In order to survive on the market, small businesses need to find ways to stay competitive at all times. Quite often, staying competitive means boosting our Google ranking. But that is not something we can do on our own.
When looking for a professional SEO consultant, we might feel like we’ve gotten ourselves in a search that is way over our heads. Indeed, there’s such a multitude of SEO agencies advertising their first-rate services that it seems impossible to choose.
The feeling of confusion is only reinforced once we take a look at the services they offer. They all seem identical, and what’s worse — we usually have no idea what they imply.
So, what can an SEO agency do for us? If you ask Scott Keever SEO, plenty. We are going to discuss the most common SEO services for small businesses in greater detail here.
Keyword Research
Keyword research is the most common first step toward improving a business’ Google rating and traffic. Before doing anything else, we ought to learn which words we want to target with our pages.
It is a general rule that each page on our domain should target one or two unique keywords for the best results. Additionally, our SEO consultant needs to ensure that they create the sufficient number of pages to cover all aspects of our business.
When deciding which keywords we should focus on, the SEO consultant needs to help us answer the following questions:
- Is the keyword relevant to our business?
- Does the keyword have any commercial intent?
- How many people actually search for that keyword?
- How competitive is the keyword?
On the whole, keyword research provides valuable insight into market demand. Moreover, it allows us to put our prospective clients and their needs first.
Page Creation
Quite often during keyword research, we’ll realize that we lack pages for certain words. Obviously, not having relevant content poses a threat to our Google ranking. In such situations, it is the job of the SEO agency to add what’s missing.
How? By getting the desired keywords on the pages. When creating new pages, our SEO needs to ensure that they are comprehensive and long enough. In addition, they ought to ensure that they are filled with unique content — copy/paste pages will bring the rank down.
Furthermore, it is of great importance that no page ever targets more than two keywords at the same time. Our pages need to be clean, to-the-point, relevant, and easy to scan.
Page Optimization
What happens if we have a page that targets certain keywords but does it in all the wrong ways? Then our SEO’s job is to optimize it and help us use it to its maximum potential.
Repurposing already existing content might sound simple enough, and Scott (https://scottkeeverseo.com/roofing-seo-marketing/) recommends it.
An SEO consultant that knows exactly what they’re doing will be able to introduce changes that would make our content more relevant. They will also know how to modify the technical underpinnings and ensure that Google recognizes the changes.
Link Building
It would be naive to believe that simply stuffing our page with keywords would be enough to improve our overall ranking. In fact, thousands of other pages use the exact same strategies and target the exact same words. How are we going to be any different?
Google counts the quality and the quantity of links pointing to a certain page in order to rank it in its search. When counting, it takes two types of links into consideration:
- Internal, that come from other pages on our domain.
- External, that come from other domains.
Seeing as external links are far more important for the calculation, it’s obvious why small businesses can’t build links on their own.
An SEO agency will make sure that all the external links come from relevant and reliable pages. Ideally, they will build links manually, since that would allow for greater attention to detail.
Code Optimization
An SEO consultant would also work on optimizing our website codes in order to make them more efficient. They would reduce their size, as well as make them use less memory and work faster.
Technical Audits
Much as we like Google, we need to understand one thing — it’s a search engine. We might think of it as our best friend, but it is not a human being. Therefore, it does not understand a website the same way we do. While we see clearly what a page is about, Google does not. That’s where SEO consultants come in. Basically, it’s their job to “explain” our website to Google. In fact, there are plenty of tools that make that sort of an explanation possible.
A possible downside to this service is certainly its cost. Regardless of their size and scope, technical audits are expensive. For a small business on a tight budget, that could be a problem. However, the good news is that a technical audit is usually needed only every couple of years.
Social Media Marketing
As a small business that is still trying to make a break on the market, we should not ignore the power of the cheapest advertising tool of today — the social media.
SEO consultants will work fervently on building and maintaining social media links that would boost our website traffic. They will create captivating content that would inspire not only clicking on the link but also sharing it with others
