Components of a Good SEO Program: SEO Foundation
There are good or effective SEO and not-so-effective SEO that some may call outdated. Keep in mind that the Google bot and other search engine crawlers’ algorithms are constantly changing or updating. What was good practice at one point is no longer relevant.
For instance, you used to have to put exact phrases or keywords into search and have this defined as your keywords used within your content marketing and had to make input the same keywords within your content marketing that users searched within Google. However, Google now understands nuanced such as plural terms within keywords a lot better now if not fully the same as the intent.
Components of modern and efficient SEO programs consist of utilizing various strategies that anyone optimizing their website and content should consider. Some of the tactics you should always consider include:
- Ongoing content updates and optimizations
- Finding the right balance between high-ranking keyword search volume and keyword difficulty (KD) to maximize budgets
- Creating content marketing output while using keywords and quality of work to reach the right audiences that can turn into leads
- Make sure that keywords are present cross headlines, tags, subheads, meta descriptions, alt text images, and other on-page SEO activities
- Have a good number of inbound links within your content – from reputable sources or high-ranking websites
- Know when to add the “nofollow” tag to less trustworthy sources in order for Google to not associate your content with theirs
- Create content on a regular basis whether video, blog posts, or articles to generate interest and clicks to your website.
1. Align on Business Goals and Targets
When you finally find the right SEO agency for you and your needs, you should have a meeting with the agency representatives and introduce your business plans to them or what you hope to achieve from the program. You should have some goals or plans ready ahead of time and bring them up during this meeting. This way you can find out if your expectations were realistic and achievable or not (especially when defining a timeframe).
The meeting will also allow the SEO agency to understand your overall business and the way it functions; your objectives going forward; the primary targets or potential leads and customers you want to target; what sort of competition exists within your field or area; your current client or customer base; your understanding of SEO and your overall SEO vision for your company.
We at Rampiq are always ready to meet potential clients and would love to get to know your business and the vision you have in terms of an online presence. We also included the best questions to ask during such a meeting at the end of this article, so keep reading and stay tuned.
This initial meeting should take place either in person or more commonly today, via a video or audio call online. By the end of the meeting, you and the agency should come up with some solid strategies and courses of action to take in improving your SEO.
Keep in mind that it is advisable to note down the questions you may have ahead of time. This is so that you do not forget as the meeting is underway and take note of answers so that you can refer to them in the future. If you do not get satisfactory answers, ask again for a more clear explanation or bring it up again when it becomes relevant during the meeting within a different subject matter related to SEO strategies.
2. SEO Growth Plan Design
An SEO growth plan consists of marketing that will help businesses increase organic traffic and give them fresh leads generated resulting from this traffic. Before commencing your SEO program or strategies, you will need to, set a clear growth path,
You need to be clear on how exactly the agency, you hire or work with, will impact your business before trusting all your faith in them or their ideas of “a good plan.” Within your initial meeting or soon thereafter, discuss SEO growth aspects such as:
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- Business goals, marketing objectives, and revenue targets: The most important aspect is already touched on in the first point. Discussing these will help the SEO agency understand the best ways SEO can support your overall business strategy.
- Target audience: Describe your ideal customer persona (ICP) and how they find your products/services. This enables the agency to develop a fitting keyword strategy that aligns with users’ search behaviors.
- Competitor analysis: Inform the SEO agency of your business competitors and their search performance in order to help the agency identify opportunities to explore, gaps to fill, and challenges to solve. Note that your business competitors may be different from your organic search competitors, which the agency will identify in the course of the project.
- Budgets and timelines: Discuss the budget and timeline allocated to the SEO project. With this information, the agency can develop an effective plan that aligns with your resources and overall expectations.
- Content strategy: Ensure that the SEO agency will implement a content strategy that aligns with your business goals and your target audience.
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- Link building: Several link-building techniques exist, and you want to know what strategies will improve your website’s authority and rankings.
- Analytics and reporting: Inquire how the agency plans to measure the success of their work and report on progress periodically; ask how often they will report this information or inform you as well.
3. A Comprehensive Initial Website Analysis and Audit
The agency will audit your website to identify its strengths and weaknesses. An SEO audit includes a crawl or outlook of a website in order to mimic or emulate how a web crawler, such as the Google bot, would do it. This will include analyzing redirects, broken links, internal linking being sound, how duplicate content is being handled, website security, organic search traffic, and more. They will also check and evaluate the website’s performance using key SEO metrics.
4. ROI Forecasting
You can check out our template for B2B SEO Sales Forecasting here. This may be beneficial for your business as it offers a more comprehensive outlook at predicting potential traffic and conversations your business can generate with an effective SEO strategy. Of course, this is once it is implemented and put in place over the long haul. Such a prediction will allow you to estimate the revenue you will be generating and predict the overall ROI you will gain.
Some metrics to look for include:
- Organic traffic in sessions and users
- Impressions
- Click through rate
- Organic conversions
- Historical data & seasonality.
SEO sales forecasting will allow you to make better decisions when it comes to budgeting and optimizing your strategy for the maximum ROI. Keep in mind that, like every forecast predicting SEO ROI is not 100% accurate. However, it helps you to track your investment in SEO efforts or spending and will allow you to compare this to your return in revenue gained from SEO investment in the long term.
Components of a Good SEO Program: SEO Ongoing Effort
A good SEO service and program includes various components that may differ from business to business. One business can utilize certain components to maximize profits and attract leads while it may be detrimental to another. Many businesses can take advantage of all or most of the components a good SEO program consists of, but they do not have to take advantage of all of them as this will depend on the business’s needs and goals.
If your business’s goals are to reduce the bounce rate, increasing website traffic may not be a priority as you want to focus on existing traffic being better leads or convincing them to click through your site pages. Whether your business needs to utilize all the components or not, it is good to know them and keep them in mind because in the future as your business grows you can start taking advantage of them.
Below are the components of a good SEO program:
- Content creation and recycling of existing content
- Link building and off-page optimization
- Keyword research and analysis
- On-page optimization of website content
- Technical optimization of website structure and code
- Measurement and analysis of website traffic and search engine rankings
- Site health checks, continuous monitoring, and adjustment of site content
- Regular reporting on key results gained from analysis
1. Content Creation and Recycling
Content creation involves creating high-quality and engaging content that is shareable across social media or other channels. This content should also appeal to both human users and search engines. Examples of such content include blogging, writing how-to guides, creating infographics, or shooting video content. This form of content marketing, where SEO strategies and keywords can be implemented across, is flexible. You can create content for your own website or blog and publish it there, or create the content in order for it to be published on other channels, such as YouTube itself.
Content recycling involves SEO experts assessing existing content and altering it or adding to it in order to find ways to make it perform better across search engines. Aspects of content recycling include adding new keywords or finding ways to optimize structure and word count.
Some SEO programs include both hands-on content creation alongside recycling existing content. Other programs or services only provide a recommendation for this. However, a good SEO service should provide both recommendation and implementation, so you can be in control of how you want to factor this in and implement it.
2. Link Building and Off-Page Optimization
Link building involves building high-quality and relevant backlinks to your website from authoritative websites within your industry. This adds relevance to your site on search engines and improves SERP results. Some tactics include creating content that attracts good backlinks naturally to your site or content, as well as proactively reaching out to authoritative websites via various platforms online or even simply asking them for a backlink, review, or exchange links.
There are search-engine-approved link-building methods an SEO agency can implement in order to accomplish good link-building SEO and others that go against Google’s or other search engines’ guidelines. An SEO agency will recommend and in most cases, implement the most suitable tactics for your case. You must ensure that the agency doesn’t use unethical link-building techniques and you should ask them this before hiring them.
Other off-page optimization activities include using social media for marketing purposes and reaching out to influencers for brand mentions.
3. Keyword Research and Analysis
Keyword research and analysis involves identifying queries or keywords that a target audience is using within search engines in order to find website content relevant to their search. Google in particular is constantly shifting its algorithms to appear more natural or understand search queries better to produce better results for end users. The SEO agency you hire should keep track of what Google and other search engine algorithms are doing and respond to the changes on an ongoing basis.
Finding the right keywords to add to internal content and content creation going forward is something SEO agencies specialize in and this is where certain business goals can be met, such as finding new clients or leads from search.
4. On-Page Optimization of Website Content
On-page optimization of website content involves incorporating keywords that were identified through keyword research within certain strategic locations on a website. These places include metadata descriptions, title tags, image ALT text fields, and headers of the website or blog content.
5. Technical Optimization of Website Structure and Code
When you hire an SEO agency, they should have both SEO experts and coders onboard who can delve into your website code to look for flaws or areas to fix so it aligns well with Google’s algorithm or search bot that crawls the website and indexes it. Keywords and other aspects of having good, or clean, code will be implemented as this helps search engines index sites more effectively.
6. Measurement and Analysis of Website Traffic and Search Engine Rankings
Good SEO agencies analyze website traffic for aspects like what regions of the world it comes from and search engines those users rely on to find your site or content. They will use tools such as Google Analytics, Search Console, and more to find both the effective keywords used to find your site and user data that you can leverage for business gain.
7. Site Health Checks, Continuous Monitoring, and Adjustment
A good SEO agency will continue to monitor your website and make adjustments when they see the need to. They will align it in accordance with Google’s changing algorithms related to how people input keywords into search and make sure it ranks well. They also will be checking how clean the code is and if the proper use of keywords and other SEO tactics are implemented across all channels and subpages of a website.
8. Regular Reporting on Key Results
You should have regular reporting on key results as part of the relationship between your company and the SEO agency you are working with. This should improve business results and may include increasing sales, leads, traffic, and overall ROI.
The SEO program should deliver improvement for your site and you should be able to see this within metrics. Compare the results to the agency’s previous forecasts to evaluate if the agency is doing its work or if the relationship is worthwhile for both.
Keep in mind, however, that SEO results occur over time and you may not see results right away.
Components of a Good SEO Program: Add-On Services
Besides optimizing existing content, creating new content, while using effective keywords and simply being competitive within the SEO market. If in the future you change your host for your domain or buy a new domain name for an URL you want to use, migration services will come in handy. Some SEO agencies offer them in addition to standard SEO services. These add- ons include:
- Local SEO
- Website migration
1. Local SEO
87% of shoppers now start their searches online, and this also applies to physical businesses. Local SEO consists of activities that enable a website to rank well within SERP when compared to local competitors or other businesses trying to compete for the same customers within a given geographical area or location. This is especially useful for businesses that have physical locations to attract local customers through search.
2. Website Migration
If your business grows and you can eventually afford to purchase the domain address, meaning the URL you really dreamed of since starting your business, you may want to purchase it and migrate your website to a new server. This is where migration services come in handy and an SEO agency may offer this service as an add-on.
How to Ensure the Success of Your SEO Program With an Agency
Although finding the right agency for your brand may be hit or miss, once you do, you should strive to keep a good working relationship for the long haul. Before this happens, below are some things to keep in mind to make sure that you will have a successful partnership with the SEO agency you decide to hire:
- Clearly define your business goals and expectations from the onset.
- Hire an SEO agency with a proven track record of successful campaigns, preferably for businesses in your industry: research the agency and find out more about them. See who their clients are and the types of results they brought them as well as compare them to others. Look for businesses within your area of expertise for the best comparisons in what sort of results the agency may bring.
- Provide access to necessary resources and data that the agency can work with. This can include access to your domain and website as well as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and metrics on your site – such as monthly visitors or user data looking at what countries site visitors tend to come from.
- Allow the agency to perform a comprehensive SEO audit of your website. They will need to do this to see how your site is structured, analyze various metrics associated with it – such as what keywords you used or worked well for you and which did not. This will help you to analyze site visitors and sources of traffic to your website better.
- Collaborate with the agency to develop a customized SEO strategy.
- Regularly review and analyze SEO metrics and adjust the strategy accordingly.
- Ensure that the agency provides regular updates, progress reports, and results.
- Continuously evaluate the performance of the agency and make necessary adjustments where necessary.
Benefits of Hiring an Agency For SEO
The SEO agency will make sure the business will be visible when users search for relevant information related to what it offers and remain findable across search engines, particularly Google. It will remain relevant and allow new leads to the website.
Besides this, here are six more in-depth reasons that make hiring an SEO service a must:
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- Improves online visibility and ranking in search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo: Online visibility allows users who are entering keywords, such as questions asked or information they seek, into a search engine and find your website as close to the top of the results as possible. Less than 10% of people click on the second page of a search result, and the number one result gets nearly 30% of organic traffic.
- Increases website organic leads: Organic traffic is important to a business that wants new visitors via search and not artificial means, such as PPC campaigns. This is how SEO brings in site visitors and if it is working well it will be regularly. Organic lead generation is done through the use of effective SEO and keyword generation.
- Helps build brand awareness: Content marketing is one of the backbones of good SEO. This means creating articles or blog posts, for instance, with relevant keywords to the brand to attract visitors to the content as well as the overall website. When this content ranks high on search engines SERPS, it makes people visit the overall website and notice the brand as well as what it offers.
- Increases credibility by establishing your business as an authority in its industry: Topical authority is an SEO concept where a website fully covers a topic and Google recognizes this and gives it credit as an authoritative source for the given topic. It then allows it to rank high in SERP when keywords related to the topic are used by those searching for content.
- Cost-effective marketing strategy that provides long-term benefits: SEO is a cost-effective marketing strategy (vs say pay per click) that provides results over the long term, rather than just page views or a couple of clicks via ads. When using SEO, you do not have to keep paying for clicks or ads as the results will be continuous.
- SEO tactics improve your website structure, hence, user experience: Search engines (ex., Google) have a set of ranking factors (that determine which website ranks highest within their result pages). Among these factors that help websites rank higher is user experience (UX). Sites with good UX tend to rank higher as SEO involves optimizing overall UX.
How Much Do Effective SEO Services Cost in 2023?
Investing in effective SEO programs costs anywhere from $1,200 as an entry-level price to $5,600 for more premium and high-end services; while content creation prices range from $800 to $1500 per piece depending on content volume and level of research required.
A lot will depend on your budget and what you expect or want to get out of SEO, however, investing money in SEO pays off in the long run and it is a wise investment for any business that has an online presence.
How Long Does a Good SEO Program Take to Show Results?
There is no way to predict with certainty how long it will take to achieve specific SEO goals as everything is an estimation based on the website metrics, organic competitors, keyword strategy, and external factors. Below are some desired SEO results and approximately how long you can expect to see results:
- Indexation and technical issues (2-4 weeks)
- Installed analytics systems and measurement framework (2-4 weeks)
- Content rankings (several weeks to several months)
- Website traffic (several weeks to several months)
- Organic lead generation and conversion ( several months to a year or more)
As you can see, SEO could take anything from a few days to several months to show results. At Rampiq, we focus on building a strong foundation for a website’s SEO first and foremost. This includes managing the quality of content, on-page optimization, and off-page optimization, and making sure you have a strong domain as well as the backlink profile for your domain.
We have previously gone into more detail, in an article that we published about measuring SEO results, about the various factors that determine how long before you start seeing results from your SEO efforts.
