Two directional signs pointing to Yes or No

SEO Marketing services can be confounding. Scarcely a day goes by when you don’t hear about them—from your marketing team wanting to get more organic traffic, from the CFO looking to reduce marketing costs, in spammy emails from random fly-by-night companies promising you “PAGE ONE GOOGLE RESULTS FOR $99!!!”.

Even more confusing is that there are so many services that fall under the SEO umbrella. How do you make sense of them all? How do you prioritize them? Which are going to provide a reasonable ROI—and which are a waste of time and money?

SEO MARKETING SERVICES - THE GOOD INVESTMENTS

There are a few SEO services that will generally be worthwhile investments for almost every organization:

AUDITS OF TECHNICAL SEO AND CORE WEB VITALS

No matter what other SEO efforts you undertake, it all begins with a solid reliance on the basics. Making sure that your site is in compliance with the technical best practices will provide you with a solid foundation on which you can build. On the other hand, having a site with significant technical or user experience issues can act as a drag on future efforts, reducing their effectiveness.

It makes sense, therefore, to have an in-depth audit done of your site’s technical SEO and core web vitals. This will identify any potential issues that need to be addressed and allow for a prioritized to-do list so these issues can be addressed in a timely manner.

TOPICALLY-TARGETED CONTENT CREATION

It is critical for sites to meet the E-A-T guidelines set forth by Google. This means that content should express Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. One great way to approach this is via the hub and spoke method. This method focuses on a key concept and builds authoritative content in that niche.

For example, if a site feels that they need to be considered an expert on widgets, they would build a hub page focused on providing in-depth information about widgets. To further support their expertise, they would then build out additional content on terms that are closely related to widgets, using terms that are considered to be semantically proximate.

As identifying semantically proximate terms requires considerable research by a team that understands how to best identify these terms, we recommend using a qualified team that is well-versed in SEO content practices.

USER-GENERATED CONTENT (UGC)

One of the ongoing challenges in SEO is how to (affordably) scale content. With the cost of outsourcing a single blog post typically being hundreds of dollars, scaling up to hundreds or thousands of pieces of content can quickly break the budget of some companies. Even having an in-house content team can be fairly expensive on a per-article basis.

One great solution to this is to allow for user-generated content. Topical discussions, reviews, guest posts, and the like all allow for large volumes of content to be created for little cost. That being said, there are still costs and concerns. How do you minimize spam? What platforms should you use? Determining the right solutions for your exact requirements may take some time, but the potential payoff can be quite good.

ANSWERING COMMONLY-SEARCHED QUESTIONS

On the subject of content creation, one reliable approach is to determine what questions are being asked by your target audience—and then provide great answers to those questions. For example, your customers may be asking the question, “What are the best widgets for attaching flanges to flux capacitors?” Creating a piece of content that answers that specific question right away can help capture that traffic and drive qualified visitors to your website.

One thing to note is that you should make sure that there is a reasonable amount of search traffic on the question. To determine this, you should always make certain that you’ve done your research. If the above question is being asked a thousand times per month, it’s likely a good candidate for answering. If it’s only being asked 10 times monthly, it may not be worth addressing unless you have determined that those 10 searchers are extremely high intent and very likely to convert for you. Need help identifying volumes, intent, and good questions to answer? A good agency can help you with all of those things.

LONG-TERM AGENCY PARTNERSHIP

One of the best investments you can make in your SEO is a good agency. Even if you have a fantastic internal team, there is tremendous value in having that extra set of eyes available to take a look at your strategy. Generally speaking, the longer you work with a given agency, the better the understanding of your organizational needs and processes. More importantly, the agency can be a valuable tool as a thought partner and can add additional weight to your internal requests.

Have an awesome initiative that you want to kick off? Getting pushback from the C-suite? Often, your SEO agency, being an external voice that has proven itself over time, can add weight to your business case.

SEO MARKETING SERVICES - THE BAD INVESTMENTS

Just as investing in some search engine optimization services can be a big plus, there are others, often promoted by sketchy spam emails, that can actually hurt your rankings or cost you money for nothing. Below are a few services that you should avoid at all costs.

DIRECTORY SITE SUBMISSIONS

A very long time ago, some search engines relied on the number of incoming links as a strong signal for the quality of a page. This led to a large number of directory sites, where users could post a link to their site. This, in turn, led to large numbers of people bombarding these directories with links to sketchy or spammy sites. Google very quickly realized that this was a problem and can now actually penalize sites that use too many of these spam-filled directories, calling them “bad neighborhood” links. There are, however, still a number of folks offering “directory submission services,” offering to build links to your site by submitting on your behalf. Avoid these.

FILL-IN-THE-BLANK- STYLE CONTENT CREATION

There are some “content creation” services that will offer to create large volumes of content for you using “content spinners.” This is a software-driven approach where a single fill-in-the-blanks piece of content is created and then the blanks are filled in automatically, creating “unique” content. Although this approach can generate a large volume of content quickly, Google is pretty adept at identifying such content and has been known to penalize sites for using this approach.

It should be noted that this does not mean that you should not use pages that are template-driven and are populated by unique data sources. There is (as long as it is done correctly) significant value in such an approach, but be certain to differentiate the two approaches. One is created using data and is designed to provide unique, high-value content; this is good. The other, “spinner” approach is designed to create cheap, high-volume pages in an attempt to not have to add value on each page; this is bad.

GUARANTEED TOP RANKINGS

It is a truism in the world of SEO services that no one can promise you top rankings. An ethical, best practice-focused SEO agency can certainly help you by aligning all of the right pieces to help improve your rankings (and frequently help you achieve some page one listings) but, at the end of the day, Google reserves the right to change the rules of the game at any point—and frequently does so. Any company that claims to be able to “guarantee” top rankings is frequently just a scammer who will take your money and then disappear.

$99/MONTH SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION SERVICES

It is surprising that these unsolicited emails still get sent out, let alone work. A solid SEO plan involves research, page optimizations, content development, link nurturing, and considerable time and energy. Add to that the KPI analysis, reporting, and recommendations based on results and Google’s constantly evolving algorithm and you’re looking at a considerable baseline just to gain small improvements.

Any agency claiming to accomplish that for only $99/month may either not be planning to do a good job, or may just be an outright scam.

At the end of the day, you need to decide what search engine optimization services are going to be right for your organization. Ultimately, though, you should ensure that the services you choose are not only a good fit for your needs and budget but also legitimate and productive.