a focused partner will likely have a highly-efficient operational system in place, which means getting more out of each dollar spent.

  • Less control of the processes

Outsourcing companies have the responsibility to regularly report the work they did for you to keep you in the loop. However, when it comes to SEO agencies, the business owner usually doesn’t have a hand in every aspect and process. A reliable SEO partner will ask for your recommendations and guidance, but ultimately, they may end up using strategies that they themselves deem is fit for your business, even if you don’t necessarily think that it’s the right one.

Outsourcing and Its Implications to Scalability 

Every business aims for growth, but that will always be a challenge to do so, especially with the ever-changing market conditions. A thriving business means that clients and their demands will also increase, and if you’re still working with the outdated systems that you started with, you’ll likely fail to keep up with those demands.

No patchwork solution will be enough; instead, you have to prepare by regularly improving your solutions and processes for the future, so that you can also stay competitive. In this case, scaling your business means building a model and putting systems in place that can be grown or shrunk, depending on your needs at the time. 

The importance of scalability

When you have solutions in place to handle increases, you maintain your business’ efficiency and the quality of products and services you offer. These, in turn, can reinforce good customer relations business reputation. From a financial perspective, scalability can lower what you’re paying out, and you get more for what you pay. 

Small businesses need scalability even more, as they have the biggest potential for growth. Scalability on one or more levels allows them to hold onto and build market share. However, they have to be more careful with their limited resources, as they may fail to foresee what they might need or where the market might go in the future.

How outsourcing SEO can help scalability

One of the solutions you can look at to improve scalability is outsourcing, as this option would allow you to ramp up production without having to go over your budget for recruitment and retention. You’re also assured that personnel adequately trained on what they need to do for you.

It’s also easier to shrink the size of your team with outsourcing, as you don’t have to get into the nitty-gritty of terminating employees, and because you’re only scaling up on an as-needed basis. For example, outsourcing would allow you to scale up during peak seasons or when you’re starting a new project, until such time that you’ve achieved the goal of your project and you can reduce the size of operations. 

It goes without saying that you only pay for what you use when it comes to outsourcing SEO. This means that you can retain a significant amount of budget that would otherwise be spent on overhead costs, and still get the expertise you require full time, albeit only temporarily.

Other organizations may also opt to outsource non-strategic tasks in order to optimize their core competencies while bringing in more value to their businesses. These tasks are ideal to contract out because it won’t require you to hand over access to sensitive information, and you can cut down costs and time. 

Outsource If You Must

In reality, no single option works for every company. Outsourcing or doing in-house SEO would each work best in specific situations. For instance, a start-up or SMB that has limited budget may find it more beneficial to hire an outsourced agency that offers low-cost packages, but an established enterprise that has more on the line in terms of reputation would want (and afford) in-house specialists.

Keep in mind, building a SEO team isn’t always black and white. For example, some companies may choose to hire small core SEO team in-house to focus on strategic decisions while an outsourced SEO partner handles the bulk of the execution.

Situations can differ depending on many factors; that is why it’s vital to have a deep understanding of your business’ nature, goals, and resources before choosing between in-house and outsourced. But, just in case you opt to hire a partner for your SEO needs, SEO Company will work with you to find the agency that matches your needs!

How to Build an Awesome SEO Team That Consistently Drives Results

As new technologies continue to shape the digital marketing landscape, businesses are doing everything they can to adapt and stay on top of consumers’ minds. That’s why it’s important for organizations today to maximize their brand visibility online to generate sustainable traffic. 

If you want to reach your audience online, one of the most effective ways to do it is with search engine optimization (SEO). After all, over half of all online activities start with search engines. Each click represents the behavior of end-users who are in a particular stage of their buying process. 

If the predicament of whether you should build an in-house team of SEO specialists or outsource instead keeps you up at night, we’re here to enlighten you!

There’s a lot to take into consideration when deciding between outsourcing or building your own in-house team. There are plenty of risks and a lot at stake. But ultimately, your decision depends on the unique needs and capacity of your organization.

Some businesses end up outsourcing their search marketing efforts due to lack of knowledge, resources, or scale of operations to start their in-house team. But there are those who are willing to take the risk to build their own SEO team. 

If you see yourself meeting with your in-house SEO team over daily coffee and getting hands-on with their journey, then it’s time you roll up your sleeves and find out how to do it.

Critical SEO Team Roles 

You need more than one person to build a team and execute SEO strategies effectively. Each role demands a particular set of skills and expertise. Ideally, your in-house SEO team should be composed of these power players:

  • SEO Manager

The head of the team is responsible for spearheading the campaigns and ensuring that everyone is on track from start to finish. He or she essentially maintains coordination within the team, ensuring that they’re all on track towards planning and implementing successful SEO campaigns. 

On the technical side, the SEO Manager is in charge of developing measurable goals and creating action plans to help reach those goals, so a holistic understanding of modern SEO is a must. It’s also important that your SEO Manager has natural leadership and interpersonal skills because he or she will be in charge of leading and motivating the rest of the team.

Qualifications: This person must have a solid background in marketing (e.g., inbound marketing), in-depth knowledge in SEO, content marketing, and conversion optimization. 

  • PR and Link Builders

Public relations (PR) outreach and link building are different things. However, in the new age of digital and modern SEO, the two can be considered as one and the same. Ultimately, they have one common goal: to increase a website’s organic visibility and authority. 

PR specialist work involves looking for and connecting with trustworthy and relevant people in various industries to help promote your website content. They are in charge of the guest posts, public relations, and general media coverage for businesses. 

On the other hand, link builders do the core of growing your website’s digital footprint online through building links. They’re responsible for doing outreach campaigns, assessing clients’ sites and recognizing linkable assets, and developing tactics based on live analytics for optimal link efficiency. 

Qualifications: The ideal candidate for this role has excellent analytical skills, creativity, good writing and researching skills, and a background in SEO. 

  • Content Creators

Content is the heart of SEO. Without your quality content, your link builders won’t have anywhere to point the valuable backlinks that they generate. 

You need two people to produce relevant and well-written content. A content strategist who is in charge of the content planning, strategy, and development; and a content writer who’s responsible for writing/fulfilling the content requests.

Content writers are responsible for producing quality content as outlined by the content strategist. Their job is to curate content that captures the attention and interest of the client’s target market. They should also possess good copywriting skills to be used for titles, headlines, and captions. 

Qualifications: This person has great communication and writing skills. He or she should also have excellent time management skills and should be able to work with minimal supervision. 

  • SEO Analyst 

Every SEO team needs an analyst, the one who knows the technical aspect of SEO inside out. Your SEO Analyst should understand site architecture and can draw information from search-related data quickly and easily. He or she should be able to catch virtually any glitch in the SEO infrastructure. 

They’ll handle tasks like split testing, internal linking optimization, executing rich snippets, and “rel” tags. Primarily, they’re responsible for sending reports, analyzing data, and doing website audits. For analysis, the work involves gathering, segmentation, and processing of data, such as traffic, user signals, search engine rankings, revenue per keyword, and more. 

Qualifications: Your SEO analyst should have a solid background in data analytics, search ranking factors, Google analytics, and knowledge in website optimization tools.

  • Developers 

Modern SEO takes account of user experience. And to provide that, your team would need a developer who can transform a website into something that is functional, intuitive, and that drives results. This person is responsible for using best SEO design practices for the entirety of a website. 

SEO developers implement modifications and improvements necessary to optimize a website and draw in more organic visitors. They track and analyze website performance and analytics, so they can immediately offer solutions if they identify any deficiencies. Also, they work on optimization techniques for search engine marketing. 

Qualifications: Your web developer needs to be knowledgeable in user experience principles. He or she should be able to troubleshoot issues quickly and should have excellent experience in coding both websites and web applications. 

  • Designers 

If you recognize quality written content, then should you know what stellar design looks like. To consistently deliver remarkable outputs, you need a designer to make your content even more shareable, clickable, and visually compelling. 

SEO designers can help improve a website’s representation in aid of the developer, so an understanding of UX principles is always helpful. Moreover, designers work side-by-side with content marketers to work on visual materials for content, such as infographics, page layouts, and other visual content materials. 

Qualifications: Your designer should have excellent visual design skills. He or she needs to be proficient in design software and knowledgeable in graphic design principles, typography, and color psychology.

Structuring Your SEO Team

An SEO team is a lot to manage, which is why you need to find the right structure to keep the team in harmony. To develop the right structure for your in-house SEO team, you need to consider factors like budget, company size, and the model that best works for your organization.

Below, we share three different ways you can model your own in-house SEO team around (these structures work for any data-savvy teams that depend on collaboration and data sharing):  

  • Center of Excellence

In the center of excellence (CoE) model, the “center” in this structure refers to the group of people leading a central department that focuses on a specific field (in this case, SEO). Thus, enhancing their expertise in a particular area to help propel the business forward. This is one way of boosting competency and efficiency in the team. 

The CoE concept makes SEO less time consuming and focused on laying the groundwork and corroborating all processes and guidelines. The team will then have a better opportunity to establish an impact online. They work as a unit to find the best SEO practices and map out how the process with be applied across the company.

Large companies are likely to adopt this model because of incapacity to support an SEO team at every branch or location of their business. The CoE ensures a standardized process for maintenance and eventually, evolution. 

Pros: 

  • Uses resources and time in a more efficient manner
  • Can measure and prove organizational impact 
  • Have a defined ROI
  • An adaptable process

Cons: 

  • Can drive away local markets due to its paramount scope
  • May disempower employees if unable to keep the harmony strong
  • Distributed Team

The distributed team methodology is perfect if you’ll be working with remote employees or creating a virtual team. “Distributed teams” involve a hybrid model where on-site and off-site employees work together to take on projects big and small. 

This framework is an ideal starting point since you’re building a team from scratch. Of course, you would need responsible workers who are independent but also collaborative. For instance, designers and developers can work independently. But when it comes to projects that require both of their skills, they should be able to coordinate and work together without issues. 

Pros: 

  • Allows management to stay focused on goals; no micromanaging
  • More flexibility
  • Good for teams with skill gaps

Cons: 

  • Prone to miscommunication
  • Solving problems in real-time can be difficult
  • Lack of a tight-knit culture
  • Hub and Spoke

If you have the budget and organizational set-up, you can look into modeling your in-house SEO team to the hub and spoke model. This framework is a hybrid approach that embodies the right balance of the two models above. For instance, you can practice a distributed team with your remote developer and designers, but observe a hub and spoke model with the rest of your team. 

The hub and spoke model focuses on centralization. Instead of implementing multiple leaders, the hub and spoke concept builds a hierarchy of control where centralized concerns can be raised. The decision-makers are the “hub” while the “spoke” represent the workers who fulfill their specific roles.

Given this, the model has a central contact person or expert team that sets the guidelines, tools, and identifies processes. It encourages coordination between departments and central management. With this, local teams are motivated to innovate, take risks, and become more proactive. 

Pros:

  • Cost-efficient
  • Empowers local teams
  • Has a chain of command process

Con:

  • Decisions not implemented through centralized commands might cause catastrophe
  • Hubs tend to micromanage
  • Employees may feel reluctant when making decisions

Building an SEO Team from Scratch 

How you want to build your own SEO team depends on your organization, your industry, and the approach you want. Regardless, here are the necessary steps that will help you build a robust in-house SEO team from the ground up.

Step 1: Define the kind of team you want

Before you start evaluating costs, find out what type of SEO team you want to build. Will you be employing remote workers, outsourcing a particular skill, or building an on-site team? Some companies hire a combination of creatives (design, content writers) and technical SEO professionals (SEO analyst, developer) while there are others that prefer to have a whole team dedicated to one skill (SEO specialists). 

Step 2: Identify your budget

Next, you need to develop the budget for your team. As you know, hiring top talent can incur hefty costs, that’s considering the roles you need for the initial team, their experience and achievements, and their salaries. Additionally, you’d want to look into training and technical tools for the team as well. 

Step 3: Determine your goals

Once you have determined your budget, you can move onto establishing the goals you aim to accomplish. This can touch on performance measurement, traffic growth, keyword rankings, and return on investment (ROI). Since you’ll be shelling out a sizeable budget, you’ll want to keep track of development costs.

Let’s say you’re prepared to allocate a total cost of $75,000 per year. Divide that by twelve months to find your monthly expense. With your margin percentage, you should be able to determine how much you should be getting in increased sales to justify your expense. 

Step 4: Start hiring

Now that you’ve outlined your budget and goals, you can begin filling your vacancies. Since you can’t fill all positions at once, you best start with hiring the head of the team—the SEO manager or director. This person will be a critical part of your initial team because they will help you build out processes from the get-go as well as assist with the hiring process.

In summary

Many businesses thrive and wither by word of mouth advertising. In this digital age where smart devices are omnipresent in people’s lives, online visibility through search is vital to a business’ success. Search engine optimization can be seen as the modern day’s word of mouth marketing. 

It takes a lot of time, resources, and patience to put together an incredible team of SEO professionals. If you don’t find success in building your own team from scratch (which is understandable), you always have the option to outsource these services.

SEO Company offers a wide range of search engine optimization solutions proven to help your online growth and brand authority.

How to Successfully Perform a SEO Audit

You’ve finally built your own website after spending long hours, a huge chunk of resources, and considerable effort to make it work exactly how you want it to. But after a while, you’ll eventually notice that you’re not getting the amount of traffic you expect, stunting the growth of your business. You even find out that your competitors are leaving your market share in the dust as they rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).

When this happens, there is only one definitive action to be done: perform an SEO audit. This lets you go through a checklist to find out if your entire website, including its individual pages, is optimized for search engines. A lot of people mistakenly believe that they should approach their online presence less meticulously than an offline business. However, this shouldn’t be the case.

A sloppy approach will probably do more harm than good. You’ll need to perform a systematic review to check how it’s performing. Through an SEO audit, you’ll be able to find the reasons why, despite the competition having lower authority and poor user experience, they might be ranking higher than your site. With an SEO audit, you’ll find the answers that can help you make the necessary changes to your website.

What is an SEO audit?

An SEO audit is an evaluation of a website that determines its ability to appear in SERPs. These audits are completed with the objective of finding any issues that need to be addressed to boost your website’s performance on search engines.

Think of an SEO audit as a kind of grading system for your site’s likelihood to be found on search engines. You might have built a clean and well-designed website, but if search engines can’t read it, all the hard work you put into the pages of your site may go to waste.

A full SEO audit can give you an actionable plan that helps you do the following:

●  Find out what your competitors are up to and use it to your advantage

●  Pinpoint what changes are needed to be made and how to approach them

●  Get a general rundown of your site’s SEO efficiency

●  Expose your site’s weaknesses and repair them

●  Set expectations for your site’s future

Some current guidelines include:

●  Ensure the responsiveness of your site or preparedness to be mobile-friendly

●  Optimize for voice search

●  Update your content

●  Link your social media efforts to your website

●  Make sure that your keywords are found in the right places

It’s worth noting that it would be difficult to improve on all your findings, so you might not be able to do it all at once, but you can work on several essential factors over a period of time.

Components of an SEO Audit

1. Technical Audit

A technical audit will help you identify the technical-related issues in your website that’s causing the restrictions of search engines to crawl and understand its content. You will need to be meticulous and your report should summarize all the technical problems you find along with the necessary solutions so you can take action immediately.

Here are the things that you need to do:

●      Make sure your pages can be indexed

Your objective here is to ensure that Google isn’t blocking your relevant pages by mistake. Check your index status on Google Search Console to know the number of pages Google has crawled from your domain. What you want to see here is the data indicating an increase in page count over time. While you’re there, you can also use the site and URL errors reports to locate problems.

For Google not to block your pages, test your robots.txt file by adding /robots.txt to the end of your domain to make sure your pages aren’t “disallowed” in search. To retrieve a list of indexed pages, do a Google search for site:yourdomain.com.

●      Secure your website

Google now favors sites that are encrypted with HTTPS, which provides encrypted communication with a web server, so you might want to secure yours with Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). If your website isn’t HTTPS-enabled, maybe it’s time to upgrade.

●      Go through your metadata

When pages are crawled, sometimes a NoIndex meta tag is inserted, blocking Google from doing its job. Do a quick search to make sure there aren’t any NoIndex tags on pages where they shouldn’t be.

●      Optimize site speed

Speed impacts the way search engines rank your site, so when yours loads too slow, visitors are prone to bail out and go elsewhere. It’s best to optimize your website to load in three seconds or less.

Use speed testing tools to find out how fast your site loads. You can also reduce your images’ file size for optimum performance. If you’re using WordPress, you can identify bandwidth hogs by evaluating your plugins. You can also remove redirect chains and speed up your Javascript.

●      Optimize for mobile

With Google’s approach to mobile-first indexing and with the number of mobile search users projected to reach 221 million by 2020, it’s vital that your website appears in mobile searches.

Use a responsive design that delivers an excellent user experience for any screen size. To test your improvements, use Google Search Console’s mobility usability report to find problematic site pages. Google’s Mobile Test tool scores these pages relative to mobile-friendliness.

●      Optimize for voice search

The rise of virtual assistants in mobile devices and smart speakers have created a need to optimize your site for voice search. Aim your site to become a featured snippet by optimizing for semantic keywords and queries to boost traffic for voice search.

2. Link Profile Audit

A link audit analyzes your current links, a.k.a. your link profile, to help evaluate how good they are for your website. A comprehensive link audit reveals any risky links and shows you the way to how you can improve your strategy. The goal is to ensure that your search rankings are not negatively affected.

Link profile auditing outlines issues related to inbound links, broken links, and bad links. Conduct a complete backlink audit to spot problems and find new linking opportunities.

3. Content Audit

A content audit allows you to assess and evaluate your site’s copy for relevancy and clean up its pages of any issues related to content. You can then ditch duplicate content that dilutes the authority of the primary URL, causing it to rank lower.

This will also allow you to remove low-value pages by ensuring each of your Google-indexed pages contains original and valuable content with relevant keywords. This is also an excellent time to de-index low-value pages that aren’t necessarily robust pages. Instead, redirect them to content-rich URLs.

4. Competitor Audit

Through a competitive website audit, you can learn about what your top competitors are up to in their SEO efforts and how yours compare to theirs. This process will also allow you to find out what particular messages resonate better and implement different strategies to build your business, staying ahead of the pack.

5. Local SEO Audit

You’ll be able to obtain accurate and actionable data on key areas of local optimization in this kind of audit. This includes local listings and citations, on-site and off-site activities, local search rankings, and reviews. The end report will detail issues in these critical areas, allowing you to address concerns and improve local rankings.

How to Successfully Perform an SEO Audit

It’s recommended that you take your time to plan things out before diving into making any sort of analysis. A comprehensive audit requires a little groundwork to make sure everything goes according to plan. Generally, an SEO audit is broken down into the following:

1. Accessibility

There’s no point in creating a website if both Google and users can’t access its content. It’s extremely important to check every detail, including the robots.txt and meta robots tags since they usually restrict Google’s access to certain areas of your site. Be sure to check them manually to know that everything’s up to speed.

Your XML sitemaps should be the next thing on your list. It’s a way for site owners to let search engines know about all your existing web pages, so it’s crucial to format your XML sitemaps and submit them to Google Search Console for better accessibility.

Another vital step is to check the overall architecture of your website. Make sure that the number of clicks needed to move from your homepage to another is reduced. This will make it easier for crawlers to do their jobs. And if you have any redirect issues, they must also be addressed accordingly.

Now that you’ve taken care of all the Google necessities, it’s time to focus your attention to user experience. Keep in mind that your visitors are more likely to leave your site immediately if they’re unable to browse freely, which is pretty bad for business. For this reason, you’ll want to work on making improvements on the speed and other concerns that may cause your visitors to navigate away.

2. Indexability

If accessibility is centered around the ability of a search engine to access your web pages, indexability involves how those pages are shown in Google once they’re accessed. But if some pages are not shown to users, there may be several reasons.

At this point, your site may have found itself on the bad side of Google, perhaps due to a page not following their SEO guidelines or some similar reason. In a case like this, the first thing you need to know is that Google’s bots work differently from site to site. A popular business website with a lot of content has a better chance of being indexed quickly compared to personal bloggers who only post occasionally.

3. On-Page Analysis

When you’ve reached this point in your checklist, there’s a good chance your website’s already up and running in a sense that both users and crawlers can access its content with ease. The next thing you should be doing is run an on-page analysis that focuses on general content and single page issues.

To begin with, it’s in your business’s best interest to focus your efforts on creating original and relevant content since the two major challenges content creators face are keyword cannibalization and duplicate content.

When duplicate content happens, Google gets confused with published articles that have similar content, which eventually leads to issues with indexation. With keyword cannibalization, the site owner tries to rank for a particular keyword on multiple pages. When this happens, Google spreads keyword authority across multiple pages, minimizing the effect of each.

4. Off-Page Analysis

For the most part, off-page analysis highlights the level of popularity of your site on the internet. When it concerns this, you’ll want to look at trust factor, which is a huge deal if your website has earned it form Google. This happens when you gain more trust and avoid all black hat or unethical SEO techniques.

After gaining this trust, make sure your content resonates with your audience and other bloggers in your industry, so it should be tailored your target audience’s interests. This leads to more traffic, good quality links, higher retention rates, more shares, and lower bounce rates. Essentially, off-page analysis gives you a clearer picture of the kind of impression your site leaves on users.

5. Competitive Analysis

You’re finally done with all the internal issues, and now you can move on to carry out keyword research or what’s also known as competitive analysis.

Ideally, your ideal keyword should be within that sweet spot between difficulty and traffic. While it’s okay to go for medium difficulty and volume, it’s in your best interest to take on high-performing keywords to boost traffic and beat your competitors. A good rule of thumb is to go for the low-hanging fruit by picking target keywords with low competition and high search volume and buyer intent.

Let the Experts Handle It

There is no doubt that SEO audits are essential for your business’ success since they’re focused on a comprehensive examination of your website. However, this kind of audit cannot be done in an instant; it takes days or even weeks, depending on the size of your site. This is where you might need the help of accomplished professionals to get the job done.

If you’re looking to perform a complete SEO audit for your business’s website, SEO Company guarantees to go through all the right motions in looking for issues that may affect your site’s ranking. Your successful SEO audit is just a few clicks away.