I was doing a little research into SEO services for small business. I wasn’t surprised to see a bunch of blog posts discussing how entrepreneurs can start their own SEO companies. SEO is extremely important in the modern business world. There is plenty of room for more competition. But not all providers offer all the right services.
As an entrepreneur with your own SEO company, you could get bogged down in offering a laundry list of services among which there are none your company truly excels at. Another option is to offer five core services:
1. Keyword Research
Webtek Digital Marketing is a Salt Lake City SEO and marketing firm with a sister office in Austin, TX. The Webtek team defines SEO as the process of improving online visibility and relevance, especially in relation to organic searches. Pay special attention to the idea of organic.
Organic search results are those unpaid results that pop up on Google, Bing, etc. They are what SEO experts are after. To get a website listed near the top of the results, an SEO developer needs to use the right keywords. Finding those keywords is a matter of research.
Webtek maintains that keyword research is the most important among all SEO services because it is the baseline for everything else. What happens in content creation, PPC advertising, etc. all flows from keywords. If the research sucks, so will the end results.
2. Content Creation
There is a saying in the SEO world that ‘content is king‘. Here’s what it means: content is ultimately the most important element from a website visitor’s perspective. Visitors go to websites looking for information.
That is what content is. It is the information users are looking for. Therefore, it needs to be good. It needs to be helpful and relevant. If an SEO provider doesn’t know how to create quality content, they are going to struggle to retain traffic.
3. On-Site Optimization
Also known as on-page optimization, on-site optimization is the process of modifying and tweaking the various elements on a website to make them more search-friendly. The easier it is for search engine algorithms to find and index pages, the more likely those pages are to rank higher on organic search results.
On-site optimization involves a lot of little things. SEO developers concentrate on things like meta-tags, descriptive titles, image optimization, and reducing page load times. As a side note, Google algorithms are trained to prefer mobile-friendly sites first. So optimizing a site for mobile is important.
4. Off-Site Optimization
Off-site optimization (or off-page optimization, if you will) is all about the actions you take outside of the website environment for the purposes of boosting the site’s authority and relevance. Publishing guest posts on other reputable websites is a good example.
One of the keys to on-site optimization is the coveted backlink. A backlink is a link on another site that points back to yours. A series of links from reputable sites can go a long way toward boosting online reputation and authority.
5. Local SEO Services
Last but not least, it is very difficult to run a successful SEO company without offering local SEO services. Some of the largest corporations in the world started as local businesses that needed to get a foot in the door at home. Local SEO affords plenty of opportunities to do that.
Are you an entrepreneur looking to start your own SEO company? If so, don’t bite off more than you can chew in the beginning. Offer these five basic services and then grow from there.
