If you run a business, you must be aware of the importance of getting free organic traffic from Google and other search engines. However, getting that sweet free traffic from Google is not easy as everyone wants that which means there is huge competition for the limited real estate on the top of search results. Specific efforts need to be made in order to gain high rankings in the search results and this is the reason, experts recommend hiring the services of a professional and reliable search engine optimization agency to help with the ranking of your business website.
Most business owners typically don’t know much about the work done by an SEO company. This article is focused on helping you figure out the work done by an SEO company and why it makes sense for you to partner with a reliable SEO agency.
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What Does an SEO Firm Do?
If you search for an SEO agency on your favorite search engine, it will return millions of results. There are thousands of SEO agencies spread all across the globe making tall claims about how they can quickly transform a business.
You should know that a search engine such as Google uses more than 200 different factors to calculate the ranking of a website for a particular user query. They don’t share these factors and their algorithms are a trade secret. It is the job of an optimizer to figure out various factors that matter and how to optimize a website in order to increase its rankings in the search results.
Search engine optimization campaign can be typically divided into many different phases including audit and optimization phases. Here is a quick guide on what does a typical SEO agency do when they begin a new optimization campaign for a client:
Audit of Website Structure
An experienced optimizer will always begin by auditing the existing website structure. In this audit, they will use a crawler to go through all the webpages on your website and check a variety of factors.
Some of the important factors that checked during a website structure audit is presence of any 404 pages or duplicate content or broken internal links or blockage of crawlers or missing tags in various web pages among other things. Another important thing they check is whether all the important pages are indexed by the search engine. They also make sure that pages that should not be in the search engine index are not there.
They will check presence of various important meta elements as well as page loading speed as these are also important ranking factors. The audit will also include whether the XML site map includes all the important pages on the website.
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Audit of On-Page Factors
When it comes to on-page SEO factors, one of the most important factors is the quality of content present on each web page. You should know that search engines such as Google map the content present in each web page into different categories known as the main content, supplementary content as well as other types of content.
The quality of content present on each web page is one of the most important factors that is used by Google to calculate the ranking of a web page. During the audit, the optimizer will check the quality of the content as well as presence of all the tags and other such issues. They will also make sure that there are no duplicate content issues and the content does not seem to be chock full of targeted keywords as search engines do not like content that seems to stuffed with keywords.
Voice search is the future as most people use their smartphones and ask questions to the search engine instead of typing a few words on the search engine page. The optimizer will ensure that content on your website is compatible to voice search.
Audit of Off-Page Factors
There is no denying the fact that the weight of off page factors in ranking algorithms is much higher as compared to various on page factors. The off page factors not only include links from other websites but these also include consistency in your name, address and phone number across the Internet as well as various other things such as reviews from past customers and your online reputation.
Optimization Phase
Once they have audited the website and prepared a detailed report outlining the factors that may be hurting the rankings of various web pages on your website, they will come up with a strategy to take care of the discovered issues.
The optimization campaign usually begins with tweaking the structure and site code to make sure that it is search engine friendly and also user-friendly. They will take care of any issues in the code to eliminate any crawlers or other errors. They will ensure that there are no dead links.
They will check the quality of content and make sure that all the content on your website is well optimized and has just the right amount of keyword presence. They will make sure that no duplicate content is present on your website. They will discover other websites in similar industries to get high quality links for your website. They will make sure that all the information about your website online is consistent and accurate.
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Continued Efforts
One of the biggest misconceptions associated with search engine optimization is that it is a one-time task. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Search engines continue to update their algorithms and they also regularly introduce new algorithms to stay a few steps ahead of the scammers trying to manipulate rankings. This is the reason, expert optimizers are always tracking various metrics in order to make sure that the optimization campaign remains on track and your website continues to gain and retain rankings.
Conclusion
Overall, a search engine optimization campaign involves a lot of work. Also, search engines are continuously evolving and they are introducing new algorithms regularly which means SEO is a full-time job. Expert optimizers understand the importance of regular tracking and testing. They not only optimize your website but also continue to track and test the results in order to tweak the strategy to gain rankings.
An expert Chicago SEO firm will help you increase your ranking in the search results which should lead to increase in organic traffic which, in turn, should lead to increased revenue and more sales. So, do your research and partner with a reputable SEO firm that is known for helping their clients achieve consistent success in the search engine results.