SEO is a requirement for the success of any online business today. It’s simply about being able to drive targeted traffic with search engines. For the most part, Google is the king.
While SEO is not the average guy’s job, it’s possible to hire experts to handle it completely for you.
Now, let’s say you have concluded that further development of your project is impossible without search engine optimization. You got an expert, you gave him access. Then you get a heavy set of guidelines for implementation at the structure level of the site, texts and even design.
How do you figure out which area is really important, and what specifically does the SEO-specialist do to improve your website?
For the most part, SEO agents get clients confused with a bunch of unnecessary stuffs. In this post, I want to help you with an idea what your SEO expert should focus on so you do not pay for the irrelevant SEO activity.
5 SEO tasks your SEO agent should perform
#1. Website analysis, topics and competitors analysis.
This is one crucial phase of SEO but which online projects is this phase of SEO relevant?
- E-Commerce.
- Websites of services and products.
- News sites.
- Message Boards.
- Corporate sites.
- Forums (not single pages).
If your online project is any of the above, then your SEO expert should provide results for this phase
#2. Google webmasters panel – analyze data without panic.
When the SEO-specialist gets all access rights to the website’s analytics and Google Search Console, he starts to analyze every section on the platform to evaluate the work that has to be done.
He will come up with a strategy to promote the site and a comprehensive plan of work.
What exactly does the specialist do here?
- Evaluates the total visibility of the site not only by high volume search terms, but also on the mid and low-frequency phrases.
- Conducts an analysis of competitors to understand goals to focus on, what makes competitors better, what are their weaknesses, etc
- Analyzes the layout and link profiles of the leading pages in the niche.
- Notes the keywords for which pages should be created and optimized for.
An SEO expert determines whether it is necessary to make instant modifications to the site. For instance, change the Content Management System (from Wix to WordPress or vice versa), adjust the site for the mobile friendliness, switch the protocol from http to https, etc.
#2. Establishing the current SEO status of your site
For which projects this phase is relevant:
- E-Commerce.
- Websites of services and products.
- News sites.
- Business cards sites (not single pages).
- Message Boards.
- Corporate sites.
- Forums (not single pages).
If you currently have your project before contacting an SEO agent, what they will have to do is give you the current situation of your SEO. This will help measure their activities.
There has to be a ‘Before’ and ‘After’ kind of report. However, note that SEO results after implementation often take months. So you will have to give your agent enough time to measure his results.
Most professional SEO specialists have access to professional tools that help them come up with the overall SEO score of any website.
The situation report will help the SEO specialist to:
- Measure how much work he has to do
- How long it will take him to finish the tasks
- If he has to incur some cost before being able to deliver
- Etc
The semantic core or situation report may include several hundreds of search queries (for small business sites), and several hundreds of thousands (for E-Commerce).
The compilation of report is sometimes time-consuming and, according to the size of the site,it can take a couple of weeks or months. So it is broken down into chapters and groups, so as not to slow down the progress and expand the semantic core during the other work.
#3. Formation of tasks for internal optimization
For which projects this phase is relevant:
- E-Commerce.
- Websites of services and products.
- News sites.
- Message Boards.
- Corporate sites.
- Forums (not single pages).
SEO is split into many different phases. The specialist will have to pay attention to optimizing your site locally: keyword groupings, dealing with duplicate pages, optimizing theme and images, dealing with CSS/Javascript files, mobile friendliness, etc
Some other areas your SEO specialist may look at:
- URL structure of your pages
- Meta data, including page titles and meta descriptions
- Server load speed
- Redirects, Canonicals, noindex, dofollow and nofollows
- Current site Sitemap configuration
- Robot.txt and search engine crawlers access management
- Internalization and language settings
- Pages and pagination
- Checkout pages and conversion
- Backlinks and their SEO scores
- Etc
Conclusion
These are just some ideas to help you figure out what SEO task look like for your website. If you are dealing with an agent who doesn’t take into consideration these (and maybe more) points, you may start questioning his ability to deliver
Comments are closed.