SEO Company

Search Engine Optimization

How to Write Optimized Content for SEO

It’s always a must to create a content marketing strategy that revolves around thought-provoking content to achieve your marketing goals. However, most brands don’t realize that both content marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) should be properly integrated to maximize the effects of either one.

Content marketing and SEO are like soul mates in the digital marketing industry: they complement each other in such a way that one will have a tough time existing without the help of the other. While you can’t be effective in marketing in general without any of them, they still can be distinguished from one another in several crucial areas. However, you still can’t separate the two entirely.

Unfortunately, many brands still don’t have a clue on how to make effective use of both. To do this, you’ll first have to know how they function separately before diving into the formulation of a strategy that combines both in a way that helps hit your marketing goals. Remember, there is no such thing as content without SEO, and vice versa. You will need their combined elements—words, articles, keywords—for maximum impact.

To put things into perspective, SEO helps draw people to your site while content marketing keeps them there and converts. While SEO is more technical, content marketing is more holistic in its approach. They need each other to work.

SEO Demands Optimized Content

When looking for an item to buy or a service to acquire online, the first action you usually do is conduct a search. The same goes for any restaurant, salon, or any other establishment, where you may read online reviews before deciding to pay a visit. This goes to show that most consumers are dependent and have considerable trust in search engines.

The goal of any brand is to be more visible and rank on top of search engine results pages (SERPs), so a webmaster should optimize content using relevant keywords. This is the reason why SEO and content marketing are two of the most effective marketing tools currently being used to grow scalable organic engagement.

Treating SEO and content marketing as two separate entities is a huge mistake. They are so closely related that the two are proven to work better together than they do on their own. SEO sets the guidelines and content fulfills them. Essentially, SEO needs optimized content to work. Here’s why:

  • Crawling

For search engines to better understand your product or service, they have to be able to find and read the content of your website. To do this, they need content to crawl, which helps search engines determine the kind of search queries your website should rank for and if they are relevant to a user based on their search query.

  • Keyword Targeting

Keywords are a fundamental aspect of SEO, but stuffing them throughout your website won’t help you achieve your SEO goals unless you’re willing to face penalties from Google.

Through the proper integration of your keyword strategy and content marketing strategy, you’re effectively avoiding any search engine penalty, while boosting organic rankings in SERPs, and amplifying your content strategy through SEO.

  • Link Building

Building links back to your website is still a huge part of SEO. It enhances its authority and boosts its rankings in search results.

You know your content marketing campaign is garnering considerable success if you attract highly sought after inbound links from other websites across the internet. It’s advisable to construct a digital PR strategy and integrate it into your content marketing campaign to maximize organic links and increase your exposure by getting your content seen by as many people as possible.

  • Social Signals

Social signals are activities on social media networks that include likes, comments, shares, and clicks, which can have an impact on where your page ranks in organic search results. A carefully planned content marketing strategy that performs well on social media opens a great opportunity to boost your ranking.

  • Featured Snippets

Featured snippets are now a common sight in SERPs after performing a search query, which appears at the top of the page that’s also known as Google’s Knowledge Graph. This gives you a massive advantage if you provide the right content.

Your website’s content quality plays a huge factor in helping to determine if your website qualifies to be a featured snippet, which is a highly sought-after spot in today’s search results.

Content marketing and SEO are the dynamic duo of the digital marketing industry. They each can work solo, but a harmonious tandem delivers a far more powerful and effective strategy to achieve your business goals.

Types of SEO Content

An essential part of an effective content marketing strategy consists of knowing what you need to put out there to rank in SERPs. In line with this, there are distinct content types that work best for SEO and specific formats that are best suited for certain queries. You can use them to satisfy searcher intent, match them to the right project to achieve your goals, and enhance your overall strategy.

1. Blog Posts

Blogs are one of the easiest ways to produce a regular stream of SEO content. This is largely due to the fact that blog posts are easily-accessible and generally quick to consume, making them a great way to establish authority for your website. Remember, blogs are flexible, and you can use them to host other types of media like images, videos, and interactive content.

2. Product Pages

If you run an e-commerce or retail website, product pages are your bread and butter. A well-constructed product page packed with information can serve as both SEO content and a PPC landing page.

3. Articles

These are made up of news articles, interviews or a feature piece, which are your go-to type of content if you’re running a newspaper or magazine-style website.

4. Listicles

Simply put, a listicle is an informative article that’s presented in the form of a list, making it easier to scan. Titles such as “5 Ways to Teach Your Dog New Tricks” also seem to be more clickable when found in search results or social media news feeds.

5. Guides

A guide is generally a long piece of content that details how to do an activity the right way. It’s often broken up and featured in multiple web pages, although viewing one on a single consolidated page is considered best practice for comprehensive SEO.

6. Infographics

Infographics are made up of large-format images that are packed with data on a single subject and are often presented in the form of graphs or charts. Due to its highly visual and informative nature, this type of content can rack up a lot of page views and links. But its content is embedded in the image, so the text isn’t readable by search engines. For this reason, it’s important to optimize the rest of the page for ranking purposes.

7. Slideshows

If you’re looking for a way to present a series of related images, slideshows are your best bet. There really are times when images are far more important than text when it comes to delivering relevant information, but make sure your title, captions, image file names, and so on are optimized since search engines have less text to read.

8. Glossaries & FAQs

People now tend to use Google when they look up terms instead of using a dictionary. If you’re working in a specialized industry, a detailed glossary is an effective way to capture some of that important search traffic. The same goes for answering frequently asked questions. Positioning your content to strategically provide the right answers to common questions will mean your brand gets noticed during the information search stage.

9. Directories

A directory is a useful index of links to sites or other resources pertaining to a given topic. For instance, if you’re running a blog about band equipment, you can create a directory about places where you can purchase the best sound equipment for outdoor gigs around the country. Directories help build relevance around your target keywords, which is great for intent matching.

10. Videos

Depending on the type of site or business you’re running, videos are a superb way to attract an audience. You can create video tutorials showing how your products are used or demonstrate a process that’s related to your business, such as the right way of changing dead strings of a bass guitar if you’re a business that sells guitars. It’s important to note that including a text transcript of your video is a must for SEO purposes (because search engines can’t crawl the video media itself).

How to Write Content for SEO

If you want to build an audience and know which type of content to use, you have to be smart with what you actually publish. Your job is to create useful content that’s interesting, persuasive, and optimized for search engines, and you need to do it consistently.

The biggest challenge that marketers face is creating content that’s optimized for search engines, and at the same time appeals to people. There’s no “secret sauce” involved in writing SEO-friendly content. In fact, SEO copywriting or writing in general, follows a pretty standard process, but it all boils down in finding the right formula to get things done. Here are the industry’s best practices that can help you reach your goal:

  • Do keyword research and integrate them into your content

You’ve created valuable content that fits all the criteria for your audience. So your effort won’t go to waste, you should take time to make sure Google takes notice of this. This means finding out which keywords and phrases people use in their queries, as well as those you can be competitive in. Work those keywords into your content and use the right tools to track your progress.

Avoid peppering your content with keywords to avoid hurting your rankings. Instead, you have to be strategic by including them in the title, the first 300 words, and the H1 or H2 if possible. It should be noted that the integration of your keyword into your content should feel natural in your writing. Never struggle to make them fit into your article or copy.

Remember, people search Google using a particular phrase because they want to know more about it or purchase it, so it only makes sense to give them what they’re looking for. By doing so, you’ll get more traffic, clicks, and conversions.

  • Write about what people care about

There are many writers who just pump out content without the guidance of reason and with no real strategy behind it. Remember, you’re not writing for Google’s algorithm. You’re writing for your target audience, and they’re real people.

When creating content, make it a point to always offer value to your readers. Let them know a few things that no one else can tell them, or offer a unique product or service. Nobody knows your business like you do, so use this to your advantage.

  • Know the technical SEO basics

Any form of clever keyword optimization won’t mean a thing if your website isn’t even indexed. You might not be expected to know the complex workings of HTTPS, JavaScript or site migration, but it pays to know a few things about technical SEO to make you a better content creator.

Understanding how Google crawls pages and how it gives out link authority can help you develop an effective strategy. Keep in mind that content writing isn’t just about writing a blog post; it’s about creating a database of relevant content that link well together. If you have a good understanding of how your blog is structured, you’ll be able to make everything more efficient, which means each backlink to a post will deliver maximum benefit.

It also helps if you have an understanding of how to optimize a website beyond keywords. You can do this by maintaining optimized images, avoiding too many popups, or making sure that your posts are indexed. All these are important when creating content for SEO.

  • Make it long enough to count

Search engines tend to prefer longer articles with good reason. Try to go for at least 600 words. And if you can get 1,000 or more, it would be best to go for it.

Search engines are inclined to favor “in-depth” content that’s made up of about 2,000 words. The bottom-line is, the longer your content, the more value you’re likely to give your readers, and this gives you a better chance to lower your bounce rate.

  • Keep an eye on your analytics

SEO content writing isn’t just a write-and-forget kind of gig, so you should never post your article and walk away. In fact, what you need to do is regularly monitor your content using Google Analytics. Bounce rate, time on site, and pages per session are a few of the important metrics you have to keep an eye on.

Knowing how your content is performing can help you make the necessary adjustments to your content strategy. If your site has a high bounce rate, this means your website visitors aren’t staying too long, possibly because you fall short in providing them with the information they’re looking for. 

  • Half of the battle is online PR

After writing and posting fresh content, your work is only half complete. The final step involves linking your content all over the place, so to speak. Now’s the time to start building link and social signals to help search engines notice your content. A large part of this involves building and maintaining relationships with online communities who your content is relevant to.

Know What Works for Your Business

It pays to know the ins and outs of writing content for SEO. Learning the required skills may take time, and mastery takes even more, but once you get the hang of it, you’ll be on your way to achieving your marketing goals.

Remember, there is no cookie cutter way to pull this off successfully. You’ll have to make the necessary adjustments to determine what works for your business. In the long run, you’ll get better with creating content for SEO with the business growing as your strategies become more precise.

User Experience: The SEO Factor You’re Probably Ignoring

When you hear the term user experience (UX), what often comes to mind is web design and development. While UX is primarily a part of those disciplines, it also plays a key role in SEO. When webmasters optimize standard procedures, they usually consider factors like content, keywords, and linking. What most sites may tend to miss out on, however, is how fine-tuning the site’s SEO user experience can greatly affect search rankings. 

With a look at Google SERPs now, you’ll find a compact list of results that directly address a query. Often, the small grids which encase content are already rich with what a user needs, be it copy, images, or video. This development is mostly thanks to Google’s consistent stream of algorithm updates, which puts quality of experience at the forefront. 

What is User Experience?

According to the International Organization of Standardization, UX refers to a “person’s perceptions and responses resulting from the use and/or anticipated use of a product, system or service.” In simpler terms, it’s your impression of whatever is presented for you to use as you’re using it. 

There’s actually a lot to consider when you think about user experience. It’s more than just about whether or not you can actually use a product or service. You need to look into questions that ask your audience the specific hows, whats, and whys, too. Such as: 

  • How do you use the product? Is it easy or difficult?
  • What can you do with it? Is it helpful to you? 
  • Why is it relevant? Is it credible and accessible?
  • And ultimately, does your experience in using the product make you want to come back and use it again?

User testing delves deeper into the definition of UX and identifies how it’s something that will always be around. This kind of thinking—putting the user first—has the capability to build both trust and loyalty between a product and a consumer. The value of a product increases when convenience is elevated. Therefore it only makes sense to want to continue using the product.

How UX and SEO Go Hand in Hand 

As a good business owner or marketer, you’d know that to get to your target audience, you need to provide the kind of product or service that addresses a potential client’s needs. SEO shares the same goal in aiming to provide answers to any question a user might have.

But of course, getting a user to your website isn’t enough when the true purpose of a website is ideally to gain customers and hopefully a strong following for your product or service.

UX now holds the power to turn a page visit into a conversion. Taking UX into full consideration when creating your website opens up the path for the different personas you can attract. When visitors enter your page, you can greet them with information that’s easy to digest. Offer better page navigability according to who they are and what they need, and eventually, they’ll become a returning visitor.

Marrying UX and SEO brings more value to your business because you are not only creating a wall of content to rank higher, you’re essentially making your content worthwhile for a user—which is really just about making them happy.

With SEO user experience, you make finding a user’s answer much easier by surfacing well on SERPs. UX then makes sure queries are addressed the second a page loads. Once you get a good grasp of how these two work together, understanding a user’s perspective becomes much easier and puts engagement and activation at the forefront of your site’s achievements, which is all the better for your business. 

Let Data Guide the Way

Search engines, in general, go through tons of updates in a year. Most, if not all of these changes, are geared towards making a user’s efforts in finding information a much easier process. For instance, Google has declared RankBrain as the engine’s third most important ranking signal. The machine learning system contributes data to the core algorithm, helping identify the most relevant results for queries punched through.

RankBrain employs the observation of your site’s impact on a user with behavioral statistics. Context from patterns in this sense is what becomes the basis for producing results. Depending on the kind of question entered, SERPs could count on time relevance, content depth, or other related subjects. In turn, your site and content should have the answers based on the aforementioned factors. Crafting your copy this way will help build your brand reputation.

Key metrics that you should always be mindful of when optimizing for RankBrain are bounce rate, organic CTR, pages per session, and dwell time.

If a user stays on your site enough to read through your content and visit different pages, it recognizes good UX. Otherwise, if a user exits faster than you expected and never returns, it sends Google the message that your page may need optimization improvement or is generally irrelevant to a user’s search.

At the end of the day, RankBrain’s purpose all boils down to determining how well visitors and users like your site. The happier you’re able to make a user, the bigger the chance of getting the same user to come back and try other things.

Aligning your UX and SEO Strategies

1. Mind your buyer personas and user paths

Your target audience are people you want to attract to your business as clients. And then, you also have your buyer personas who are basically a more refined and better-identified audience. Knowing your buyer personas brings you behind the psyche of the user you want to attract and can ultimately help you figure out the ideal user path to your website.

2. Keyword research

This kind of research goes beyond pulling together a list of top searched terms and stuffing your content with it. Keyword research necessitates putting thought into the context of these terms and understanding the reason behind why and how they connect to your brand.

Tip: Once you’re able to map out the psychology behind the keywords, you’ll be able to identify your product’s worth from a user’s perspective. You can then better plan out the type of content you need to create. 

3. Improve your site structure

Similar to the purpose of creating appropriate headings, minding your site’s structure improves your site’s crawlability. Having a simple structure that allows all your pages to be accessible gives users the opportunity to find out more about your business, too.

Tip: To improve, start with a map of your website. Once you’ve listed everything out, you can then figure out a way to restructure or tweak it so it’s much easier. Take the opportunity to organize pages by category or what you identify as important.

4. Navigability

Improving your site’s structure directly affects the navigability of your website provided that the relevant links are in areas that can be spotted instantly. Always double-check that links are correct and working.
Tip: Don’t forget to keep all existing pages of your website accessible with a simple click or tap. 

5. Design your website according to SEO principles

There are a number of simple but effective ways to ensure you’re hitting the right balance of UX in standard optimization processes. The idea is to keep search engines and your target audience’s best interests in mind at all times—especially when crafting your content.

Here are some things you can do:

  • Maximize headline potential. Front load copy in your headlines with the important information your user might need. Have the answer ready to catch attention at a glance. This cuts the time and effort spent in finding answers from other websites. 
  • Strengthen your site’s link equity. Optimize your site’s menu and functionalities for better link equity. Where can you link the important pages of information effectively? Are labels in your menu easy to understand for even a non-niche user? Can your menu have another category added or should it include a dropdown to better organize a user’s thought process? 
  • Provide intuitive product names and straightforward descriptions. Again, we’re looking to effectively optimize your page as well as reel in quality UX signals. Giving your product or service an intuitive name and easy-to-digest descriptions will make recall and relevance much likelier to happen. This isn’t to say you should abandon your brand’s voice and tone. You can always adjust it in a way that works for your business.

6. Focus on quality content

Your business is only as good as its content. If you have duplicate content or pages that don’t offer relevant information, then there’s a higher chance of users dropping off. With the keyword research you’ve done, you can churn out informative content that could potentially boost your worth to a user and keep them coming back. 

7. Include big, bold CTAs

Call-to-actions should have clear, straightforward messaging that directs an action rather than deliver a vague, cryptic one. Google’s UX practices make a solid case for an effective user-centric copy.

Tip: Make sure you’re also adding the right relevant links to these CTAs as well.

8. Create appropriate headings

Search engine crawlers use headings to understand your website while your audience uses it to know what they will be getting. Creating appropriate headings in effect can help define the relevance and worth of your website from a UX and SEO perspective.

9. User Signals

Always keep track of user signals as Google uses this (via RankBrain) to track behavioral patterns. Some of the most important user signals to track are bounce rates and click-through rates. This, respectively, measures the amount of time a user spends on your site while the other checks how many people took action after seeing CTA buttons.

10. Fast Site Speed

Site speed is just as crucial to a user’s experience as it is for SEO. As a user who wants to find answers quickly, if your website isn’t loading fast enough, there’s a bigger chance that they’ll be dropping off your page and moving to your competitor’s.

Tip: Test your site speed on Google PageSpeed Insights.

11. Optimize Your Site for Mobile Experience

Seventy percent of online traffic occurs on mobile. More than just searching the web on your desktop, mobile devices are much easier means to access the internet. You can bring them anywhere with you, after all, so it makes sense to make your site responsive to any mobile device.

12. Always Run Tests

Just as Google consistently updates its search engine with new tech developments, it’s a best practice to run tests for both SEO and UX. Keep your site in good shape with routine checks for SEO improvement as well as user testing to ensure you’re offering page visitors the best experience. 

Tip: There are tons of tools readily available to test without shelling out the extra cash for it. Ahrefs has a great compilation of SEO tools you can check out here.

SEO User Experience Must Never Be Ignored

User experience might not seem like much to account for when you’re building your site and its content, but the longer you observe, the more you’ll notice that you might not be getting the engagement you want. It could be because of a number of factors, but at the very end of it, you may come to realize that it’s something as basic as customer satisfaction. 

Understanding what a user wants and needs, and being able to deliver it in a clear and concise way is the most effective way to acquire your target audience. Continuing to give them the same high-quality content with relevant information is what will keep them coming back.

With consistent output and improvements to your content (no matter how small), you’ll be able to build loyalty and trust. That’s additional customers and a step closer to being recognized as a valuable online resource. 

The formula for a successful website isn’t as complex as it might be painted out to be. When a marketer or business owner recognizes how good UX and SEO work together and puts it to practice, then the website can really be set up for success.

What is SEO and Why Does My Business Need it?

You’ve probably come across many digital marketing articles interjecting that SEO is one of the most vital elements in your online strategy, or that you can’t possibly skip this in your process, whether you’re a small business or established brand. Well, these blogs are right—but if you’re new to SEO, you might be wondering what precisely this tactic entails and how it can help you.

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of enhancing your website so that it can rank higher on search engines like Google and Bing, thus getting higher organic traffic. This “enhancement” can be done via a six-stage process, together with learning the most influential search ranking signals and applying these on your site. It’s also worthy to note that you can’t just do SEO once; it’s a continuous process that you have to polish every six months or less if there are significant search engine algorithm updates.

The practice of SEO dates back to more than 20 years ago, near the time the internet launched. Back then, there was no way to know if you were getting the best or most relevant result to your search query—as long as you typed in a relevant keyword present in a webpage, it would appear. This is the reason why in the early 2000s, it was easy to apply black hat SEO tactics such as keyword stuffing and work your way to the top without much effort.

Over the last couple of decades, Google slowly but surely became a household name and eventually created policies to catch these cheats—and the proper practice of “clean” SEO began. This forced the practitioners to prioritize users and create accurate posts that would entice users to click, creating a much more relevant search experience.

What Factors Affect Search Rankings?

Content Quality

Search engines can understand the kind of content that you publish for your readers. Specific signals will let them know if this is worth presenting at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs), such as word count/length, keywords used, internal and external links, readability, and image optimization if applicable. It still pays to produce expert articles for your users, regardless if your business isn’t in digital publishing. Writing quality content also includes your landing pages, services pages, and any other webpage on your site. For instance, this lets Google know that you’ve put a lot of thought in your branding and you care about the experience your users will have when they browse through your site.

Mobile-friendliness

Mobile devices have been successfully outpacing desktop usage over the past couple of years, and this will continue to be the trend. Mobile search also owns 52.2% of the internet’s search traffic, which already indicates the majority. If you haven’t transformed your website to something more responsive on mobile devices, Google is ranking you lower on search engines. It makes sense to adopt since there are a lot of people who own smartphones now and searching via mobile is one of the most intuitive things to do when your potential customers are out and about.

Volume of backlinks

Gaining inbound links are a signal to search engines that you are putting out content that’s valuable enough to merit a citation. Link building is a common SEO tactic to boost the number of your backlinks, but it doesn’t take overnight to accomplish. You have to start with publishing great content that’s worthy of linking out to in the first place before you even think of executing guest posting and other forms of link building outreach. Racking up backlinks will also boost your website’s domain authority, another ranking signal, and tell Google to prioritize your site at the top of search results.

Domain Authority

Your domain authority (DA) is a “grade” assigned to your website, assessing its age, relevance, credibility, activity, and overall perceived value by search engines. The higher your domain authority is, the more your webpages will appear at the top of search engines. Besides gaining backlinks, you get to increase your DA by consistently satisfying Google’s guidelines and updating your other on-page and off-page optimization tactics.

Page speed

The amount of time it takes for your webpages to load can also affect your search rankings! Page speed is a mobile search ranking factor now, in line with Google’s priority over mobile-friendliness, known as the mobile-first index. The average webpage on mobile devices takes 15.3 seconds to load vs. 3 seconds on the desktop. Your goal is to make your site load as fast as its desktop counterpart or even quicker. Think about it: First-time visitors will exit your page if it takes too long to load, translating to lost business as well!

Social shares

Social shares aren’t so much a popularity contest or a desire to go viral, but rather, it’s a way for search engines to recognize content that seems to be getting extra attention from users on social media and community websites. This clues in Google that you probably shared something worth the time and effort of users to read, which is a good thing. In a nutshell, they would want to bump your ranking higher so that more people can see this great piece of content that they’ve observed many people are talking about.

Local SEO

97% of people expect to see location information from a brand, and Google knows this. They’ve created Google My Business and Google Maps to help users find establishments like yours easily, and if you’re not taking advantage of this, you’re missing out. These searches turn to in-store visits and most of the time purchases as well. Optimizing your local SEO strategy will quickly put you at the top of Google’s priority list when someone in your area searches for “fitness store near me.”

The Importance of SEO for Modern Businesses

While some argue the importance of SEO, there are also the naysayers. You might have heard that SEO is dead or that it’s an outdated strategy that your business doesn’t need. The following points will prove non-believers otherwise.

  • Improves user experience

Planning and executing a strong SEO strategy forces you to do a full audit of your website. This means fixing errors, replacing broken links, deleting duplicate content, and fortifying existing content. Not only will this reflect professionalism and show Google that you care about your readers, but you’re also continuously giving your visitors a better experience since their last visit. In turn, your users will be more pleased and will be more inclined to do business with you.

  • Boosts your brand visibility

93% of online activities begin with a search. Everyone hops on to Google, Bing, etc. to look up for information—and all your potential customers will too. Search engines allow brands to market themselves for free, as long as they show that they’re worthy of being at the top spot. Consider this free marketing with a great bonus of being able to maintain your website in the process.

  • Gains more web traffic

Users want information quickly. This is why 75% of users don’t click beyond the first page of search engine results. If you take any of the top three spots on Google, you naturally increase your chances of attracting people to click on your website. Those visits can turn into desirable actions, such as newsletter sign-ups, online purchases, and more.

  • It complements other strategies

SEO results take a while to manifest, but it’s still paving the way to rack up organic traffic without the use of an excessive amount of budget for ads. It’s essential to invest in different tactics, both paid and organic, to elevate the performance of your business. If you skip SEO and focus on social media or perhaps only SEM, you won’t be able to optimize the other parts of your site.

  • Opens your business to global opportunities

If your brand consistently shows up at the top of search engine results, the brand recall will be stronger. This will inevitably open the possibility of expanding your operations, perhaps to areas outside your geographical territory. This can open up exciting avenues for you—and you may not even have to move your HQ to those new cities or countries you will be working in. Growth is a vital aspect in business, and SEO can help you achieve that.

How to Improve Your Company’s SEO

Now that you’re realizing the value that SEO can bring to your business, you might be wondering what you can do to implement this strategy. Generally speaking, you have two options to beef up your SEO performance: hiring SEO experts or outsourcing from an SEO company.

Before you conclude, reevaluate which path will benefit your business. Below are a few questions to ask:

  1. How much control do you want over your SEO team?
  2. What’s your budget range for this?
  3. Do you want to lead a team or gain new partners?
  4. How many people would you need to implement your vision?
  5. Is your industry already in digital marketing or not?
  6. Will it be easy or difficult to recruit a team?
  7. How much knowledge do you have on SEO?

Build an in-house team of SEO practitioners

One of the most significant advantages of having an in-house team will focus all of their time to the SEO performance of your business. Since they will be a part of your business for the long haul, they get familiar with your company’s goals and mission. This is the option to take if you’re comfortable that you can manage an SEO team so that they can follow the direction you want to set for the company. Having a considerable amount of knowledge about SEO will come in handy here as well.

It’s worthy to note that building a team will take time. You need to ensure that the dynamics of the group are great and that they’re a culture fit. This may also cost more in terms of recruitment, onboarding and training, and office space accommodation. If you’re a startup, this option may not be one of the best choices if you’re working with a limited budget.

Keep in mind that you’ll be responsible for further training and certifications if you want them to keep up with the trends.

Outsource SEO services from experts

Outsourced SEO practitioners are more like partners. This is a recommended option to take if you don’t have much knowledge of SEO and would like a group of experts to work on this with you.

Outsourcing can be a more cost-effective option for you than hiring in-house. Since they won’t have to take up space in your HQ and the nature of their jobs are digital, it’s doable to discuss strategies online. You won’t have difficulty with the recruitment process either, which is another plus.

Usually, SEO companies are more in touch with the latest trends in the business, such as algorithm updates and search engine guidelines. There are plenty of SEO agencies who have outstanding portfolios with companies they’ve previously worked with, meaning they’ve been exposed to plenty of industries and have a broader knowledge of SEO.

The result of the selection process will boil down to your company’s needs.

Invest in SEO Today!

There you have it: the complete low down on SEO. It’s simple and straightforward, yet also meticulous and demanding. It’s a universal strategy that applies to any business you have, whether it’s a startup or a huge corporation, purely digital or a brick-and-mortar shop.

SEO may have been born in the 90s, but that doesn’t strike out its relevance in modern marketing practices. It’s not enough to rely on SEO plug-ins on your CMS either—instead, it’s better to dig deep and examine where you can be doing better so Google will up your ranking and expose you to a broader, international audience. Getting experts who know what they’re doing will ensure long-term success will elevate your brand and help you achieve your marketing goals that much faster.

Plenty of smart companies have been doing SEO for years. It’s time to follow suit and take advantage of this marketing strategy. Every second you’re not practicing SEO is lost business, and once your competitors realize this too, they can beat you at the game.

Contact the search experts at SEO Company to learn more!