If you have been in tune with the world of digital marketing, you know that SEO has become one of the important parts of online marketing. Many companies pay a lot of money to SEO agencies to help them come up with systems and methods they can use to rank better. Good SEO ensures that you beat your competition in the battle for visibility in the online market, and get more people to look at what you are offering.

Unfortunately, a lot of people, even SEO agencies are having a hard time coping with SEO. It is understandable, after all SEO is complicated and Google and other search engine platforms work to make it harder every single year. This article will serve as a lifesaver, a way to help you come out of the sea of complexities SEO offers. In this article, you will learn some fundamentals that are necessary to win in SEO today as an SEO agency.

The Most Important thing to know about SEO

While there are many techniques, tricks, etc. that can be used to game the SEO system, SEO is not a system of tricks and techniques alone. The fundamental principle of SEO is understanding how people search and what people search for, and working to give them the best results for their search.

This is good news and bad news. The bad news first: because customers desires and expectations are constantly changing, the target is always moving. The techniques that would have helped your company rank just two years ago might be outdated today. This is bad news mainly for those who are rigid and rely solely on some so-called proven techniques and quick tips to work.

The good news is that if you are flexible, and are willing to grow with the customer, you will always stay on top of the game. If you have a good understanding of the basic needs of your customer online and are dedicated to satisfying them, you will be successful in the long run. This also means you must do away with every notion of gaming the system or using quick Black Hat SEO techniques to push your website up the ranks. It also means you should be willing to play the long game, and understand that SEO is a process that involves trying out new things, failing, running analytics and trying again.

This, of course, doesn’t mean that SEO is a game of trial and error. Far from it. It just means that sometimes you can make some poor judgements or estimations, but it is fine if you can quickly learn from your mistakes and move on. 

SEO Factors that can impact your success

There are some solid SEO requirements that every SEO agency must be privy to if they wish to be successful in SEO. These factors can play a big role in impacting the success of your company, and should never be neglected. Some of them are:

• On-page SEO

This is a fancy word for “content”. Users of search engine come to Google and other search engines to find good content. This kind of good content is more than just articles or educational research papers. Good content on the internet today also means pictures, infographics and videos.

If you have been on the internet for a while, then you have seen or read the phrase “Content is king”. This is true, and even more than that, good, relatable and helpful content rules them all. Google and other search engines will judge you based on your ability to provide content that your website visitors want.

For you to do this right, you need to have a basic understanding of what your website visitors want. As an SEO agency, take out some time to do some research on what your prospective customers are constantly searching for online. That way, you can find some keywords they use constantly and build content around those keywords. In addition to that, get your team to be on social media, engage customers and find out the questions they ask the most on these social networks. Your content on your website can provide answers to these questions, and if Google sees that people are engaging a lot with your content, they will push your content up the ranks so that more people will see it.  

• Technical SEO

This has a lot to do with your site performance. If your website is difficult to access, if it is very slow to load, etc., your SEO ratings will drop. Site structure, indexing, crawling, page speed and URL structure are just a few of the things that Google will look at when they are deciding whether to give you a good rating or not. 

• Off-page SEO

This has to do with everything you do to promote your content outside your website. Everything you do to make people see your website and brand as a whole as a competent authority in your industry is what makes up good off-page SEO. This includes social media promotion and link building. 

If you can get featured or publish good content on top authority sites in your niche, you can get a lot of people to check you out more than usual, and Google will take this as a sign that you are a credible source of information. To reward this, they will give you more opportunity to promote your work by raising your website up the SEO ranks.

Conclusion 

There is a lot more to SEO than what is written here, and if you are an SEO agency, then it is your job to find them out. However, if you keep the basic principle of SEO and marketing online, you will be able to find your way through any difficult times. SEO and digital marketing as a whole are just marketing at the end of the day, but with different tools. The fundamental principles of marketing are more important than the tools themselves. When you understand how marketing works online, you will find SEO easy and rewarding to your business.