What do SEO companies do?

[Your Company Formations]

SEO companies will build links, many outsource to India and the links are very low quality. Other companies will charge you 4 x the amount and do exactly the same. My advice would be a company the allows you to pay after you see the work report. Avoid companies who take the payment upfront.

 

[boring-friday]

Hello everybody,

I'm a former Google, Inc. employee and I can tell you that SEO is not wizardry, it's not some semi-science and especially nothing to be a genius in order to comprehend how Search Engine Optimization works.

First of all - it's a matter of content.
Second - it's a matter or pure arithmetics, algorithms.
Have your content written down before you think of website design.
Second - decide what your website DOES. It's like buttons What does this button do?
Third - Design - Form follows function.

Don't imagine your website like a sweet little frame and then when you want to add more content nothing fits in. So, imagine your website like it's something made of chewing gum... should never be the same, should always offer new experiences - this brings me to the WOW or surprise factor.

In this order you should consider things for a better SEO:

1. Find a guy who can write clean code

2. Pick up your color scheme

3. Write down your copyright

4. Asses images of the site or have your images done especially for the site, talk to an illustrator, graphic guy, designer, etc.

5. Imagine the typography - headings, normal paragraph text, subtitles, chapter signs, bullets, etc.

6. Now back to content, create each page and carefully craft it on paper, visualize it so you will be able to properly describe it to the web designer, also keep it simple and let the designer do what he/she does: design. Don't screw with designer's work, that's why they studied DESIGN, so they can offer services and DESIGN stuff. Don't be the designer's controller, let them do their job. You can't design websites better than they do, you can only make suggestions and accept their refuse, maybe that's a real bad idea.

7. Follow-up with the designer every three days, let him/her breathe, don't call/write every day, it's so annoying.

8. When site get into shape don't look at it everyday like 10's of times, your original idea might disappear, and THAT could be the best idea you might come up with. Plus that the designer might charge you additionally for the modifications.

9. At this point you'd rather prepare for the website launch, advertise it, do some viral stuff, tell your friends, create a "current", do what you exactly do before your first child get born: be excited.

10. Keep your website up to date, keep posting new content. Google loves fresh unique content. It doesn't matter what stupid stuff you want to post as long as it's your own generated content.

11. Drive some Social Media Campaigns or SMM, SEM, or other triple-letter abbreviation smart name thingy.

Don't bother about inbound linking, make sure your website is easy to navigate, has an excellent typography and website architecture, it's nice for the human eye, the code should be clean, get gorgeous images, crisp and coloured, let your visitors' eyes go around the site, not just see the logo and the menu... this brings us to visitor's engagement to the site.

Give the visitor something to do, they all get bored at your blah-blah about how old on the market and reliable your company is, they don't care about that. They came there to see some action, oh yes! ACTION! Call-to-action! Do this, click here, buy that, see that... they prefer call-to-action buttons to your multitude of text and company history, philosophy and/or view, business ideas... really, nobody cares about that.

Visitors need your services and your contact data. The rest is just pages you can woo them with, make their navigation pleasant. It's like they are in your home: you're supposed to make them feel welcome and special.

Some companies offer you weekly SEO services, or they promise you number one in 2 weeks or something... People, believe me, nobody can guarantee such a thing, not even Google. When you hear about weekly/monthly payment for SEO just turn to the opposite direction and run as fast as you can - because it smells like fraud.

I could go on and on about the other aspects of SEO, but it's already too much
YES, so is not about the on/off-site optimization. It's about original content, typography, user experience and architecture. The rest will come with your hands off: SERP, inbound linking, referrals...

Or to save time and make more money, withdraw £10,000 from the bank, buy a lighter from the corner shop, set fire to it, video it and upload to youtube

 

[DH Marketing]

Sadly, there are a lot of very bad SEO companies out there, trying to get you short-term results which will cause damage in the long-term. Search engines are actually getting pretty good at working out which are the best websites offering the best content, so focus on making your website one of those.

 

[MASSEY]

@sirearl : Account Manager / AdWords

Surprised no one else has said it

How do you sleep at night?

 

[Annoying Donkey]

Avoid companies who take the payment upfront.

And pay extra for debt collection costs...

Few small business owners would know the difference between good links and bad... so a work report is useless...

Seek out referrals and if some bods reputation has survived pandas and penguins, then they're probably OK...

 

[Ali Cort]

We've been offering PR-led SEO services way before everyone went content crazy so I hope I can fill you in, in layman's terms, about what agencies *should* be doing. Everyone above has discussed the more technical aspects of SEO but an agency should also be coming up with creative ideas that will get your company's brand name widely known - a bit like traditional PR - but with more of an agenda to acquire links on sites that have authority in your field. You can call this 'content' but that probably does it an injustice. It could be anything from creating advice-based guides, whitepapers, research & surveys, infographics, virtual roundtables, social media meetups, online tools, press releases, factsheets, videos etc etc. Once you're getting traffic to your site you could also be looking at various UX activity to maximise conversions. And things always change from a technical PoV, so diving in to Search Console and GA should also be ongoing activity alongside this content creation. Hope that helps.

 

[Audrey Wright]

I think the sooner the term SEO service / SEO company dies, the better.

 

[makeusvisible]

I think the sooner the term SEO service / SEO company dies, the better.

I totally agree...which may sound odd as an SEO provider.

When we approach an SEO project of any kind, our one key goal is to increase revenue....bottom line. Very often a customer will want to focus on one or two golden nugget keywords.... but in reality you just cannot focus a campaign around one or two keywords AND stay within what is deemed white-hat and natural SEO.

For some of our SEO clients we do things which are certainly NOT traditional SEO..... but they increase exposure, traffic and sales. For example, for some clients we run MailChimp campaigns within their SEO campaign.... it's not SEO, but it can increase traffic and drive sales.

Content is a huge part of what we do within any SEO campaign. Be it blogging on the clients site, improving landing pages, or writing better product descriptions. Not only does Google love good quality unique content, customers do to....and a bad landing page will result in a high bounce rate, and thus lower conversions.

For the same reason Graphics also come into play. Landing visitors onto a £500 product page with a pixelated image is not going to result in conversions. We will often spend some of our SEO hours on product images.

Social Media also comes into play.... as for some clients it will result in a lower bounce rate than their existing organic traffic, and over time can be used to drive relevant reoccurring traffic.

Our-reach also plays a big part. To give an example.... for one of our clients we spend 2 hours each month contacting by email, social media and even telephone....mum bloggers, as our client is in a niche which mum bloggers have a great social media reach to. From this we often leverage social media actions and organic links.

We also look at the client's website..... what state is it in....is it conforming to Guidelines.... could the landing page experience be improved, is Analytics highlighting issues which could be fixed..... is the site responsive!

The sooner clients recognise SEO as 'Digital Marketing' and 'Getting Your House In Order' the better...... because as several people above have stated, there are too many providers building low quality cheap-as-chips links which are only going to result in one thing.

 

[MASSEY]

And pay extra for debt collection costs...

Few small business owners would know the difference between good links and bad... so a work report is useless...

Seek out referrals and if some bods reputation has survived pandas and penguins, then they're probably OK...

It's not useless if it keeps the customer content that you are actually doing something and not sitting around with your thumb up your bum.

People who pay for services very often don't know what it is that you are doing for them but its polite to keep people informed and make them feel less anxious.

Even the referrals is a bit of a minefield. I've seen local business get shafted by companies like creare, spent a fortune and then once the link farm that they had on the go was discovered lost their ranks, not that they were ranking for much worth doing anyway.

At least when someone gets asked to provide a reference about a tradesman, whether the work was done well or not, the customer isn't going to say 'my bathroom was there one day and then it vanished'

 

[Annoying Donkey]

It is pointless having something as a criteria for success which is meaningless to one party, especially the one paying... And a meaningless work report encourages paying for spam link building because everyone knows more is better...

Referrals aren't perfect, however it's better than buying from someone sending you a cold email from a gmail account promising to make you rich for 99p per month...

There's no perfect answer and if you want a perfect answer you shouldn't really be in business...

 

[exciteseo]

Bare in mind that most company's are set up by ex-employees who are not willing to learn about or even read a book about SEO. Majority don't even know what H1 tag or Keyword even means.... This is how SEO companies make money...

Same as with setting up a website. You can easily do it in 5 minutes (content excluded, of course) by registering domain, hosting and installing WordPress. But millions of people pay money for it.

 

[Court Jester]

Some SEOs only offer on-site services

Yep, and it will be about - writing short descriptions and a bit of text for the homepage. This seems to be the limit of their skills, for which youll get charged fortunes for very little.

I dint belive in those link buddy systems anymore, days are gone by when you can spam quick links to good sites and still keep your ranking alive. seems linkbuilding is plain ole spam nowadays, but what happened to good ole quality eh?

Quality content is where you want to be. Build content sites and people will link to it naturally.

Problem is it takes huge effort - but probably still the best way long term. Shop type sites cannot do this, the tradsman on the corner has a naff basic site with maybe 10k of visitors a year, he hires SEO guy and gets a bunch of dumb cheapo links from finance sites or some crud like that. Too much of this bad seo about and who to trust is a difficult path to wade through.

 

[TJ Bakewell]

Let me sum that up for you.

Don't do link building - Reach out to publishers
Don't focus on keywords - Produce content pieces based on content topics and content lists.

No. do not do this, this is bad for SEO.

 

[boring-friday]

I dint belive in those link buddy systems anymore, days are gone by when you can spam quick links to good sites and still keep your ranking alive. seems linkbuilding is plain ole spam nowadays, but what happened to good ole quality eh?

Its the opposite, link building used to be spam and now it isn't. Most blackhats who want to rank fairly long term spend around 100$ per link (for their powerful links designed to actually rank), pbns

 

[janefirst]

SEO companies follow specific technique which includes directory submission, social bookmarking, forums, blogging, article, social networking, classifieds, url submission, rss feeds, press release, adwords, woorank and other such methods to keep updating with performance.

 

[fisicx]

Indeed they do,. If they are complete idiots who wouldn't know proper SEO from a pile of indian hair transplanters

 

[HazelC]

I tend to find that local SEO is good for me / my clients. I create landing pages for the client targeted on areas they work. For example Hairdresser in ... (local village) - each page is different content and this seems to work really well - obviously is dependant on competition in the area though..

Just some food for thought?

 

[Marek Skoczylas]

That is why, business choose more safe but more expensive ads that SEO like Awdors for example.

Looks like after first penguin and panda algorithm update 50% of SEO's couldn't find proper way to back to business.

Seo will become more expensive and exclusive service and the times when some random dude run SEO Agency, after study one 37$ pdf about SEO will never come back.

It all about the growing lack of trust for SEO agencies.

https://www.google.pl/trends/explore#q=seo company

 

[Toni Anicic]

While we don't do "just SEO" here are a few insights into what we actually deal with on daily bases:

• Figuring out what the f**k did the $100 a month SEO company from god knows where do to cause this client to lose 50% of the traffic.
• Removing the penalty.
• Educating the client so that s**t like this doesn't happen again.
• Figuring out why the f**k did the $5/hour developer from god knows where did with redirects/robots.txt file/headings/titles/hosting/sorting/*insert one other million of possibilities that can go wrong* that caused client to lose 90% of his traffic.
• Fixing that.
• Getting laughed at by a prospect when we tell them our hourly rate.
• Accepting new work from client that laughed at our hourly rate a few months back insisting that he can get the job done for $5/hour now begging us to fix the mess he's got himself into
• Inspecting new features development to make sure they don't break something from the usability or SEO point of view.
• Fixing issues caused by new features deployment that costed another client 50% of the revenue because he didn't want to pay for QA process and has now changed his mind.
• Working with a lot of people to ensure that cross department cross platform cross website highly technical SEO related tasks such as rel alternate hreflang implementations in combination with different canonicals, noindexes and robots disallows get implemented properly.

Yea... this is not something for small local companies, but SEO done properly, when it comes to large online retailers is a serious business.

General rule of thumb when hiring an SEO is, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

 

[devidweb]

Hello

SEO companies do i think so on page and off page activity. and then SMO activity.