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Everyone keeps telling you how your business needs to invest in SEO, but no one is explaining why! Sick of the jargon and want cold hard facts on how SEO can benefit your business? Keep reading…

Increase Traffic 

As the top organic search receive the majority of impressions and clicks, studies show that the first organic result receives 33% of all clicks and the second result receive 18%, so ranking in these highly visible positions can lead to significant increases in organic traffic to your website. Implementing SEO strategies will help you not only optimise your organic listing in the search results but will also make every page more relevant to the search queries your customers are searching for thus increasing the likelihood of customers clicking through to your website over your competitors.

Drive More Sales

Increasing your online visibility and organic traffic as a result of SEO will lead to an increase in sales/leads. The Internet has become a main gateway for customers to shop without having to visit a physical location, but how can the consumer find your website if you don’t have a presence? The higher in the search results you appear, with a fully optimised website for SEO and user experience, increasing your organic traffic will in turn result in more sales.

 Dominate Your Sector

SEO can help you dominate the search results for industry terms so that when a customer searches for a product or service you offer; you will appear on the first page for each search. Increasing brand awareness through SEO will help you establish an industry presence and become a ‘go-to’ resource of information and products. If your competitors are ranking on the first page for your keywords then they are likely using SEO themselves, if you don’t compete then you will fall behind and lose business.

Great ROI

SEO is an investment, not a short-term fix. No other marketing practise will provide such a great return on investment. When done correctly, SEO can drive quality organic traffic to your website at a much more budget friendly rate than a paid search campaign which can run away with budget for little or no return. SEO isn’t for those looking for a short-term fix and increased traffic for a short period of time, SEO is for those with a greater vision who want to continue to increase traffic and leads for years to come.

“You simply can’t approach SEO with a short-term investment mentality. If you’re looking for a quick hold-and-flip, that isn’t SEO. If you want to know with some measure of statistical certainty what your ROI will be over the next quarter or year, that isn’t SEO. If on the other hand you’re willing to invest for the long-term, if you have a long-term vision and you’re willing to do whatever it takes to reach your end goal…that’s SEO.” – Sam McRoberts

As the above quote suggests, SEO takes time to be effective and to start showing results, offering a long-term solution that can provide you with maximum visibility in the search results long term.

Stats show that leads generated from SEO have an average close rate of 14.6%, and 57% of B2B businesses confirm that SEO generates more sales and traffic than any other marketing technique. However, if you don’t have the time to invest in the management of a fully optimised long-term SEO campaign alongside running your business, you may want to consider hiring an SEO agency.

Hiring an SEO agency can be extremely beneficial to your business as SEO is a long-term commitment. Unless you or a member of your team internally has time dedicated to implementing and managing your SEO efforts, it is recommended that you outsource to a trusted agency.

Why Hire an SEO Agency?

 Save Time

Having an SEO agency run your campaigns on your behalf will leave you the time to focus on other things, such as running your business, focusing on your work tasks, and overseeing your company operations.

Working with an experienced agency that you can trust to handle your business’ SEO strategy will help to eliminate the stress of running your own campaign while simultaneously juggling all of your other responsibilities, allowing you to take a step back knowing your business SEO is in the right hands.

 Yield Great Results

By hiring an SEO agency, you will have professionals that will make sure that you will receive the best results.

Hiring someone that knows what they are doing and how to do it, will allow you to complete more tasks that you are good at, i.e. run your own business. It is indeed easy to say that you can try and do things yourself, as it will be cheaper, but if you have little to no experience in SEO, it is highly unlikely that you will be able to correctly steer the optimisation to know just how to implement SEO and get results on your website.

Here is when SEO agencies come into place, by letting the professionals do what they do best. Professional digital marketing agencies have specified knowledge of their industry; therefore, they will be able to generate quicker and better results and steer you on a strategy that they know works.

Gain Access to a Range of Services

SEO agencies know all the latest tricks to take your SEO from 0 to 100. SEO Agencies that integrate SEO with other search marketing services, e.g. SEO and PPC, will be able to align better with your marketing goals. The process of optimising your website can be very intensive as a lot of research is required and the chance of doing it wrong is always there. However, professionals can improve SEO traffic and page rankings drastically, without steering you down the wrong avenue.

Sales & Revenue

SEO Agencies focus on bringing the right kind of traffic, they will help your business target keywords that gain concrete sales and ignore the ones that don’t. In addition, they will know how to exploit tools like search console and google analytics to gain better insight and to help grow your sales and optimise the website’s conversion rate (CRO) and click-through rate (CTR).

Make Your Website User Friendly

Many people think that SEO is just about optimising the website just to be recognised by search engines, forgetting about the importance of the user experience. Well-structured and clean websites drive visitors to stay on your website for longer, therefore decreasing the bounce rate and increasing the page views. In addition, relevant content will keep readers entertained and on site longer and solve their pressing issues and bring more value to customers as they will find the answers they are looking for.

Build Brand Awareness

If you have a start-up or a small unknown business, you most likely will need SEO to generate brand awareness. It is important to be able to have your site at least appear on the first page of the major search engines for your brand search, because that is most likely where your consumers will be and if they frequently don’t see your site on the first page then they will not go to your website.

It’s clear that there are a number of benefits that come along with hiring an SEO agency to manage your campaign. However, before signing any contract, it’s vital to ask these important questions, helping to ensure that you are in the loop, and getting the most from your SEO agency.

What Questions Should you ask your SEO Agency?

What services do you provide?

Digital marketing is a machine and within this have a lot of cogs that work together, so when looking to work with an agency it’s important that they have knowledge of all things digital marketing – not just SEO.

By asking what services they are going to be providing you, you will be able to identify who is responsible for what and what tasks you and your team need to do in order to aid their work and maximise success.

As SEO and PPC work hand in hand, it could be beneficial to recruit an agency that has experience in both.

Do you have any case studies?

If you have found an agency online but they don’t have any case studies, run for the hills!

A reputable digital marketing agency will have a catalogue of case studies for each of their services detailing important statistics such as:

• Increase in traffic
• Increase in conversion
• Increase in rankings

Case studies are the evidence behind talking a good game, if an agencies client hasn’t wanted to give them positive feedback it’s likely because they did a poor job.

What are your link building practices?

In today’s SEO scene, understanding how your agency is building links into your website is crucial. A lot of changes have come into play over the past decade and you want to make sure that your agency isn’t using old, black hat techniques that will get your website penalised and removed from the search results.

Any mention of bulk directory submissions is a big red flag!

What is your reporting process?

Reporting varies from agency to agency, but all agencies should send you updates and figures on your progress in order to justify their cost. Reports are commonly sent monthly to give you a summary of the months’ work, but some agencies send reports weekly or fortnightly.

What results should I expect to see in 12 months?

SEO takes time, so it’s unlikely you’re going to see results overnight. If any agency promises you position 1 rankings in a week, it’s a lie and, frankly, impossible.
As previously mentioned, SEO takes a long time to produce results – but how much time exactly? The answer is that it depends on your industry, business goals, website quality, and whether you have a pre-existing campaign, or are starting from scratch.

SEO is a process, not a do-once thing. Search engine optimisation agencies are like coaches that help you improve your performance over time. They do not just give you some quick tips and then send you on your way; they work with you to develop the strategies and tactics that will help you achieve your goals.

Indeed, a good SEO agency is often a manager of all your web activity from web designers, developers, PR and content writing to help define and steer the sheep towards SEO results. On average it can take 6-12 months to see the increase in traffic and 12-24 months to see the full results of a good SEO strategy.

While we all wish it was as simple as your SEO agency waving their magic wands and sending your website shooting to the first page, unfortunately, SEO doesn’t quite work like that and here’s why…

No one but Google knows the exact methods they use to rank websites

If this information was common knowledge, then everyone would be manipulating their websites to achieve page 1 rankings, so search engines like to keep their cards close to their chest to prevent this.

SEO’s use judgement, countless testing and years of experience in the industry to identify techniques that work (and techniques that don’t). There is no one quick fix to SEO success so there isn’t one button you can press; if anything, it’s a series of buttons, switches and cogs that need turning!

No SEO agency can promise you position 1 rankings in a month, not even us

We’re not afraid to tell you this because that is the technicalities of SEO. Any SEO changes you make to your website take time to be noticed by Google and then once they are indexed Google needs to compare them to your competitors and other similar sites to determine your rankings, this is not a quick process.

As these things take time, we like to give our clients an estimation of 6-12 months to start seeing results from SEO work. There are currently 1.2 billion websites on the Internet, that’s a lot of websites for Google to index!

 Now is the time to hire an SEO agency in order not to fall behind competitors. With so many companies offering services that can help your business grow and thrive, it is important that you find someone who will be able to help you succeed. The goal should be to get your website ranked at the top of Google so that potential customers can find it easily.

What does this mean for you? It means that if you do not have an SEO agency on hand, then you could be missing out on opportunities for growth and expansion.

 In the ever-changing online world, it is imperative to move with the times and stay up to date with the latest changes.

Bring your business into the 21^st century and get in touch with In Front Digital to discuss further how SEO can benefit your business!