Four things Small Businesses Should Consider When Seeking SEO Services

Small business owners seeking SEO services generally have specific needs and challenges. Hiring an SEO service firm to help your business rank in Google can be overwhelming. It can feel like bringing an old car into a mechanic and hearing them rattle off a ton of repairs you need. The firm may be describing problems that you have never even heard of. How do you know what you need?


The following four SEO services are ones you should consider hiring an agency for.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is the most important part of an SEO project and one of the main reasons that small businesses seek SEO services. Keyword research has to be done before you can even put an SEO campaign in place. Each page on your domain should target a specific keyword. You should have enough pages, targeting enough keywords, to cover the key aspects of your business. Picking the right keywords comes down to three main factors. 1) How relevant is the keyword to your business and does it have commercial intent? 2) How many people search for that keyword in your serviced geography? 3) How competitive is the keyword?


Once you know the answers to those questions, you will know what keywords to focus on. An SEO service can help you determine which keywords you want to rank for. You will want them to do the keyword research and provide you with a list in a timely manner so that you can begin structuring your website accordingly.

Page Creation

You know what keywords you want to rank for. Now you need your SEO service to create pages that will rank for those keywords. If you don’t have a relevant page on your website, you have no chance of ranking in the Search Engine Results for that keyword. As a small business owner, you may not have the time or know-how to write the content, and are seeking SEO services to have the pages written for you. When creating pages, you’ll want to make sure your SEO service is:


· Making them long enough to be comprehensive,

· Providing unique content for each page,

· Producing pages that people will find valuable and interesting to ensure that you have a low bounce rate and a better chance of ranking in Google and other search engines,


· Keeping the URLs simple, easy to find and related to the keywords.


If your SEO service does all that for you, they’re a keeper. If not, you may consider doing the work in-house or hiring a new SEO service for your small business.

Page Optimization

If you have pages written on your website that are not SEO-friendly, the agency that you’re working with should be able to fix them for you. Search engines are just computers. They require certain elements so they can understand the subject matter of the page. A good SEO consultant or agency will be able to make the modifications to the content and the technical underpinnings of your pages to ensure that Google can understand them as well as your visitors can. Good page optimization is seamless and works for both visitors and search engines.


Here are some things you should have them do:


· Create keyword-relevant and attractive TITLE tags for your listing in search results,


· Include the keywords and common variations and synonyms in the body copy of the page,


· Optimize the anchor text of links on the page and to the page,


· Add notation to the images so Google can understand them,

Link Building

Link building can be a difficult process to undertake. It’s one that can be good to outsource to an SEO agency. Google uses the quality and quantity of links you have on your pages to determine where to rank you for relevance. An SEO consultant or agency will understand which links have the most value and seek them out. They will also improve your content so that you are linkable to other sites. The SEO agency will put internal and external links on your page. The key to good link building is quality AND quantity. The best link building projects are done manually so they take some time.


There are many reasons that a small business seeks out SEO services. You have to decide if you wish to seek out these services or if you want to do them in-house. You can certainly hire an agency short-term to do one of these tasks and see how they handle it. If they do well, then they can work on other projects for you.