If you want to find information online, whether it is a recipe, a new coat or a holiday destination, you will more than likely pass through a search engine. This might be Google, Bing or even a website such as Amazon or TripAdvisor. Anywhere that has a search function built in is likely to be using some form of search engine optimization services (or SEO services for short).
These SEO services cover a number of different areas and in this post, I will be covering a few of the more common ones that you will encounter.
What are SEO Services?
In short, SEO services are services that are provided to increase or solidify your business website’s position in search engine results. Commonly this is used to refer only to Google search but can be applied to any online site that uses a search function to aggregate information and provide results to searchers. Therefore, you are likely to have encountered the effects of SEO on Youtube, Amazon, eBay, Bing and many more websites besides these. This is because they all use a system that takes the information that is being searched for and matches it to the information in their database that is the closest match in order to produce the search results page that you see.
What you could say is that SEO is the challenge of identifying what potential customers are looking for and creating informative pages that answer their questions better than anyone else. As well as adapting to the changes in the algorithm.
What do businesses need from SEO?
Search engine optimization services is a blanket term that is used to cover a range of options that your business may choose to focus on in order to increase your online visibility, traffic and (most importantly) sales. Often when a business looks to improve its SEO they are referring to on-page SEO, however, there is also content writing, local SEO, competitor analysis and research and link building that can be used to increase your brands’ online visibility.
Some packages might focus on one of these factors or all of them to increase your rankings in search results.
Local SEO
Local SEO, which you might also have heard of as Map Pack SEO or localized organic results, places the focus of work on increasing local search visibility. An example of this might be using the term “Boiler Repair Birmingham” or “Boiler Installation Coventry” by including a specific location or the term “Near Me” turns the query into a local search, after all, you want an installer that is near you rather than at the other end of the country.
This type of query might result in a local pack being created that includes maps showing the location of nearby installers as well as local providers and adverts.
As you can see from the example above there are a number of different ways that results can be shown for local search queries. While some of the information that Google will use to identify the most relevant results will be on your website, they will also source information from across the web. This might include the Google My Business listing for your business, directory listings (such as Trustatrader or Yell) and reviews that are gathered from social media platforms.
On-Page SEO
Probably the most common form of SEO, on-page or on-site SEO is exactly what it says, optimizations directly on your website so that it performs better for keywords in the search algorithm.
That includes internal linking, using proper canonicalization, editing for content clarity, creating descriptive title tags, and writing unique meta-descriptions.
On-page SEO ranking factors are about what a page is relevant for and are considered stronger signals than off-page SEO factors and can make it easier for search engines to crawl and understand.
That’s why content is understood to be the strongest ranking signal.
Off-page SEO
Invariably the opposite of on-page SEO, off-page SEO solely focuses on increasing the online reputation of your website and business across the web.
Off-page SEO matters because a website lacking citations from other sites resembles a site that’s not worth crawling and indexing.
Because off-page ranking factors, like links, measure how important a site is, failure to attain any links may very well contribute to stagnant search traffic from Google.
The most accurate description of what makes off-page SEO important is that it provides forward momentum to a site by helping it rank higher for more keyword phrases.
Takeaway
If you want your company to have higher authority online and increase your sales and enquiries organically through Google rather than relying on Google Ads to grow your business then you won’t want to overlook the potential return on investment of Search Engine Optimization services.
A starting point for your business is to have an SEO audit to find areas of improvement before you choose a service.
