75% of online users don’t look past the first page of Google results, so it’s essential that your website is optimized to rank highly on search results pages in order to reach your target audience.
In recent years, SEO (search engine optimisation) has become a non-negotiable for brands looking to increase brand visibility, engage with customers and grow their business online, with 69% of marketers investing in optimising their websites in 2021.
If you’re thinking of hiring experts to help improve your website’s search engine performance, you may be wondering what exactly it is that an SEO agency does. You might also be weighing up the benefits of working with an agency as opposed to going it alone.
The benefits of investing in SEO go beyond your search engine ranking; it is a tool that can help you to build credibility, improve overall customer experience and supercharge your business growth.
Working with an SEO agency can help you to:
- Drive more website traffic to your site
- Reach more of your target audience
- Decrease bounce rate and improve engagement
- Increase brand awareness
- Improve sales and conversions
In this article, we’ll be delving into the top ten benefits of working with an SEO agency, and why partnering with experts on your SEO strategy could be one of the most valuable investments that you make for your business.
Why is SEO important?
Every day, 3.5 billion Google searches happen across the globe. If we want to buy a product or service, or find out the answer to pretty much anything, we head to Google to provide us with the most relevant answers. Google controls 92% of the search engine market share worldwide, so where your website ranks on Google searches is of vital importance.
The term SEO encompasses a range of techniques that work together to boost a website’s ranking on search engine results pages (sometimes referred to as SERPS), when users search for topics and keywords that are relevant to your business. Investing in SEO can have major benefits for your business and help supercharge your business growth, helping more people to find your website organically.
It doesn’t matter how great your website is, if it is buried deep in the recesses of a Google results page, you won’t be attracting the volume of customers that you otherwise could be. Seeing as 90% of traffic goes to only the first page of search engine results, investing in SEO is a must.
Your website is your online shop front, with the potential for your business to be found by an almost limitless number of people via a quick Google search. But with plenty of potential comes plenty of competition. If you aren’t investing in SEO, you can bet that your competitors probably are.
What does an SEO agency do?
Like any business, Google prioritises the experience of its users – using their online algorithm to sift through millions of websites and ranking them in order of relevance. An SEO agency will help you to optimise your content and improve your site’s overall structure in order to meet the criteria of the Google algorithm, signaling that you are a trusted source of information in your industry.
Over the years, the practice of SEO has become increasingly sophisticated as experts keep up with the ever-changing Google algorithm and work with a range of factors both on and off site that affect your overall SEO ranking.
At Social Chamelon, our experts will create a bespoke SEO strategy for each client based on the unique needs of their business. Some of the activities that an SEO agency does to optimise a website for SEO include:
- Keyword research
- Optimising your website content for SEO – both on and off-page
- Link building
- Conducting audits on your website’s SEO and fixing issues
- Setting and implementing an SEO strategy, as well as ongoing monitoring
What are the benefits of working with an SEO agency?
1. Drive more organic traffic to your site
Organic traffic refers to online users who find your website through Google searches.
No matter how good the product or service that you offer is, you won’t find new customers online if your website isn’t ranking highly on search engine results pages. In fact, over 50% of organic website traffic goes towards the top three results of a Google search.
Working with an SEO agency can vastly improve the volume of organic visitors to your website by boosting your ranking in search engine results pages.
Although other digital marketing methods can work together to help to promote your business, organic search is one of the most valuable, with 53% of all trackable website traffic coming from organic search.
For most businesses, the reason for partnering with an SEO agency is to improve their website’s search ranking on Google and boost website traffic. Our SEO experts can also help make the necessary changes to your website to ensure that, not only do you get more visitors to your site, but you also increase the time that they spend there (known in SEO circles as the ‘dwell time’).
2. Improved sales and conversions
The more traffic to your website, the greater chance you have at converting page visits into sales.
A site visit can lead to a sale in just a few clicks; in fact, 39% of site visits through organic search result in a sale. As well as improving the quantity of traffic to your website, an SEO agency can also help you to improve the quality too; 60% of marketers said that their best quality leads come from SEO engaged customers. This is because when customers find your website through a Google search, they are looking to ask a question or fulfill a need that your website is providing. Because users have found your page through organic search, they may be more inclined to trust your business compared to if they were clicking on a paid ad.
3. Help navigating the Google algorithm
SEO is a dynamic and fast-paced industry, with many new changes and developments to the Google algorithm happening all the time.
The Google algorithm is constantly changing and shifting, with new updates influencing the factors that it uses to determine website ranking. With constant changes to the algorithm (there were 4,500 updates in 2020 alone), it can be hard to keep up and to ensure that your SEO efforts will pay off. In fact, staying up to date with the intricacies of the SEO landscape really is a full-time job.
Working with an SEO agency will ensure that you are always tuned in to the latest updates in the industry, and that experts are on hand to make adjustments to your SEO strategy. By working with SEO experts, you can give yourself a competitive edge over your competitors and ensure that you are always using the most up-to-date tricks to boost your SEO performance.
4. Avoid costly mistakes
The old saying is that there is no such thing as a mistake, only a lesson. However, in the fast-moving world of SEO, mistakes can be costly and can lead to the time and energy that you have put into your SEO strategy not being rewarded with a higher search engine ranking.
With so many businesses investing in their SEO strategies to attract new customers online, making mistakes with your SEO strategy can be a costly mistake to make.
By working with an SEO agency, you can rest assured that they have the relevant experience and industry insight to avoid common mistakes that may hinder your SEO instead of helping it.
From not optimising your website for mobile, to keyword cannibalisation and old URLs, could you be making some of the most common SEO mistakes? To find out, take a look at our blog post on this topic.
5. Improve your website
In the early days of SEO, your search engine ranking was mainly determined by the content on your website. Although content is still important, there are now many other factors that come into play when determining your Google ranking. Now, SEO involves making sure that all aspects of your website are optimised for users, which can have the added benefit of improving the usability and functionality of your website.
Google has to search through millions of websites every day to ascertain which ones they should show to their users. Websites that are well organized make it easier for Google to ‘crawl’ through their pages and assess their relevance.
In 2020, Google announced that the algorithm would be prioritisng websites that were optimised for user experience, including how fast your site takes to load, ease of navigation and whether or not it is optimised for mobile.
Working with an SEO agency gives you the ability to have access to a wide range of skills, including experts who can help you to optimise the user experience of your website. By prioritizing the user experience on your website, you have a better chance of increasing the time that visitors spend on your website, and improve their impression of your brand. All of these aspects work together to boost SEO.
Keen to learn more about the relationship between user experience and SEO? Take a look at our recent blog: ‘What is User Experience and How Does it Affect SEO?’.
6. Elevate your content marketing
SEO and content marketing work hand-in-hand. One of the benefits of working with an SEO agency is the opportunity to overhaul the content on your website and your wider content marketing strategy.
An SEO agency will help you to optimize the content on your website to ensure that it contains necessary keywords that your target audience may be searching for. SEO experts do this because the Google algorithm trawls through millions of websites, prioritising those which contain keywords that match what a user is searching for. This is sometimes referred to as on-page or on-site SEO.
Our SEO agency begins on-site SEO with keyword research to ascertain high-volume keyword phrases for your industry. However, the Google algorithm has caught onto practices where pages are crammed with keywords and don’t actually provide any helpful content for users. Therefore, the trick to successful on-page SEO is to create genuinely useful and high quality content for your audiences, using key words sparingly.
Working with an SEO agency gives you the opportunity to optimise the content on your website, creating useful resources for your audiences such as blogs and how-to guides. Making sure that your website has great content will encourage audiences to stay on your website longer, which in turn also boosts SEO. As well as the SEO benefits, having a website filled with useful and high quality content is a great way to build your brand reputation and enhance customer satisfaction.
Content marketing is a highly effective marketing strategy for your business, but it is also time-consuming and may fall to the bottom of your list when you are focused on the day-to-day operations of your business. At Social Chameleon, our team of content writers are skilled at crafting engaging and relevant content in your brand voice that your audience will love.
7. Boost your brand authority
Building a strong and visible brand reputation doesn’t happen overnight, but it can have long-term benefits that can secure your position in your industry for years to come. By having a high-ranking website, it will be easier for potential customers to trust your business, thus boosting your authority and likelihood of attracting customers. However, there are elements of SEO itself, such as off-site SEO, that also directly build your brand reputation.
A key aspect of a successful SEO strategy is improving your website’s domain authority. This is a score that is attributed to your site that denotes its reliability.
Domain authority is improved through off-site SEO services. This includes social media, guest blogging and digital PR. Our digital marketers will work with external sources to increase the number of backlinks to your website and to improve your domain authority.
These strategies involve creating links to your website from other reputable websites, and is usually done by writing guest articles or collaborating with other brands. This technique works as links to your website from other reputable websites signal to Google that your business is a trustworthy source of information, boosting your SEO as a result. However, this activity also has an added bonus of boosting the profile of your business and increasing the probability of people finding your website when browsing online.
8. Benefit from an SEO audit
When you first start working with an SEO agency, it is common that they will conduct an audit to deep-dive into what isn’t working with your website, which may, in turn, be affecting your SEO. Some of these issues might be obvious, such as your page loading time, but others may include more technical aspects of SEO.
At Social Chameleon, our team of SEO experts conduct ongoing audits on our client’s websites, looking at what is currently working and what could be improved in order to boost SEO performance.
9. Save precious time
SEO is by no means a quick fix marketing tactic. In order for your SEO strategy to be a success, it requires time-intensive upkeep to ensure that your website is performing at its best, against the ever-changing criteria of the Google algorithm, as well as industry knowledge and experience.
If you go it alone with your SEO strategy, you could risk not seeing a return on investment from your efforts and end up back at square one.
By trusting the experts with your SEO strategy, you can free up time to focus on other areas of your business. At Social Chameleon, we work as an extension of your in-house team and take our time to understand your business and your goals. By trusting our team of experts to manage your digital marketing needs, you can prioritise other areas of your business whilst also reaping the rewards of your improved SEO strategy.
10. Results you can measure
One of the best things about SEO is that it is much easier to measure the success of your efforts versus other marketing methods. This is because tools such as Google Analytics can provide plenty of information such as the number of site visits, to the time that visitors spend on your page. Also, it’s clear to see if you are seeing observing an increase in sales as a result. What’s more, the fact that such metrics can be broken down makes them all the more helpful – as they specifically tell you who is visiting your website, how much time they are spending there, which pages they are visiting, and whether they are a first-time browser, or a regular. Importantly, you’ll also know whether they are window shopping, or making a purchase! Having access to such a wealth of information at your fingertips gives you more power to adapt your website where necessary, to achieve that ultimate goal: increased sales and revenue. An SEO agency will be able to provide you with regular updates on said results, while analyzing what these results mean – doing all the hard work for you.
So, just sit back, and relax!
Want to rank on the first page of Google? At Social Chameleon, we have worked with hundreds of businesses in a diverse range of sectors, all with a shared goal to stand out in a crowded online space and engage with new audiences online.
Our dedicated SEO experts will provide a bespoke strategy for your business, spanning on-page, off-page and technical SEO.
You can view our SEO packages, or get in touch with our friendly team of expert marketers today to discuss your SEO needs.
