70% of online marketers say that SEO is better than PPC for generating sales. But when it comes to SEO client satisfaction, Backlinko finds that only 30% of clients recommend their current provider to their peers.

No surprises there for us. As a full-service SEO agency, we have worked with countless clients with a previously poor experience with search engine optimisation. And that is also one of the reasons for their skepticism towards organic marketing.

To save you from making the same mistake, we have created a list of the five most important deliverables that you absolutely must expect from your SEO agency in Hampshire. Let’s dive in!

A complete SEO audit of your current site

The first thing that your agency should do is perform a full audit of your website and the surrounding elements. They should look at your on page SEO, like header tags, page titles & Meta data along with the content, design, user experience, and even social media accounts (depending on the services you sign up for) to determine where there are opportunities to improve.

The audit can include:

• Keyword analysis: To identify gaps in your keyword research and marketing strategy as well as understand how your competitors are performing.

• Technical SEO audit: To tell you whether or not your site is ready for search engine optimisation. It may highlight any issues that need to be addressed before any work can be done, such as slow page loading speed, poor mobile performance, broken links, or poor quality images.

• On-page SEO analysis: To evaluate the content of your website so that they can make changes to optimise it for search engines. This includes things like keyword research, metadata, header tag optimisation, and content creation.

• Off-page SEO analysis: To analyse how other sites link back to yours and how those links are being ranked by search engines. It also includes identifying opportunities to build more links in order to improve rankings.

A clear and in-depth search engine optimisation strategy for your site

If you don't have a specific goal in mind, it can be difficult to measure success. So before you hire an SEO company, make sure you tell them about your goals so that they can clearly explain how they will achieve them for you.

For example, your SEO agency should create a detailed plan for how they can help increase traffic to your site through organic search results (i.e., without paying for ads). This plan must include recommendations for improving your on-page content, off-page link-building efforts, technical issues that could be impacting ranking performance and more.

Having a comprehensive strategy will help you achieve results faster than if you were simply left to try and navigate through the maze on your own.

You should also expect a clear and in-depth search engine optimisation strategy for your site. This will include an assessment of the following:

- The overall structure and architecture of your website.

- The quality of content on your site (the length, depth and relevancy of articles).

- The number of pages on the site (and how many are unique).

- The number of links pointing to your site from other websites (and the quality/authority of those websites).

- The presence/absence of keyword phrases on relevant pages within your website (and how they are used).

Competitive analysis and market gap identification

This is one of the most important deliverables because it is the foundation for everything else. You will want to know who your competitors are and how they are ranking in organic search. It allows you to understand your competitors' strengths and weaknesses.

Once you know where they are falling short, you can use this information to identify opportunities for your business to grow. It will also help you determine where you should focus your efforts, what keywords to target and which of those keywords you should consider building links for.

In other words, it will help you understand how your competitors are ranking and how you can do better than them with your content and strategy.

Strategic development of your on-page SEO

On-page SEO is an essential part of organic ranking. When hiring an SEO agency, this is one of the first things that you should expect them to do for you. Here are a few things that go into on-page search engine optimisation.

• Keyword research - This will help identify what people are searching for and the competition for those terms. It will also help identify gaps in the market that you might be able to fill with content or landing pages.

• Link building - Link building helps Google understand that your website is authoritative and trustworthy so they will rank it higher in the search results. And while people prioritise outbound links more than internal linking, your SEO agency should focus on both as part of their SEO strategy.

• Content creation and management - An analysis of your content to determine where there are opportunities for improvement, such as keyword density or content length, and what your ideal customers are looking for. This also includes the implementation of on-page SEO elements like page titles, meta descriptions and alt tags on every page.

• Technical review - An assessment of your web pages’ architecture and internal linking structure to ensure that they are optimised for search engines, testing of landing page layouts, and A/B testing of different strategies, among more. 

Performance monitoring post implementation

Your SEO agency should provide you with detailed reports about the progress being made toward achieving goals as well as an explanation as to why they missed them (if that’s the case) along with tips for improving future performance.

You should expect regular updates about how well your SEO campaign is performing and how much progress has been made towards achieving your targets (such as ranking for certain keywords).

Note that every SEO agency uses a different tool for performance monitoring. But all SEO tools focus on similar key performance metrics: better rankings, more traffic, and more conversions. The tools also provide different views of how well your website is performing so that you can judge whether or not it is working as intended. So, make sure your agency is delivering the promised results irrespective of the tool they are using for it.

Ready to start building your SEO strategy? Let’s talk!