What is an SEO company? The easiest answer is that it is a “company that performs the service of search engine optimization for clients.” This service is misunderstood by many business owners who know that they need to do something in order to make the internet work to get them customers, but do not know what the process entails. Many companies who provide SEO as a service do not elaborate on what they do for each client, either in order to protect their process or because they do not feel the need to share this information with the people paying them, but the SEO process itself takes many forms. “Doing SEO” means performing any of hundreds of potential actions or analysis in order to enact an outcome of higher rankings on search engines. The process itself works towards this goal, but the specific definitions of the goal and the process are the only way for business owners to understand if the process is working or not. This is why it is important to interview the SEO companies you are considering in order to get a better sense as far as what exactly you are paying for. It will also benefit you to be somewhat familiar with the kinds of work that goes into effective SEO, so that you know what to look for.
SEO is generally based on performing tasks that have been identified as having a benefit on moving rankings higher on search engines. The search engines themselves use hundreds of different elements to consider with regards to each search that is performed, in order to rank the results that are provided from the best to the least effective. This means that with every search that is performed, hundreds of different elements on your website are being compared to all other websites that are being considered by that search engine, and the results that are displayed are positioned in a way that posts the closest match to everything the search engine is looking for, and then the results following it are slightly less of a match. Because there are so many different elements in play all at once, most SEO experts will concentrate on the things that are known to have the biggest impact. For example, we know that content developed and posted on a website is a major factor in ranking position, and speed of a website is important but not as important as content. This means that improving the speed of the website will have a positive effect, but writing better content will probably have a better effect. When deciding which tasks to perform, the SEO company must look at how many hours they have to preform these tasks then prioritize them in order to have the best effect. Both types of actions will benefit the project and both are “doing SEO,” but one will have more impact. Most SEO companies develop a strategy for your project that will mix different tactics together in order to have the greatest impact over time. The more effective SEO companies will begin to see improvements in the rankings of the pages they are providing SEO for, and hopefully these improvements will be within searches that are important for customers who may buy from you. This is the process that can ove rankings up, and also is the process that can use rankings that are moved up in order to actually convert into customers. Simple ranking for terms is not enough, you need to rank for the terms that customers who are ready to buy are using.
