If you are about to start your search for the best SEO agencies, chances are fairly high you want to rank on page one of Google and generate lots to traffic to your website. Or do you want to increase your sales and maintain year-over-year growth?
Indeed organic ranking plays heavily into a company’s ability to increase sales and see steady growth. Unfortunately, most SEO agencies aren’t at all growth driven; once they get your landing pages ranking, they do a mic drop. The best SEO agencies focused on converting organic traffic operate on an entirely different playing field. These are the marketing firms that view organic search as an opportunity for attracting and converting searchers. Once a client’s website ranks well, these SEO agencies don’t stop; they are always deep in the weeds with conversion optimization, audience targeting, and other strategies that SHOULD be a part of any respectful organic search engagement.
These tips are intended to help businesses decipher the poor quality organic search providers from award-winning SEO agencies that are always focused on growth driven strategies for every SEO engagement they touch.
Attention to detail is everything when it comes to growth driven SEO. One sure way to spot SEO agencies that focus on all the fine details is to ask what their onboarding of new clients process entails. If the agency doesn’t run an audit on the website or address meta and site errors, you should dismiss them from your short list.
If SEO agencies claim to do a site audit, there needs to be a strategy behind it. Focal points for an SEO audit should include:
Understanding the objectives will help SEO teams know how to tackle all the above points under the objective to stay upon a goal orientated path. Make sure the team shares the findings on each and every one of these with above points with their clients, and you should also expect them to educate clients on these points with straight-forward language.
One sure way to tell if an SEO agency is focused on revenue generation is to see how their process plays out for generating keywords. If they search for industry and product / service related broad keywords with high search volume, they are amateurs. It may seem like a practical approach to source the keywords that get the most searched. After all, the more eyes on your content the better, right? Not really.
Today’s keywords for SEO need to mirror modern buyer behaviors–people who do thorough online research before making a purchasing decision. Remember that every search query is pain-based; searchers have a problem, and they are looking for the best solution. Your keywords should reflect this, even if the search volume is lower than broad keywords. Think about it: would you rather rank for a keyword that gets 20,000 monthly searches and converts 100 buyers OR rank for a keyword that gets 800 monthly searches and converts 400 buyers? The goal is never to rank for the hell of it. Instead, savvy SEO agencies have an objective to rank the right content for the right audiences that may have a lower monthly search rate BUT that converts better.
Most SEO agencies blogging as a way to feed websites with fresh, recurring content rich with the target keywords as a way to win the ranking game. However, true growth driven SEO agencies rank content while focusing on conversions from organic traffic. To do this, content needs to be easy to find, address topics that matter the most to searchers, and motivate readers to complete the next step which could range from downloading a guide, to making a direct purchase.
In order to convert readers to buyers, blogs must offer an amazing user experience while ranking for keywords that are directly related to buyer needs. The cluster model for blogging structure and strategy is ideal for achieving both these things, and if SEO agencies don’t do this, keep walking. The cluster model consists of creating clusters of blog topics all relevant to one main key phrase. Each article has a unique title, covers a topic in a specific context buyers care about, and links to another blog similar in subjectivity. In addition, each blog links to a pillar page (normally this would be the home page or main service / product page).
Cluster blog models work well to improve rankings for all keyword types because the content is structured and therefore easy for Google to crawl and see the relevancy between mammoth, broad keywords and buyer-focused keywords that convert better. This format also fares well with customers because it provides an easy way for people to find the content they are looking for upon entering search queries, and once they are engaging with the content, there are easy navigation options to find related articles to help them make their purchasing decision. In order to master the art of SEO, structured content is a crucial format to nail down.
We covered some great topics here, but there is so much more to finding the best SEO agencies that actually focus on generating revenue through organic traffic. We invite you to download our FREE guide on the WEBITMD approach to modern SEO strategies. Discover what we do that’s different, and give us a call with any questions you may have. Even if we never work together, this guide offers standards you can use to hold other SEO agencies to!
