Kevin Homer — October 31, 2016 Follow @kevin_homerThe ideal online marketing campaign includes both search engine optimization and paid search. However, it’s not uncommon for a brand to focus solely on organic search (SEO). SEO is extremely important to search marketing, but it’s also much harder to provide an exact measurable ROI. Because of this, many clients often ask “so what do you actually do each month for our brand?”
Search engine optimization campaigns are all different, depending on the size of the brand’s website, its industry, or its allocated marketing budget. However, here is a checklist of services that your SEO agency should be focusing on that you might not have thought about or be aware of. We’re skipping the stuff you typically think of, such as title tags and creating content.
- Organic Keyword Research – It’s important to know which keywords were being targeted by your prior SEO agency (if you had one) and to know which keywords are most important to your business, in terms of popularity and profitability. This is something that should be reviewed fairly regularly to ensure the SEO agency is keeping up with shifts in business.
- Website Analytics – This should be constantly monitored by your SEO agency to see any unexpected changes in website traffic or consumer behavior, year-to-year comparisons, etc.
- Pay Per Click (PPC) Data – Even if another agency is managing your paid search campaigns, your SEO agency should be aware of the campaign and interested in monitoring results.
- Webmaster Tools – Your SEO agency needs access to your Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools accounts. They’re monitoring tasks such as recent XML sitemaps, page load times, crawl errors, etc.
- Page Indexing Inventory – Keywords are indexed differently by various search engines (such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing). Your SEO agency is keeping track of how your website’s content is being indexed and what opportunities exist to improve your indexing quality.
- Backlink / Link Building Quality – When other websites or directories link to your website, this helps develop trust (domain authority) from search engines. It’s important that your website be “recommended” by as many websites as possible, and that information provided is accurate and consistent.
- Website Crawls – Reviews of how search engine spiders and crawlers are viewing your website
- Website Graders – Many SEO programs will provide a “grade” for the overall health of your website. The number itself is honestly pretty pointless (a grade of 40 in one industry isn’t necessarily worse than a 60 in another industry), but it is helpful when comparing your website to competitors’ websites and providing a benchmark to work towards.
- Social Media – This doesn’t really belong so low on the list, but social media account management as a significant benefit on positive SEO. If you aren’t managing your SEO presence internally, your SEO agency should be persuading you to include social media as part of your SEO strategy.
- Measuring Success– This might sound obvious, but success is measured differently for everyone. It’s important for your SEO agency to understand your brand’s goals and how success will be measured.
If you’re working with an SEO agency and not sure what they’re doing for you, feel free to ask about these items. Again, all contracts are different, but they should be able to discuss these items with you, or explain why they’re not focused on certain areas.
If you’re looking for a new SEO agency, now you’ve got some talking points for your discussions with potential brand partners!
This blog post was originally published on Navitas Marketing’s blog.
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