Search engine optimization (SEO) is the cornerstone of long-term organic business growth. With your content speaking for your brand, it’s like you have salespersons working for you 24/7.
In fact, a majority of business-to-business (B2B) customers prioritize reading through a brand’s content before contacting sales. A 2023 survey by Demand Gen Report found that 71% of B2B buyers consume multiple content assets while evaluating business solutions.
To ensure your content reaches potential buyers, it should appear in the relevant parts of their customer journey. In short, you have to tame the search engines, aka the practice of SEO, to connect readers to the content assets you want them to see.
That said, having one member of your marketing team spend an hour a week finding keywords on Ahrefs and Semrush won’t cut it. If you want to stay in the spotlight or first page of the search engine result pages (SERPs) for years, you’ll need a bigger focus on SEO.
With an SEO partner, you can leverage search engines to your advantage without hiring additional people. Let’s dig in to see why you need an SEO partner and how to choose one.
Here’s what we’ll cover:
Why Your Business Needs an SEO Partner
With time-intensive tasks like content creation, technical SEO, off-page SEO, keyword research, content strategy, and website audits, handling your business’s SEO needs is not a one-person job. Instead, It’s better to rely on a team of people who specialize in these SEO practices.
While it might make sense for a company to bring in its own in-house SEO team, it’s not a necessity for all. You may be better off working with external SEO partners who can take some of this work off your hands and offer a range of benefits.
Vast Expertise and Multifaceted Skill Set
A good SEO company ensures its team can deliver value to customers with its SEO services. Plus, it stays abreast of industry best practices and changes to search engine algorithms to keep clients competitive.
When you partner with such an agency, you get access to the skills and experience it has accumulated from providing marketing services to multiple clients in different industries.
Plus, by partnering with a resourceful SEO agency, you get services from dedicated experts who have dealt with different SEO aspects, from finding difficult keyword opportunities to acquiring quality backlinks.
Cost Savings
SEO agencies are an affordable way to get your content strategy off the ground without investing in a large in-house team. Instead of spending money to hire, train, and manage SEO experts, link-building specialists, and content managers, you can leverage the expertise of an agency to achieve your SEO and content marketing goals.
In fact, working with an agency lets you convert the capital expenses to operating expenses. You only pay for the services you need within the timeframe of your marketing campaign.
Plus, if you choose a versatile SEO agency, you’ll also secure other services — like content creation, graphic design, and competitor research — without having to recruit additional employees.
Strategic Planning
To get a high return on investment (ROI) with SEO, your brand should appear in relevant search queries that lead customers toward a purchase. In other words, you need to cater to different sales funnel stages.
However, identifying content opportunities through keyword research, analyzing search intent, and getting quality backlinks to support your content efforts can be a struggle for a one-person marketing team. In contrast, experienced SEO agencies have in-house resources to formulate a long-term strategy for engaging customers throughout the customer lifecycle
Performance Tracking
An SEO partner offers you the additional bandwidth to keep track of content metrics, audience engagement, and website performance. It helps you take informed marketing decisions to increase your business visibility.
In fact, it’s more than just seeing how well your website is performing in search engines. SEO partners help you track user behavior, sales funnels, and conversion metrics to monitor content’s effectiveness and how it is contributing to your business’s success.
Offerings To Look For in an SEO Partner
To give you a better understanding of what kind of digital marketing agency to partner with, let’s look at what you might need from an SEO partner:
Keyword Research
Keywords make the search engines go round. Search engines use these terms to understand the content of webpages, find page relevance to user queries, and rank suitable webpages in the SERPs.
As a result, to improve your brand’s search engine presence, you need to know what keywords your target audience uses. Plus, you need to understand what customers are looking for when they search for those terms.
An SEO agency can help with keyword research by having its experts study customers’ search behavior — common queries, search intent, and buying journey stage. As a result, it can provide you with keyword opportunities to create appropriate content for your target audience while considering factors like domain authority, competition, and keyword relevancy.
On-Page Optimization
While keyword research helps you with content ideation, you’ll still need to optimize each webpage to let search crawlers know what it’s about — also called on-page optimization.
Typically, this means publishing content that addresses search intent, including semantic keywords, and adding key phrases to title tags, meta descriptions, and page URLs.
Beyond that, you should also include relevant internal and external links to help search engines understand the relationship between different content pieces.
In addition to using these tactics to create new content, you can also optimize older pieces you’ve published as part of a content refresh.
While on-page optimization can be overwhelming, an SEO agency can help by creating detailed briefs with pointers to address search intent and suggestions for page URLs, title tags, meta descriptions, and links.
SEO Audits
In addition to searching for new keywords, preparing fresh content pieces, and getting more backlinks, you also need to see if the existing website content is working for you instead of against you.
For instance, if your content features broken links, readers aren’t going to have a seamless experience. Similarly, you might struggle to achieve your goals with outdated advice, incorrect information, and incompatible formatting.
An SEO audit from a versatile SEO agency can help you:
- Analyze competitive keywords, traffic trends, and linking domains to identify content refresh opportunities.
- Identify user experience issues stopping customers from converting.
- Assess pages competing for the same keywords — also called keyword cannibalization.
- Pinpoint content optimization opportunities for incorporating new products and services.
- Detect technical issues — such as poor performance on mobile devices.
Off-Page Optimizations
Off-page SEO is the practice of improving your website’s authority and trustworthiness through actions outside your website.
For instance, think of how it would look for your finance startup if Investopedia recommended you to its audience. While that might be a far-fetched idea, the takeaway is to get leading websites to trust you and lend credibility to your website via link building.
Examples include getting organic backlinks from reputable websites, earning recommendations from influencers on social media, and guest posting on other websites.
An expert SEO agency can help you get a head start in your backlinks strategy via its existing marketing network, social media reach, and industry connections.
Technical SEO
The focus of technical SEO is on enhancing the performance of your website to improve the user experience (UX). It includes the following activities:
- Improving page speeds.
- Refining site structure.
- Creating and submitting a sitemap.
- Implementing structured data.
- Enhancing accessibility.
- Developing a mobile SEO strategy.
Typically, SEO agencies have developers on their teams to optimize your website’s structure, edit the robot.txt file (which instructs the search crawlers about the pages they should and should not crawl), and improve your website’s performance.
Competitor Research and Analysis
SEO competitor analysis involves identifying websites that rank higher than yours on search engine results for keywords associated with your website. It pinpoints things the competitors may be offering that you should, as well as content topics you may be missing.
The goal of competitor research and analysis is to discover your content’s shortcomings and identify areas of improvement.
Competitor research is typically an essential offering of SEO agencies since the takeaways — keyword opportunities, potential keyword clusters, and content gaps — shape the overall SEO strategy.
Local SEO
Local SEO focuses on helping your website get higher rankings for search results with local intent, such as for queries like “Italian food restaurant near me.” It benefits businesses with a physical location or those that want to target a particular geographic region.
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Local SEO includes creating a Google Business profile and optimizing content to target locally relevant keywords.
An SEO agency can help with local SEO by optimizing your Google Business profile, acquiring high-quality backlinks from local websites, and implementing relevant schema markup.
Rank Tracking and Performance Monitoring
You’ll need reports to see if you’re riding the wave or just treading water. While common performance reports include metrics for organic traffic, priority keywords, and high-quality backlinks, you may also benefit from reports on overall SEO performance.
For example, besides looking at traffic, see how many attributable leads and sales each content piece brings to your company. Similarly, you may track engagement across the different types of content to see what’s working to your advantage.
In short, ensure the SEO partner offers relevant performance reports to help you see the ROI of your SEO efforts.
Strategic Advice
An SEO partner can also offer strategic advice based on your SEO performance. For instance, if a particular content format results in more conversions than others, the agency can offer recommendations to leverage that format.
Besides that, if you’re going to release a new product, an SEO partner can recommend new content pieces, refreshes of previous blogs, and appropriate lead magnets to develop an organic audience before the launch.
How To Choose an SEO Agency
Once you know what you need from an SEO partner, here’s how you can choose an SEO agency.
1. Review the Services Offered
While some SEO companies will offer the bulk of the above-mentioned offerings as part of their services, you’ll more likely encounter those offering only a selection based on the experience they have with those services in the past.
Your focus should be on agencies that offer the specific services that your business requires.
For instance, an SEO agency can also help with content creation, so you don’t need to worry about hiring in-house writers or managing a pool of freelancers. Instead, you can offload the majority of your content marketing tasks — from keyword research to copy editing — to the SEO agency.
Similarly, you’ll find SEO agencies that offer graphic design, CMS upload, and content refresh services. Typically, it’s good to partner with an agency that has more than what you need so you can develop your content strategy without any hard limits.
2. Evaluate Niche Specialization
To succeed in your SEO efforts, you want an agency that understands your industry and niche. So, look for a company that either has experience in your niche or has a process for getting up to speed.
For instance, if your industry involves frequent changes, you may need an SEO agency that can stay up-to-date. Similarly, if your niche requires expert insights, you’ll benefit from an agency that can connect you with leading subject matter experts based on the topic.
Plus, see what the agency’s onboarding process looks like. Does its team gather all the information for understanding your offerings — via intake forms and meetings — or jump in feet first and worry about the basics afterward? Finally, go through the agency’s processes to see how it handles complicated topics.
3. Avoid Any Unrealistic Promises
SEO is a long game, and you’re working with black boxes at the heart of search engines — with frequently changing algorithms. As a result, you should avoid any agency that promises guaranteed SEO results within a short time period, like the one below:
In fact, a recent Ahrefs survey of SEO professionals found that most SEO efforts show their results in three to six months.
So, chances are that an agency promising a No. 1 position within a few weeks is using unethical SEO tactics (also called black-hat SEO) for short-term results, which will end with a manual penalty from search engines sooner or later.
If you’re looking to achieve long-term business goals, you’ll need to opt for an SEO agency that remains clear in its promises, helps you navigate any problems, and tweaks your SEO campaigns as required to help you get to the first page of Google Search results.
In fact, you’ll have an easier time if you partner with an agency that inherently understands SEO, keeps up-to-date with industry changes, and refines its processes with each search engine update.
4. Assess Their Results
Check the SEO agency’s results to see if its strategies and campaigns have been effective in helping brands grow their online presence. In particular, you can look for:
- Organic traffic: Look at the trend of organic traffic over time and see if the SEO agency significantly increased the volume.
- Keyword rankings: See how many keywords it helped a brand rank for.
- Content performance: See if the produced content received sufficient audience engagement and social media visibility.
- Data on conversions: Besides social shares and organic traffic, ask if the agency can pinpoint how many sales its content pieces generated.
- Quality of backlinks: Ask the agency to show how it helped another brand improve its backlink profile. Plus, see if the content helped a brand become an authority in its niche.
While you can ask the agency for performance reports, the simpler way to get this information is through the agency’s case studies.
5. Consider the Costs
Working with an agency lets you save a lot of upfront expenses in exchange for operating costs. You save on many overhead costs since you no longer need to worry about training another set of employees. Plus, you start getting benefits from the agency’s team right away.
That said, you should assess how much you’re saving depending on your current marketing staff. If you already have writers, editors, and content strategists, you might benefit from an agency that only offers SEO services. However, if you’re starting from scratch, it may be more cost-effective to opt for an agency that provides a wide range of services.
SEO Agency vs. SEO Content Agency
While navigating the list of potential SEO partners, you’ll encounter two types of agencies: SEO agencies and SEO content agencies. While you might consider them synonymous, they have their differences.
Here’s how SEO agencies and SEO content agencies differ:
- Area of focus: SEO agencies focus strictly on search-engine related efforts — keyword research, technical SEO, local SEO, rank tracking, and off-page optimization. In contrast, SEO content agencies handle SEO tasks, offer content creation, perform content audits, interview experts, and track content performance.
- Team composition: SEO agencies come with web developers and technical SEO experts who can help optimize your website’s structure for search engines. On the other hand, SEO content agencies house niche experts who can talk to your audience while balancing the search engines’ needs.
In short, an SEO agency conducts keyword research or content audits, offers you data, and leaves you to figure it out on your own. If you have the in-house content capacity, your staff can implement the findings. Otherwise, you’ll need to look for a content marketing agency to prepare content — which means extra collaboration, extra expenses, and extra effort.
But why hire two when you can hire one? With an SEO content agency, you get almost all the services under one roof. In fact, since the content creation team has direct access to the SEO experts, the content strategy gets executed seamlessly and results in improved quality.
How The Blogsmith Does SEO and Content
At The Blogsmith, we are an SEO content agency that specializes in content with an SEO focus that benefits both the reader and the search engine. We help our clients publish rank-worthy content that engages their specific target audience, answers users’ queries, and moves them down the buyer’s journey.
Here are some of our SEO strategy offerings:
- Content strategy development for mapping out a path to better search engine rankings through superior content
- Data-driven topic development and content creation
- On-page SEO to help create content that holds its own against the search crawlers
- Technical SEO audits to improve the URL structure, remove duplicate content, and fix broken links
- Content audits to determine the quality and performance of existing content
- Competitor analyses to identify gaps and areas of improvement
- Rank tracking to measure the performance of our SEO efforts over time
In other words, your brand doesn’t have to choose between an SEO agency and a content agency. Instead, with The Blogsmith, you can opt for an agency that does both, as we use SEO as the foundation of everything we do. We take the search data and use it to create strategies and content that meet your goals — whether that’s lead generation, brand awareness, or higher conversion rates.
Rather than making you figure out the SEO stuff on your own, we work with you throughout the process. Plus, we also do technical audits, content evaluations, and rank tracking for big-picture planning to ensure we’re meeting your goals.
At The Blogsmith, we’ve got all your bases covered — SEO, content, and strategy — all under one roof. This means everything flows smoothly, from planning your content to getting it out there. Our teams work closely together, making sure every strategy, campaign, and piece of content pulls its weight to help your business succeed.
What’s more? We’re not just shooting arrows in the dark. Instead, with Maddy Osman, one of the top 100 content marketers in the industry, at the helm of our team, everything The Blogsmith does is backed by strategy and experience. You can review our client testimonials, case studies, and portfolio of work to see us in action yourself.
Final Thoughts: How To Choose the Right SEO Agency for Your Business
The best SEO agency can turn your website from just another web address on the internet into a high-ranking authority for useful content. You can have a team of content and SEO specialists on your side without going over your marketing budget.
Everything hinges on which agency you opt for. If you go with a versatile SEO content agency, you can have everything you need under one roof. Otherwise, you’ll need to hire two or more partners just to cover the range of basic services.
If you’re looking for a single agency for your SEO needs, consider The Blogsmith. Our team of dedicated professionals — content strategists, subject matter experts, and graphic designers — will go the extra mile to meet your requirements.
Get in touch today to find out more.
