What Are SEO Services & What Do SEO Services Include?
Search Engine Optimization or SEO — it’s a term you hear a lot these days, but what are SEO Services?
If you’re a business owner with a website, you’ve probably heard about SEO but may want to learn more about the specific SEO services meaning and how it can help your business capture more leads by driving potential customers to your site.
In straightforward terms, SEO is the process of improving your website’s search engine rankings with Google, Bing, Yahoo, and any other search engines online. That can be done by ensuring your site meets the criteria laid out by the various search engines and then monitoring performance and adjusting based on needed improvements or changes to search algorithms.
In fact, with Google representing over 90% of search volume, most SEO is geared towards Google-defined best practices.
Because of the importance of an online presence for most companies today, SEO has gone from a DIY project to a vast industry with experts that bring deep knowledge and technical skill to the table. Gone are the days when you could build a site and hope that people would find you. In fact, over 50% of companies are looking to professional SEO services to help them navigate their online footprint.
What are SEO Services?
To answer the question: ‘What are SEO services?’ — it’s the optimization services provided by an agency or consultant that are intended to increase organic traffic and lead conversions and, thereby, your business revenue. Whether you choose a one-off experience or ongoing services and analytics, professional SEO services are crucial to optimizing your site’s ability to grow organic search engine visibility and traffic.
The ultimate goal is to rank on the first page of Google’s Search Engine Results Page (SERPs) and a digital marketing and SEO agency can provide full SEO services to get you there.
When accessing an SEO agency, look for these key elements in their work product:
- Do they offer deep research, including about your competitors? The information is available to understand what SEO practices are successful in your industry and amongst your competitors. Is that being offered?
- Do they off an in-depth SEO audit identifying problems and shortcomings?
- Do they offer a plan to optimize your website and monitor its progress?
- Do they offer to develop a content strategy to provide ongoing marketing opportunities that are SEO-optimized and will continue to drive traffic?
- Do they provide in-depth keyword research (we’ll get into why that’s important in the next section)?
- Do they offer backlinking services (again, we’ll explain shortly)?
Types of SEO Services
When we talk about what are the different SEO services, it boils down to what types of SEO your site may need to change or supplement. During an SEO audit, your expert team will assess the different types of SEO services and recommend where improvements can be made and what services are included.
This SEO service list, broken down into six categories, gives you an outline of the types of opportunities that may exist for your site. Each one plays a key role in increasing your ranking, while also providing the best user experience.
On-Page SEO
- Keyword Research — Understanding keywords for your industry and then optimizing your content with those keywords and phrases is critical in helping search engine crawlers assess and identify your site pages.
- Meta Data — Meta tags not only allow you to reinforce keywords, but also provide context to search engine crawlers while also enticing customers to click on your page. They include the page title, meta description, headings, and alt image tags and are HTML code embedded in your site’s infrastructure by page.
- Internal Links — Links guide search engines around your site, but they also lead users through the sales funnel to more and more product-oriented pages. Done well, you can increase site dwell time by providing relevant content that keeps users engaged.
Off-Page SEO
- Backlinking — By building backlinks from reputable sites, your website grows in authority in the eyes of the search engines.
- Guest posting — When creating great content, it’s always a good idea to consider offering it to a related site as a guest post. This gets you exposure to a wider audience and further establishes you are a thought leader in your industry.
- Social Media — Similar to guest posting, marketing on social media channels that are appropriate to your industry is a great way to get exposure and grow your audience. Any post should link back to your site so that potential customers get introduced to your products or services.
Technical SEO
- Website Speed — One of the key ranking factors, page speed, is monitored by Google in exacting detail and any issues affect your SERP rankings fast. Google wants to present the best product to their customer and a slow site can be penalized quickly.
- Mobile Friendliness — Mobile devices make up more than 65% of search traffic in 2022 so having a site that is mobile responsive is imperative.
- Site Structure — An organized site structure is more easily indexed by Google and the other search engines. In addition, things like internal links, breadcrumbs, or broken links impact the user experience as well.
- Security — All of the top search engines penalize compromised websites that don’t maintain security and secure an SSL Certificate.
Specialized SEO
Local SEO
- Optimized Listings — For companies with local ‘brick and mortar’ stores or services, website SEO should be enhanced to maximize local search results with optimized online directories.
- Google My Business — By optimizing Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business), including Google Maps, with current content and information, your site improves their ranking by page.
- Keywords Optimized for Local Area — For local businesses and franchises, keywords specific to the local area can be a great way to differentiate your business and show local relevance.
- Local Content — Part of local SEO is optimizing content with local references, including landmarks, street addresses, communities, and neighborhoods.
YouTube SEO
In 2023, YouTube is the second-most visited site and has over 22 billion monthly visitors. In fact, 78% of users list YouTube as their primary source for video content. YouTube also provides the opportunity to utilize SEO and unique keywords through the descriptions and content on subscriber pages.
App Store SEO
The iOS and Android Stores get a ton of search traffic daily, which means if you have an app listed on either store, you need to optimize your SEO to attract visitors and enhance search results.
What Do SEO Services Include?
Now that you have seen an SEO list of services, most engagements start with an SEO Audit where you will discover how your site stacks up in each of the categories. With SEO as a service with many branches, there will be some flexibility in staging and prioritizing the workload to maximize the results. There will also be longer term initiatives related to ongoing content strategies, social media marketing opportunities, and analytics monitoring and analysis.
It’s also important to note that SEO is not an instant fix. Seeing results can often take several weeks to several months as search engines define how the changes impact their SERPs. However, it is most important to get started and use best practices to meet SEO standards as quickly as possible.
How Much Should I Pay for SEO Services?
Hopefully, we’ve answered this question: What is SEO and Why Do I Need It?
When you try to measure what are the benefits of SEO services, it becomes clear — those companies that use comprehensive and organic SEO services have better results when their potential customers are looking for the products or services that they sell.
If you have already determined that you need SEO services or are just looking for SEO services, expect to start with an audit where pricing is based on size of the organization and number of pages and complexity on the site. From there, your SEO Services Agency will help determine priorities and costs to see the end results you envision.
To Sum Up
To achieve results-focused SEO that drives site traffic and increases SERPs placement, a full-service SEO Services Agency will bring the expertise and experience needed to improve site performance, while also staying up to date on the ever-changing industry parameters and algorithm changes.
If your site isn’t ranking on the first page of Google, you are missing out on most or all of your organic site visits. Can your business afford to miss those opportunities?
Contact Lounge Lizard to learn more about improved results for SEO today.
