SEO or search engine optimization is something that you hear a lot about, but you might not know what this is. If you run a business or have a website, you need to know what SEO is and how it impacts your venture.

What Is SEO?

SEO is a strategy used by website owners to generate organic traffic. Organic traffic is any traffic that is free and natural. This traffic is obtained from the search engine results where your website is ranked by the search engines.

To ensure you are ranked well in these results, you need to have a good SEO strategy. You need to understand the different aspects of SEO and how to implement them. It is also important to note that SEO is not a set and forget strategy, but needs to be updated as the search engines change.

The Parts Of SEO

To rank websites in their results, the search engines use algorithms to look at certain aspects of your website. No-one knows all of the aspects that are looked at as the search engines do not release this information. However, the known aspects can be worked on through the different parts of your SEO strategy.

The first part is the on-site SEO. As the name suggests, this deals with the different parts of your website and what you post. When working on this aspect, you will be optimizing the content on the page as well as the source code.

On-site SEO helps the search engines understand what your website and each page is about. This helps them determine whether your page is relevant for certain search queries. It also helps the search engine determine the value your page offers and whether it should be ranked well.

The second part of SEO is off-page SEO. This covers all actions taken off your website, but still impact your rankings. The most widely known aspect of off-page SEO is backlinks.

Off-site SEO will help the search engines determine how trustworthy your website is. It also helps them determine relevance and authority. Each time someone links to your content or website, it is seen as them vouching for the quality of this.

Anyone who has a website needs to understand SEO and its importance. Without good SEO, your website will not rank on the search engines and will get less organic traffic. This can reduce the overall success you have online and lower the visibility of your website.

Search Engine Optimization is a low-cost marketing strategy for promoting any business online. SEO brings highly targeted traffic, which is easy to convert. However, SEO is too complex. And it takes time to see meaningful results with SEO. That is why it is important to hire an SEO company from the Philippines.

Here are the top reasons to hire an SEO agency.

1. Get High-Quality Content

Some SEO companies have a team of content creators that creates high-quality content for their clients. Most SEO agencies use high-quality content to rank websites in the Search Engine. So, you will get high-quality content by hiring the right SEO agency.

2. More Free Time

Trying to rank your own website? You must learn several SEO techniques, which can take lots of time to learn and master. And you might waste your time using the wrong SEO techniques. Hiring an SEO firm gives you more free time because the company does everything. Use that time to do something important.

3. Affordability

Hiring an SEO company is much cheaper in the long run. Do not hire a newbie. Why? You will spend more money paying a full-time employee. It is much cheaper to use an SEO company. Additionally, SEO companies work with several companies. So, they do not charge a lot of money. And they can help you avoid costly mistakes, which you might make when ranking your website.

4. Fast Loading Website

Furthermore, SEO companies build fast loading websites. They hire the best web designers. That means you will never spend more money hiring a web design company. SEO company builds a mobile-friendly website. You will get a user-friendly website that has a low bounce rate. Reducing your bounce rate may increase your conversion rates.

5. Build Trust

It is hard to convert cold traffic. Why? People do not know about your company. They have never heard about your products. So, they are more likely to avoid your products and services. An SEO company will help you build trust with your potential customers. The company creates content that builds trust. Building trust with potential customers increases conversion rates.

These are the top reasons to hire an SEO company. SEO company builds mobile-friendly websites. It saves you money. It uses proven SEO techniques to rank your website. Therefore, you will never have to worry about Search Engine updates and penalties. And the SEO expert gives you more free time to focus on other productive activities.

Are you thinking of using SEO to promote your business? SEO is perfect for ranking your website in the Search Engine. However, most people avoid SEO because they are not willing to do the work and wait for the results. If you know how to use SEO to boost your business, your organic traffic will increase. Increasing your organic traffic increases your sales.

Here is how to use SEO to boost your business.

Know Your Target Audience

Do not target everyone. You must know your customers. You need to know about their problems. And you need to focus on solving their problems. People are savvier. So, they are more likely to leave your website if you are not helping them. They are looking for information that can solve their problems. Knowing your target audience can help you solve their problems. If you can solve your audience’s problems, they will trust you.

Do Proper Keyword Research

You now know your target audience. It is time to do proper keyword research. Because it is hard to rank for highly competitive keywords. Long-tail keywords are the best. They have low competition. It is easy to rank for these keywords. Also, use keywords that your target audience uses. Because you want to attract highly targeted traffic.

Create Epic Content

If you have been researching for some time, you may have seen that long-form content ranks in the Search Engines. The days of writing short articles are over. You might never rank for short articles, especially if your competitors are writing long-form articles. Therefore, spend more time creating the best content in your niche. If you have epic content, your website will rank naturally in the Search Engines.

Optimize Your Website for Mobile

More people use their mobile phones to search for information online. Therefore, Search Engines prefer to rank mobile-friendly websites. Because Search Engines want to satisfy their users. If your website does not load properly on mobile, you might never get free organic traffic. Hire a web designer to optimize your website for mobile. By the way, it is easy to create a mobile-friendly website these days.

You now know how to use SEO to boost your business. You should know that SEO takes time. You will not see changes immediately you implement these strategies. You will wait for several months to see an increase in your traffic. If you are consistent, your traffic will increase every month. And your business will grow quickly.

Most businesses know that they need to use SEO for their digital properties. The problem is that they do not fully understand the full benefits of this. It is important that you know why every business should use SEO.

The Primary Source Of Website Traffic

While it is possible to get website traffic from paid sources, the majority of traffic online comes from organic search. If you are not using SEO, you will be missing out on the organic traffic that is boosting your competition. This traffic is vital to getting consumers into a buyer funnel and converting them into leads and paying customers. As more and more people use search engines to help them make decisions, the importance of SEO has grown. A good SEO strategy will place you in front of internet users who are ready to interact with your business. If a user cannot easily find your business online through search, they are less likely to work with you.

A Better User Experience

As part of your SEO strategy, you need to consider the user experience. This is one of the search engine signals used for ranking and you need to optimize it. If the search engine can see that users will have a good experience on your website, they are more likely to rank you well. There is also a side benefit to this of users remaining on your website for longer. The longer someone is one the site, the greater the chances they will engage with your business. Good user experience will also provide a positive impression of your company which is vital for success.

Bringing New Opportunities To Light

Part of SEO is research and this will help you discover new opportunities for your business. These new opportunities can increase the visibility of your business and the overall profitability. SEO will also help you determine which opportunities are worth pursuing and which are not. It is not only market opportunities that you will find with SEO. You can also find new opportunities to engage with customers and problems that your products or services can solve. SEO or search engine optimization is something that every business needs to use. Not only will SEO ensure you get organic traffic, but it will also boost the user experience. Trust in your business will also increase when you are able to rank well on the search engines. SEO can also highlight new opportunities that further your business.

SEO is essential these days, but the way you go about it is up to you. Some people prefer to learn as much as they can and handle it themselves. Some people hire individual freelancers to perform a bunch of individual tasks, but manage the overview themselves. Many businesses, though, choose to hire dedicated SEO agencies to get the most out of their abilities without spending their own time.

Agencies, or SEO companies, can be very useful to businesses. They bring a lot of experience, tools, and resources to the table that you would have to spend a ton of time to accumulate and set up.

You don’t have to learn the ins and outs of web marketing. You don’t have to make connections to find writers and graphic designers to work for you. You don’t have to purchase licenses for expensive analytics, heat maps, and other SEO tools. The agency you pick comes with all of that, and while you definitely pay a premium for it, you save time and likely money in doing so.

A Deep Look at Pricing

All the way back in 2012, Moz ran a survey where they polled over 600 professional SEO companies about their fees and their service ranges. Now, this data is a few years old, and I’m sure many of those companies have changed their services, changed their prices, rebranded, or even completely folded.

However, in aggregate, I can’t imagine the data as a whole has changed too terribly much. For every company that folds, another one opens. For every company that raises their prices, a new one takes their place as a cheaper offering. Trends may be different, but I’m not here to look at trends, I’m here to give price ranges, and that’s perfectly valid coming from this Moz survey.

First of all, geographic location plays a significant role in pricing. By this point, I expect all of you are aware of India’s role as a cheap source of all manner of coding, copywriting, development, design, and marketing work. As a developing nation with a low cost of living, the people there can provide their services at a lower price than competitors in more developed nations.

The caveat to this is that quality levels are much more varied. People who pay $2 an hour for SEO work often don’t expect much, and will often get automated solutions possibly using out of date techniques. It’s the same way that paying for cheap copywriting in this manner can get you anything from copied content and spun content to ESL drivel to high-quality work from someone who simply has no need to charge more for their services.

One interesting thing about the Internet is that a lot of companies and a lot of pricing relies on the US Dollar, and specifically the way the Dollar interacts with other currencies. Moz found that Australia and New Zealand companies tend to charge on the higher end of the spectrum, and the US around the middle line.

So what is that price line? For SEO companies that charge by the hour, the price ranged generally from $75 an hour to $200 an hour. This is the middle line, covering 50–60% of the companies surveyed. Some were more expensive, some were cheaper, but this is the middle of the road you might expect if you hire an SEO firm that works by the hour.

The lower end of the pricing will naturally come with fewer perks than higher priced companies, though I hesitate to say that cheaper service is worse. There are certainly companies that charge a premium for sub-par service. Perks, in this case, include things like extended service contracts, warranties, dedicated account representatives and support, a knowledge base for learning on your own, tools to work with, white label reports, and so forth.

You might also see the scope of a project change. Low priced services might not write all of your content for you but will optimize the content you produce. They might promote the content you publish, but not create it. Higher priced services might produce and market your content, and they might expand into more complex types of content, like videos, ebooks, slide decks, and infographics.

Hourly pricing is not even the most common type of pricing, however. Some companies will consult with you and will analyze the scope of the project they’re getting themselves into. They will often create a customized project just for your site, with as much or as little of various services as is called for. They will optimize your existing site and content, they will help establish social profiles, they will work to solve Google penalties, and who knows what else.

The scope of per-project pricing varies wildly, and it is most commonly ranging from $1,000 to $7,500. For extremely large sites and extremely complex jobs, the price would be even higher than that. For simple jobs on smaller sites, it can be 25% of that or less.

Per-project pricing has the drawback of being an audit and revamp of a site, with some content editing and production, and maybe even with site redesign thrown in, but it isn’t an ongoing optimization project. They take your site and run it through the wringer, and then when it’s over they move on to the next one, leaving you to your own devices. Some companies offer continued services, and other companies only offer those ongoing services.

An ongoing SEO service might include content production as a primary focus. They will produce or edit content you produce, they will help publish it, and they will promote it with their contacts. This helps your SEO through content marketing, and if anything, this is the area where price will have risen the most over the last five years. Content marketing is on the rise, and will only give way to total content saturation when influencer marketing grows to surpass it.

Ongoing SEO services ranged in a much broader variety of prices in the Moz survey. The most common were the low-tier $250–500 per month, and the high tier $2,500–5,000 per month.

Neither one was over 14% of the total survey responses, however, and as such, the price for a monthly service can range all over the map. It really depends on what you need out of your SEO company, what the company offers, the quality of their service, and what you’re willing to pay.

Some companies are firm, some can accept negotiation, and some might not be worth it at all.

Interestingly, a lot of SEO work is being done by companies that provide more than just SEO. The practice of auditing a site, fixing it, and moving on isn’t really sustainable. As a business, it means you’re signing up to have to constantly find new clients. Whereas with ongoing services, clients can last for years, allowing much more stable growth.

As such, the companies providing SEO work are providing it as an add-on or as one of many offerings from their company. A lot of businesses that do web design, for example, will also offer marketing and SEO services for the websites they design. They’ll use a hybrid pricing model in these cases, charging a project price for the site itself and an ongoing retainer for the SEO work after the fact.

One thing to note, by the way, is that if you’re a small or medium-sized business and you feel like it’s difficult to approach a company because you’re small and you’re not a high-value client, put those thoughts out of your head. The majority of SEO work is done on relatively small sites.

SEO companies aren’t servicing the likes of Coke, Forbes, or Facebook. Those companies, if they care about SEO at all, simply hire internal teams to do it for them without the possibility of corporate espionage or other issues.

No, the majority of SEO work is done with small companies. In fact, if you have a few thousand customers, you might be at the high end. A lot of SEO work — 41% as of the 2012 Moz survey, possibly even more by now — is performed with hyperlocal small businesses. We’re talking restaurants that serve a few hundred people a day, not even retail stores.

The reason for this is simply because sites have less of a need for focused SEO when they reach critical mass. Sure, massive content creators like Forbes or the Huffington Post have a bit of a focus on SEO in their editorial requirements, but they don’t really need someone to audit their site. It would be virtually impossible for them to lose their market share and drop down the ranks.

Small sites, meanwhile, need to struggle to compete. They can’t hope to out-power a site like Forbes, but with SEO they can attempt to out-maneuver it. All the while, they are fighting against their competition, on their level and above it, all of whom are trying to out-maneuver them. It’s a vicious battle for supremacy where the winner gets a few hundred views and a few conversions more than the loser.

SEO from a high-quality agency can be the difference between victory and defeat here.

Pros and Cons of Pricing Methods

So, when you have hourly, monthly, and per-project pricing models, how do you choose which is best for your site?

Starting with hourly rates, you have the positive side, which is transparency. In order to charge you per hour, you need to get an itemized timesheet with what is being done and how much it costs. This makes it easy to predict the number of hours necessary for your project, and thus how much it will cost in total.

On the other hand, paying a company by the hour is paying for the work, not the results. You don’t necessarily have accountability; the company can say they’re doing their best, but your competition is also doing their best, and you’re left with little tangible progress. It’s also possible that you get less efficient work because the workers assigned to your project are looking to fill hours, not to achieve results.

Paying a monthly retainer is a bit more objective-focused because you can see the results after a month and compare it to the cost you’re paying. You also tend to forge a better relationship with your agency, because you’re working together without the awareness of a time clock in the background.

On the other hand, you’re going to have to pay one large lump sum for, typically, six months at a time at minimum. SEO takes time, and most companies don’t want to get a month into the foundational work and be dropped because there are no immediate results. We all know that SEO takes time, so they guarantee they have that time.

The project-based model is more likely to get you efficient work because the better the employees work, the more per hour they make. You also know the results you’re getting, typically in terms of tangible onsite optimization rather than numerical growth. However, project-based SEO is typically inflexible and it’s always possible you’re paying more than the service is worth, with no way of canceling early.

There’s also the performance-based model, which has been taking off in recent years. It’s much like pay per action advertising on a site like Google or Facebook, where you run ads for free and only pay when the objective — like a click or a signup — happens.

Pay for performance SEO is potentially the most valuable because you can get work done for a low cost or for free, and if the work doesn’t show results, you don’t have to pay. On the other hand, it’s always possible that their results exceed your expectations and, unlike with PPC marketing where you have a budget cap, you can’t just pay some of your bills when you get results.

Pay for performance can also be scammy if you don’t know what to watch out for. Some companies will try to have you pay them based on your #1 rankings for various keywords, and will then target a lot of easy to rank, low volume keywords that have no value.

You pay for “performance” that doesn’t perform. However, by understanding keyword research, you can avoid most of those problems.

SEO Geniuses Philippines offers affordable SEO services ranging $600–$1500.