Your web Agency does SEO, but still?

The most important variable to consider when determining the level of expertise and the amount of work to invest in SEO is your competition.

Wanna stand out and become the best in your city or region? If that so, an analysis of what your competition does in term of SEO will be sufficient to give you a clearer idea of your own needs. You probably can find a good agency that could support you in that matter.

Do you have to position your company against other well established national businesses? Also, you will need to build strong bases for your website and follow an effective strategy to boost your content and inbound links. You'll have to carefully select an SEO agency that possesses all the necessary skills to achieves your ambitions.

Facing giants? Then, you will have to implant the most advanced methods and aks of your agency the highest level of expertise. Unless you rely on contractors, only few web agencies can offer you with this level of skills in SEO. You then need to consider working with several specialists to reach all your goals.

Do you have trouble figuring out where you stand in there? Feel free to request the analysis of an independent web agency right now by clicking here.

As an educational and popularization purpose, we took care to gather the known methods to effective SEO. Do not hesitate to use this list as a reference to question your SEO agency about their specialties, that will allow you to enlighten the path you wanna walk into.

The basics

It is believed that a web agency that aims to optimize your SEO should at least cover the basics. Knowledge and skills of each agency will determine which elements are covered by their SEO service and whether the work is done correctly.

To configure Titles and Meta description

The main job is to set up different titles tags and Meta description for each page and make sure that they meet the maximum length required, also, place important keywords at the beginning of the page.

Position tags H1-H6

The goal is to have a consistent hierarchy of titles and subtitles on each page. That will tell Google the subject for each page and each paragraph.

Including keywords

Integration of certain keywords and ideally those you want to be first in the search results in your texts and your title will give you the best outcomes.

Allow indexation

This is to ensure the presence of the robots.txt file at the root of the site and also that it is properly configured to give Google's robots access to the important content of the website.

Solid foundations

Sometimes by clumsiness, often for lack of knowledge, important aspects of organic SEO are often left out by agencies, even those who call themselves SEO experts. These errors form, along with the basic elements, the solid foundations of a good SEO.

Programming without mistake

Programming errors are not, strictly speaking, variables are taken into account by Google's algorithm. On the other hand, having a clean and error-free programming code will prevent indexing problems in the future.

Installing a sitemap.xml file

This is to ensure the presence of sitemap.xml file at the root of the site and set up the necessary features for it to update dynamically. This must be configured correctly to help to index all relevant pages of the website.

Make redirects 301

When redesigning a website, to redirect the pages of the old website to the URLs of the new site will keep the referencing and prevent starting again from scratch.

Improve loading speed

It's about optimizing everything that affects the loading speed of a website: CMS, the power of the server, image compression, scripting, development method, caching, etc.

Configure WWW redirections

In any website, redirections must be properly programmed so that the version of your site using www in the URL leads to the correct address that is not using the www or vice versa.

Advanced Strategies

SEO strategies and techniques that follow are specialties that require a more advanced level of expertise. Most of them involve constant work and are beneficial in the long term.

Registering the Website into directories

It mostly consists in registering the company into the general public, or specialized, directories that cover that field of business. The creation of these inbound links will improve the reputation of the website and affect its positioning on the search engines.

Exploit the etymology

Each of the keywords used by a website to position itself has a specific semantic field and context. What needs to be done is to integrate the various terms in the content of your website. Google's algorithm will take them into account when users search with any of those variants.

Embed long-tail keywords

It's about setting up an editorial strategy that will take advantage of longer, sharper search terms that you'll encounter less competition from. Even if they have a low search volume, these keywords will have a very high conversion rate if the strategy takes into account the intentions behind the user's search. For example, positioning on "Trip Cuba" will be much more difficult than "finding the best destination for a trip to Cuba".

Guests Posting

Guests posting is about writing texts that will be published on other generalist or specialized websites. The incoming links will benefit the SEO by using the notoriety of the blog or magazine.

Optimizing the robots.txt file

The robots.txt file is for Google's robots (or GoogleBots) that scout the Web to discover and analyze sites. It is from their analyzes that Google's algorithm will determine the positioning of a website in the search results. A rigorous optimization of the robots.txt file insures to take advantage of the visit of these robots.

Logs analyze

The results of these analyzes optimize the mesh, the structure and the positioning of the internal links inside a Website. This technique uncovers hidden indexing issues and sharpens Google's crawl budget distribution.

Our conclusion

So, the list above does not cover all the variables taken into account by Google's algorithm, but it shows the big picture of the main techniques mastered by Web Agencies. Other types of services may indirectly impact the SEO of a website such as CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) and most other components of SEM (Search Engine Marketing).

Don't hesitate to ask your agency what it's specialties are, it's a way to avoid bitter disappointments when the results come if there's any. Is the Agency able to help themselves like you'd like to be helped with?

Choosing the right Agency will definitely have a major impact on the success of your digital strategy. We strongly suggest that you base your choice on verifiable criteria rather than the mere promises of an ambitious seller. It is totally normal to ask that each of the SEO elements to be detailed in your contract as it also goes for the design of your website.