All You Need to Know about SEO Proposal
Some businesses prefer to have their own employees doing SEO, others trust agencies and other outsourcers to do the optimization. Both these approaches have advantages and disadvantages, so it’s impossible really to say which one is ultimately better.
If you decide that collaborating with an agency is what’s better for your budget and goals, then you might be asking yourself new questions. How do you find the right agency? And then how do you choose from the ones that proposed to do business with you? How do you choose from agencies based on their SEO proposal?
Let’s about the proposals and what are the things that you should look at when you are reviewing them. Obviously, you will pay more attention to the ones that look different from the rest of them, but let’s talk about more practical stuff, namely factors of the proposal that you should look at.
Audit of performance and current problems
That’s a great place to start and really adds logic to every strategy. This is when an agency evaluates current performance and reviews current challenges. Without knowing your problems and faults, how do you know if you achieve success? It’s not hard to talk about abstract quick fixes, so it’s important that an agency gives more details about the tactic they are to use. How exactly are they going to improve seo your company website?
Identifying and prioritizing keywords
That’s when we talk about SEO itself. During this process, specialists are prioritizing keywords from the lists available. At this stage an agency finds relevant themes among keywords and phrases. In order to make the proposal more detailed, ask them to work with a particular category of products. Then this review can be an example and used in other parts of the proposal.
Tech audit
Tech audit is basically when a site is checked whether Google can easily index and crawl its pages. This includes the audit of the code, re-directs, and sitemaps. It may be tough to see which agency is better, so you might want to give quite a specific task or mention a particular part of your website that needs some work to be done.
Analyzing backlinks
The search engine algorithms are changing, and one of the things to remember now about SEO is the importance of backlinks. So it’s one of the essential parts of an SEO campaign to build quality and natural backlinks. Besides that, it’s crucial to find bad inbound links because they are dragging the site down. You need to know how the agency works with backlinks and which instruments do they use.
Identifying competition
Our main goal while approaching SEO is to make sure that the site ranks higher in SERPs. If a site ranks low, it means there are a lot of competitors that Google or other engine prioritizes over the site. So we are not to ignore the stage of identifying your competition and choosing those who you will compare your performance to.
Content analysis
This is the stage when an agency reviews content both on your website and on other websites that affects your website. They have to assess the effectiveness of the existing content on the site. This includes blog posts, infographics, product descriptions, visuals, etc. Besides, there is a need to analyze off-site content. How content from other websites affects the site of a client?
Analysis of social channels
Social media play a huge role in how we market our products and promote businesses. So a deep analysis of current business’ social media channels should take place. What are the opportunities that a client is missing out on? Is there any content that is currently not present, but it should be to attract the relevant audience.
A great agency is able to identify where you should invest in social media. Both organic and paid distribution of content has proved to be one of the most effective ways of increasing incoming traffic and boosting conversion.
Building a strategy
After thorough research and all the insights collected, an agency is able to outline the future SEO strategy. At this point, it could look more like a set of recommendations and directions.
The strategy should be in harmony with business values and oriented towards the goals of the client.
Metrics and analytics
When the strategy feels just right, it’s time to work out ways to measure the performance. It’s necessary that every week and month there is a report on how the site is doing and whether the optimization benefits business and how. So this stage is all about agreeing on metrics and analytic instruments used to monitor success.
Evaluation of costs
Obviously, the agency will share information on how they evaluate the price of their work. It can look like a price guide. Also you need to agree on how you are going to work together, whether it’s work-for-hire contract or project fees. Every agency has a different SEO cost, so you can choose from the options that are the most comfortable for your budget.
Integration of different channels
Integrating different media channels is very important for the success of the business. So you should pay attention to how the agency plans to approach this process.
Obviously, besides all these factors, one has to consider whether they feel the chemistry with the team proposing to work with them. There are a lot of purely rational things to look at, but at the end of the day, every collaboration happens between humans so trust and other emotional components shouldn’t be ignored as well.
