When it comes to SEO, you really can’t afford to be cavalier. Your business depends almost entirely on SEO for its online visibility; SEO dictates how easily you can be seen by search engines like Google and Bing, so it’s naturally extremely important that you create content with SEO in mind. However, it’s also understandable that you might not know too much about the concept of SEO and the principle of how it should be applied. That’s where we come in; if you outsource your SEO to us, you can be sure that we’ll generate strong, natural in-content links for you. But how does it work? How can your business take advantage of this service? Here’s our conclusive guide on how to outsource SEO.
Pick the right company
Since you’ll be entrusting an important element of your business to outside companies, you need to make sure that you’re picking the right one. A good SEO outsourcing company is transparent, honest, and communicative; they’ll tell you exactly what they’re going to do for your business and work alongside you to determine your goals and SEO expectations. Conversely, a bad company will just steamroll ahead without consulting you and won’t pay attention to what kind of content you want to generate.
Determine your goals
It’s very important to understand what your SEO goals are before you start. You might think that “better SEO” is a catch-all goal, but that’s simply not the case. For example, if you want to increase your social media following, that will require a different SEO approach than if you want to rank higher on Google or get more traffic for your website. Talk to the company to whom you’re outsourcing your SEO operation and work together in order to determine exactly what the deliverables are in this campaign.
Incorporate other marketing elements
SEO doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Increasing your website or blog’s visibility is all well and good, but if you’re not making sure that all the other elements of your campaign are working in tandem, then your hard work might end up being for nothing. That’s why you need to make sure other elements, like email marketing campaigns, PPC, or social media outreach, are in line with your SEO goals. Doing so will ensure that your marketing campaign comes across as holistic rather than disjointed.
Create a clear plan
“Make my SEO better” does not, unfortunately, constitute a plan. If you really are serious about improving your SEO, then you’re going to need to create something more concrete. Sit down and think about real, actionable steps to improving your SEO. Talk to any content writers or bloggers with whom you’re working and collaborate to come up with a shared vision for how your company’s SEO can work. With a clear plan, you’ll know how to move forward even if you get stuck.
Emphasise content
There are many factors that go into creating great SEO, but arguably the most important of them is the content you generate. This could be social media posts, tweets, blog posts, or even videos, but they’ve all got one thing in common: you’ll need to implement your SEO brand strategy in all of them. That means paying attention to YouTube descriptions, for example, as well as inserting keywords into content and ensuring you’re using the correct hashtags. Speaking of which…
Brush up on your keywords
Every industry will have different keywords that it needs to hit in order to popularize its content and increase its SEO ranking. If you pick a good SEO agency to outsource your SEO to, they’ll take care of this angle, but you can also provide them with keywords that you want them to use. If you research these keywords extensively by using services such as Google Trends, then you’ll learn which keywords are most effective for drawing traffic to your website. Be aware that these keywords will also change over time!
Don’t use black hat techniques
Between you and your SEO agency, you should make a concrete agreement never to resort to black hat SEO techniques. Technically, black hat SEO can increase your ranking in the short term, but Google will likely bring the full force of its punitive measures down on you and force your site into the lower rankings if you use these techniques. Be sure to avoid PBNs when creating content on other blogs. They include keyword stuffing – simply spamming an article with keywords irrespective of legibility – and other unscrupulous methods.
Spend small at first
You shouldn’t spend a huge amount on your SEO agency at first. Start smaller; that way, you can determine whether this is an area in which you want to invest a larger amount of money before you make a big investment. If you’re seeing concrete returns and your SEO strategy is resulting in more conversions and more eyes on your content, then you can go ahead and start spending a little more. At first, though, it’s completely fine to play it safe!
Monitor your progress
Your SEO campaign won’t be worth much unless you and your chosen SEO agency keep a close eye on whether it’s working or not. You can use several analytics tools to help you with this, so whichever one you and your agency prefer, you can work together to determine how you want to proceed. You may wish to leave the tracking entirely up to your agency, but it’s definitely a good idea to get involved yourself, because after all, the future of your website is in the balance!
Learn about SEO
Although a great SEO agency will, of course, take care of the difficult parts of outsourcing SEO itself, you should still be learning at least rudimentary SEO techniques and concepts yourself as well. This will better enable you to implement these concepts going forward, and will also help you to negotiate with agencies when it comes time to create a new campaign. It doesn’t take much to learn SEO; while implementing it is difficult, the basics are pretty easy to grasp, and it’s worth the time investment.
Look for flexibility
A great SEO contractor or agency will offer flexible options based around what you want from your campaign. As such, you should be looking for flexibility in your chosen SEO agency. They should be able to offer a number of different options and packages based on what you want from your campaign, and perhaps even to tailor each option to your own individual needs. Reach out to them and discuss things before you decide to work with them, and if you think they seem amenable, then that’s usually a good sign.
We hope that our conclusive guide on how to outsource SEO has been helpful, and that it’s assisted you in making a decision about whether to proceed or not. Outsourcing SEO can help to relieve a lot of burdens from you as a website or business owner; it can free you up to get on with the important elements of running your business on a day-to-day basis, and can also introduce you to some important contacts that you may be able to work with later down the line. With the right SEO agency, you can do wonders for your online visibility!
