Ever since the rise of the internet and search engines, companies have looked to expand into the online market by increasing their visibility on the internet. One of the most effective ways of increasing visibility online is having a Search Engine Optimization(SEO) strategy that puts your company and its work at the top of search engines. Therefore, it is important to hire an SEO agency that can provide solid and sustainable results. 

The web & digital marketing industry is an unregulated industry and clients are unable to differentiate effectively between vendors. As an SEO agency with 12 years of experience, we have unfortunately seen many ‘black-hat SEO techniques’ being adopted that bring clients sub-optimal and unsustainable results. These include poor quality, automated, paid backlinking strategy, chat GPT-generated website content and poor user experience. Usually, these services are offered at dirt-cheap prices and many clients fall for these scammy practices since it’s hard to differentiate a good SEO partner from a scammy one.

So how should you go about choosing an SEO partner? 

There are three pillars of a successful SEO strategy and a reputable SEO agency should particularly focus on technical SEO, superior content generation, and solid backlinking. Let’s go through these one-by-one.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO focuses on the functional aspects of a website in order to increase visibility online. This is about creating a good user experience for your website. Why does user experience matter? The main reason for this is that visitors will engage better and spend more time on your website. This tells Google that the website is useful for the visitor and hence your website ranks higher on Google’s algorithm. 

A good SEO agency will look for three things in particular to focus on: Largest Contentful Paint(LCP), this measures the loading speed of your website, Interaction to the Next Paint(INP), which measures how interactive your website is to user interactions such as downloads or add to carts, and Cumulative Layout Shift(CLS), which measures how visually stable your website is. 

A good SEO agency must also have certain strategies for creating great user experience. Some of the strategies they would look at would be:

Good Load Speed:

An example of a good user experience would be to have the website load quickly instead of it taking time to load. Having a website that takes a while to load on a mobile device or computer could potentially lead to website abandonment and lead to lower engagement. All of this would hurt your search engine rankings. 

A word of caution here – be careful of low-performance SEO companies which use page speed as a hook to grab clients. Page speed alone is not enough to vet an SEO partner. Let’s proceed.

Mobile Friendly Site:

Having a website that is also able to fit and operate on a small screen is increasingly important for good SEO. With a large percentage of mobile traffic originating from mobile devices, this step is key to rank high on the search algorithm for Google. 

Use Breadcrumb Navigation:

Having breadcrumb navigation allows users to keep track of where they are within a specific website. It increases the chance of your content being discovered, reduces bounce rate, and improves engagement with the website’s content. 

Use a Solid On-page keyword strategy:

Each page should have 1-2  primary focus keyphrases that it is optimized for along with 5-10 Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords, that are conceptually related to the primary keywords. Mapping your target keywords to pages on your website through this strategy is immensely useful in ranking n search engines. Ensure all target keywords are efficiently mapped to pages and there are no keyword cannibalization, that is, two or more pages are not competing for the same keywords. 

Superior Content Generation

This is perhaps the most obvious quality to look for in an SEO agency – do they create great content that will be favorable to people online? However, this warrants a further look.

What are some of the ways in which a good SEO agency goes about creating high quality content?

Creating Relevant Content:

Creating content that is relevant will be more appealing to users. This starts with having some expertise on the topic or being able to do deep research. Then, it helps to research what topics are already written about online and find any topics people haven’t talked about. If the topic being written about is relevant, then you can dive deep into the content and have contextual material to make an article or a video. 

Satisfy User Intent:

Google is capable of categorizing content based on what the content is about. It can be classified as people, organizations, concepts, etc. Using these classifications, Google then separates them into one of four categories: informational, navigational, transactional, and commercial. This is important for content creation because the specific key words used in articles and the content purpose should be aligned so that when the user searches the key word, the content of the article matches what the user wanted to read about.

Create Original Content:

An agency’s commitment to using original content for articles is key to high SEO. In the age of ChatGPT, high quality content that is taken from an individual’s perspective and expertise is highly valuable these days. 

While ChatGPT can be used, we believe it should mainly be used to create outlines, generate ideas & summarize existing literature on the topic.

Solid Backlinking

Backlinking is incredibly important in order to get high search engine rankings. Having these backlinks exist on other websites are a signal to Google and other search engines about the authority and relevance of your website and how highly your website should rank on their search engines.

Finding High Authority Websites for Backlinking:

Finding high authority websites to put in backlinks can be of great help to a website. Tools such as SEMrush help in this endeavor. SEMrush has a backlink audit tool which helps you identify high quality websites. When you identify what websites you want to have backlinks on, there is a wide variety of ways you can have backlinks on the website such as through guest blogs, forum interactions, etc. This strategy is difficult as it involves contacting the owners of the website and requesting to create any content that can have backlinks on them. 

This is one of the primary differentiators between a reputable SEO company which spends the time and effort to generate valuable backlinks and backs those backlinks with superior content vs a low-quality SEO company that builds hundreds of backlinks each month but automates the process and relies on creating backlinks from a limited set of domains.

Local Citations:

Finding niche and local directories and posting backlinks on there is an effective strategy for local businesses. Having backlinks on various local and niche directories help improve local SEO. They also help build implicit endorsements if these backlinks are on directories such as Google Business Profile or Bing Places, search engines consider sites like these quite valuable. 

If you are looking for a digital marketing company in Naperville that can provide great results for your website, talk to Webtage, a premiere digital marketing agency in Naperville that provides the best SEO service in Naperville for expanding your search visibility.