If you can generate business from the internet, you need to have a website and an SEO campaign in place. SEO can be likened to fuel as it drives your website towards achieving higher rankings. Many businesses which invest in SEO are often not aware of what work needs to be done to achieve these rankings. The image above illustrates what tasks are a standard part of SEO. I’ll expand on the descriptions below:
- Keyword research – gone are the days of creating a list of 8 keywords which are targeted on and off the site; the process now involves constantly finding keywords around a select set which define your product or service
- Website optimisation – apart from the initial work on improving the websites speed and resolving technical issues; the process includes finding technical areas for improvements, internal linking and development
- Content – this can come in many forms from text to image or video; the more resource intensive and elaborate the content, the higher the costs, but it works better than standard text pieces
- Link building – getting links to your site can be a difficult task in todays world, get the wrong links and you’ll suffer or put in an effort to get good links and benefit from its results; one thing remains true, never pay for links
- Reporting – apart from the standard reports including numbers, there should be a comparison to projections, what helped drive the rankings/traffic and future scope for the campaign
You should expect this from any SEO consultant or agency working on your campaign. Working on a single element from the above won’t achieve much results. And once again, never pay to get links unless you don’t care about the future.