SEO Professional Services

What are SEO professional services? What do they include? What services should you offer as an SEO professional yourself? We’re answering all of these questions and more in today’s post, so keep on reading! 

We’ve also included a section on the prices you can expect to pay for such services right at the end of the article, so make sure to check that one out, too. 

What do SEO professional services include?

Creating an SEO strategy is essential for any business, whether you want to build a brand out of your name or you are providing services or selling products to customers. 

SEO has become more and more important in the past several years, while Google’s (and other search engines’) algorithms have changed and improved so as to separate the wheat from the chaff. 

Education should be at the core of your marketing goals. Whether you already have an SEO in-house and you’re looking to improve their skills, so you want a professional to teach them or you’re looking to hire a company to achieve your purpose, the truth is that SEO is the best way of ranking a website these days. 

As we might have detailed in other articles on this website, search engine optimization roughly includes on-page and off-page optimization. 

But these two can be rather complex, and you also always have to start with your website and the technical issues that might be affecting it. 

Here’s a list of things that might be included in the services that an SEO professional freelancer or company can offer keeping in mind that each strategy has to be customized depending on what the client’s goals are, the industry they’re in, the type of website they have and a number of other such factors. 

An audit

An SEO audit should always be performed off the bat. Otherwise, your SEO company isn’t going to know what’s wrong with your site or what issues they have to fix. 

So while it might sound like something entirely useless, especially if you’ve worked with other SEOs before and they’ve performed audits of your site in the past, you can’t expect another search engine optimization specialist just to trust that data and base their strategy on it.

Besides, your rankings change from one month to the next, so that’s another aspect to bear in mind. Even if you already have an audit from another freelancer you’ve worked with last year, the new one is going to want to perform another one just to know that the data is correct and up to date. 

An audit can include anything from competition analysis, keyword research, backlink analysis, and a variety of such details that can let you know how you stand. 

A technical SEO audit wouldn’t hurt, either, and if the SEO you work with is an experienced one, it’s not going to take a lot of time for them to spot any technical issues your site might have. 

On-page optimization

On-page optimization refers to everything that can happen on your own website. So it doesn’t refer to buying links, optimizing your Google My Business listing, your social media accounts, or anything else that doesn’t relate to your site.

However, it does involve looking at your competitors and what they are doing so that you can replicate their strategy and improve your articles or create better blog posts off the bat. 

Here are some things that your SEO company is going to look at when tackling on-site optimization:

  • Meta tags
  • Page content
  • Title tags
  • URLs
  • Keywords + performing keyword research
  • Image optimization (image tags etc)
  • Video optimization
  • Page speed
  • Responsive design and whether you have it
  • Internal linking structure
  • Any crawl errors whatsoever 

Off-page optimization

Off-page SEO is focused on improving everything that doesn’t deal with your website, meaning things that you do not have complete control over. 

Link building

Backlinks are still a ranking factor, no matter how many markets might like to believe that they are not. The more valuable a link and the more relevant it is, the better for everyone involved. 

You can acquire backlinks using a variety of methods from typical blogger outreach to PR, directories, and heaps of other such techniques. Rest assured that the SEO you’ve hired is already well-aware of these methods. 

If you’re having second thoughts about working with someone or they don’t seem to be as seasoned as they claim to be, just ask them what type of links they’re going to get and how. 

After all, there’s something called a ‘backlink profile’ and you want yours to be as diversified as possible. If someone builds links without taking into account the niche you are in, what you do, the anchor text, or the pages you should get links for, they are not doing a good job. 

Ads

Running ads on social media or on search engines definitely costs a penny, but if you have a product you want to sell and you want to sell it fast, it is the best marketing method that you can use.

Plus, there is this myth according to which search engines favor websites that have run ads before rather than those that want to grow their rankings organically. Sure, it could be just a myth, but many marketers have noticed something suspicious in this sense. 

If you don’t have a huge budget for ads, at least run the minimum amount that you need to get a satisfactory number of conversions and sales. 

Link analysis

Your SEO company should, of course, start with a backlink analysis and look at all of the fishy websites you might have acquired links from in the past. Don’t worry, more often than not, it’s not something you did; rather it’s something that your competition has done for you. 

Negative SEO campaigns still exist, and people that want to rank better than you and are competing for the same keywords can purchase toxic links for you. Your SEO should have the experience to disavow these links using a tool such as the Google Search Engine. 

Using the Search Console is very easy, so you can definitely ask your SEO to teach you how to disavow links for the future. Or they could show someone else on your team so it’s something that doesn’t cause problems anymore. 

Local search optimization 

If you are a local business, so you want clients to step through your door, your SEO will have to consider this detail when performing off-page optimization. 

Not only will you have to rank for ‘near me’ and location-based keywords, but you will also have to set up your Google My Business listing, your Yelp page, and get yourself listed in a variety of directories in your area. 

Your GMB listing is extremely important, so make sure your SEO company is doing a good job. You need to provide as much information about your business as possible such as your telephone number, your exact address, pictures of your storefront, and anything else that might help people find you. 

Needless to say, include the URL of your website. Also, make sure that you update any changes when they happen. If the location of your business changes, your Google My Business listing needs to be updated right away. Your operating hours should also be correct. 

Reviews, comments on other blogs, and relationships 

If you run an actual business, it goes without saying that you need as many favorable reviews from your customers as possible. No matter the type of services (or products you offer), word-of-mouth is extremely important, especially these days when anyone can vent on the Internet about what horrible experience they’ve had with a business. 

Comments are a way of acquiring backlinks, but in most cases, they’re going to be ‘no-follow’, so they aren’t going to be super useful for you. However, they can help you build relationships with others in your field. 

If you are a successful blogger, nurturing your relationships with your readership and other bloggers in your niche is definitely the best way of going about things, especially since it can help you acquire backlinks naturally. 

Monthly reports

Checking on your SEO’s performance every month is necessary for everyone involved. Naturally, if you have little to no experience with search engine optimization, you might have a bit of a hard time telling whether the strategy that the company or freelancer has created for you actually works. 

But a simple report that can show you how your website traffic is going, what your conversion rate is, and if you’ve ranked for more keywords in the past month can definitely be understood by anyone. 

SEOs don’t usually report on all backlinks, especially if they organize massive projects, but they might include at least a number of them in their monthly report. 

Routine meetings with the person who’s doing your SEO are necessary to make sure that you’re on the same page. Needless to say, your strategy is going to change as you begin ranking for more and more keywords and more competitors are starting to keep an eye on you. 

If your SEO agency or the SEO freelancer you work with doesn’t want to report on absolutely anything every month, you’re probably better off with someone else. Once again, they do not have to report on every single little thing they’ve done, but the major improvements definitely have to showcased in a monthly report. 

Mobile SEO services

More than half of all searches are now performed using mobile devices. So, if your website doesn’t have a responsive design you don’t ask the SEO professional you work with to optimize for mobile searches, too, you’re definitely missing out. 

Your content should be very easy to read, your menus should be extremely easy to navigate through, and the overall mobile design (version) of your website has to be visually pleasing, too. 

But if you do not want to invest in mobile design services, you can at least ask your SEO to use a plugin that automatically makes your site responsive. We’d also like to note that most WordPress websites (especially if you get hosting from WordPress) are already optimized for mobile, so you don’t have to worry about this. 

Another thing that we have to add here is that people have less patience on mobile than they do on their desktop computers. Naturally, everyone wants every website to load as fast as possible, but the expectations when it comes to mobile searches are so, so much higher. 

As such, even if you’re sacrificing an eye-catching design, if your site loads faster with a simplistic one, get the latter. Your SEO is probably going to advise you the same, at least until you fix the technical problems that are affecting your mobile page speed. 

WordPress SEO services

This is just a name for search engine optimization that is geared toward websites that use the WordPress content management system. 

That means that the agency or individual professional you work with is basically going to apply the same measures that we have already mentioned and use specific plugins and tools that work with WordPress sites. 

Managing the SEO strategy of a WordPress website is much, much easier than doing the same for any other site built on a different platform. The reason for this is that there are a myriad of tools available for this CMS. 

In fact, there are SEOs out there that will turn down a client if their site is built on something else both because they don’t have the expertise necessary for improving the rankings of such sites and because they can’t get the same results. And if they don’t, the client is going to ask them what they did during all this time, when they were paid. 

Our best advice to you is to always start with a WordPress site, no matter how much it costs. It’s truly versatile and convenient and it’s also very easy to work with — not to mention that ranking such a site is always easier. 

International SEO services

Multilingual SEO services are a bit different than what we have already discussed in today’s article in that there are several ways of going about things if you want to satisfy users in different countries. You can either automatically translate the content you have on your site for each one’s language or you can create different versions for a specific language. 

Naturally, the SEO you work with will have to do their best to find the right keywords, analyze your competition in those countries, and tend to most of the other aspects that we have mentioned above. They can also help you reach an international readership through SEO localization. 

Video SEO services

Video marketing has seen an increase in popularity over the past several years and that’s because people have started to produce highly successful video content and realize that it’s an excellent way of marketing their services or products. 

For the best results, we recommend adding captions to your videos as they act like transcripts and since they probably contain keywords, they’ll help you in getting your video ranked easier and faster. 

An SEO should also explain how you can come across keywords that are relevant to you, how you should use them in your video descriptions and specific platforms (YouTube has designated places where you can add them while uploading your video), or what titles you should use. 

SEO professional services cost

The price of SEO services can vary on a number of factors. If you choose an SEO company instead of working with a freelancer, you can expect a higher cost. Most will charge about $2,000 to $3,000 a month or more. 

Freelancers can be cheaper, but even their services can set you back anything between $75 and $150 an hour. But if you need a really good one to teach your staff or someone in-house so that they can later on be your SEO, paying big bucks is definitely worth it. 

Need help with your SEO or digital marketing efforts? We have lots of plans and courses available. Get in touch to find out how we can be of assistance!

 

author avatar
Craig Campbell
I am a Glasgow based SEO expert who has been doing SEO for 22 years. In this time I have gained extensive knowledge in the subject of SEO and have build up a wealth of experience in SEO and other digital marketing services.

seo profile image

Craig Campbell

I am a Glasgow based SEO expert who has been doing SEO for 22 years.

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