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Optimize your SEO with SmartKeyword

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Automated management

Manage SEO tasks peacefully, and automate the most repetitive ones: keyword, performance or competition monitoring, dashboards, reports... SmartKeyword takes care of everything!

Sustainable and effective Netlinking

Boost your website’s visibility and reputation thanks to our tailor-made netlinking. Manage netlinking actions in total autonomy via our platform and, if necessary, a dedicated expert is available as soon as possible to answer your questions and help you.

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Quality content, in high quantity

Benefit from our qualified SEO copywriters’ network, approved by our experts, to create content tailored to your marketing strategy. Available within just a few days after you place an order, articles are validated at the technical and the editorial level by us.

Tailor-made support

Benefit from a technical and human response catered to all the other SEO needs. From carrying out an audit to redesigning a website, including training teams on the latest SEO trends, we are here to guide and help you on all your projects.

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SEO agency: Pros and cons of keeping SEO in-house versus outsourcing

Should you outsource your Google SEO strategy? This question often arises among e-merchants for whom SEO is the main acquisition channel. The success of their marketing strategy depends on it!

Your digital marketing team is efficient, but is it in need of a helping hand? The time may have come to call on a specialist SEO agency. In this guide, we answer all your questions.

What does an SEO agency do?

With an SEO agency, you can develop a strategy to rank on Google; An agency will provide services catered to your business needs and objectives.

An SEO agency provides you with experts who will analyze your website and advise you on the following areas:

  1. Content & website structure: existing content’s verification and optimization, and new content’s development
  2. Technical: best practices’ verification, advice in new websites’ development, advice in website redesign
  3. Keyword researchmarket research and full SEO audit
  4. SEO training
  5. Expertise in various sectors (diversity of its client base), and SEO techniques (technology watch)

Any new agency you decide to work with will start by performing an SEO audit to identify any blocking points. It also helps the agency to provide detailed recommendations to correct these points, and maximize your website’s positions on search engines. As an option, some SEO agencies also offer to implement website’s improvements for you in the case where you don’t have the necessary internal resources.

Regardless, you are responsible for the smooth running of SEO actions on your site, and must guide the SEO agency in the tasks’ progress. This is why it’s imperative that you develop your skill set and that of your team by attending SEO training courses, organized either by your agency or by third-party companies.

The impact of Google's algorithm on SEO agency services

With each update of its algorithm, Google changes the rules of the game a little bit, forcing SEO agencies to adapt their recommendations. Up until the Panda update, SEO outsourcing was mostly standardized, making it a common practice.

Since the release of Panda, the Google algorithm has taken a keen interest in the quality of the pages’ content, and user behavior. It’s no longer enough to offer standard optimizations. On the contrary, any SEO agency now needs a deeper understanding of their clients’ business issues, which is a more complex and opaque task for an external service provider.

What type of websites work with an SEO agency?

A website’s purpose and size are factors in deciding whether or not to outsource their SEO.

Very small businesses: a few web pages’ website

Your website is a showcase site, intended to give you an online presence, but web traffic is not a vital issue. You produce little or no content and SEO needs are simple: make sure that best practices are in place, and correct any technical errors. For you, using a web agency is a very good solution.

Small and medium size businesses (SMB): e-commerce website with a hundred web pages

You are an e-merchant, you’ve got several hundred product pages on your website, and sales depend mainly on your online presence. For you, SEO is a vital issue. You’ve got a small in-house team who writes product pages and website content. Your best bet is to hire an in-house SEO expert, and possibly call on an SEO agency for specific actions like netlinking and annual SEO audits.

Large business: e-commerce website with several thousands of web pages

You are an e-merchant, you’ve got several thousands of pages on your website, and SEO is the main acquisition channel. For you, developing in-house SEO skills is very beneficial.

A prerequisite: you must absolutely have access to all the links in the technical chain. In other words, you must be able to make changes directly on the website, and manage the content’s creation. When you’ve got full control over the website, developing in-house SEO skills makes sense and even allows you to be much more effective in your SEO and resulting positions.

Calling on an agency in your region or an external service provider to take care of your SEO when content and communication are carried out internally is a little counterproductive. You write the content, you choose an editorial line, you know who you are talking to. So, you are in the best position to determine the keywords you need to rank on, the on-page SEO and netlinking strategies to adopt.

So why not monitor results yourself? Today, there are a lot of tools on the market to help you optimize your SEO and monitor its performance. Some are very thorough, others are specialists, but you are guaranteed to find something to meet your expectations and help you determine an effective strategy according to your needs.

Privateaser is the leader in booking bars and rooms. They publish several hundreds of product pages and new articles every week… In short, they work hard! Well, for them, the question of outsourcing their SEO did not arise for a second. And for a good reason: they refuse to bring external providers in their business, and have a strong desire to learn new skills.

After reviewing several SEO tools, they chose SmartKeyword because it was the one that best suited their needs: a platform to detect the most profitable keywords for their business, and to analyze competitors, but above all, a service that provides personalized support to help them implement their strategy.

What should you outsource to an SEO agency?

An SEO agency helps you to perform tasks that you don’t know how to do or tasks for which you don’t have the necessary internal resources.

A bad SEO agency can hurt an SEO strategy!

You must know Google SEO’s basics and Google's guidelines for webmasters. You need to be able to spot mistakes and avoid bad ideas before they get onto the roadmap. And you need to be able to measure the current and upcoming tasks’ scale in order to properly drive your project. You are also responsible for the agency’s correct immersion into the company and its business issues in order to maximise outputs.

So, while an SEO agency is a cheaper choice than hiring an in-house SEO expert, there are certain “business” tasks that you need to keep in-house no matter what.

In our opinion, tasks should be shared between your team and your agency according to the following projets:

  • SEO Audit: you can perform a small audit yourself, you should seek an agency’s advice if you are planning a full website redesign.
  • SEO training: you should always train yourself on SEO basics, and for more specialized SEO, we recommend that you take part in a professional training session, either run by an agency or by a third-party company.
  • Keyword research: you have the business skills and know better than anyone who the website is for. However, hire an agency to discover more keyword detection tools
  • Technical: do you have access to the website's CMS? Do the on-page optimizations yourself, however, hire an agency for large-scale change projects

The SEO agency is the best ally for large-scale projects

An SEO agency’s expertise will be very useful for large-scale projects that not only concern SEO but also have an impact on the website’s referencing.

New website

You are launching a website, so now is the best time to get off to a good start, and have an optimized website from the get go. An SEO agency’s role will be to advise you on web pages’ optimized structure (what is called On-page SEO), on technical elements such as programming language, architecture and domain name.

Website redesign

Your website is getting a new look, and the goal is to generate more visits, more conversions, and also more sales and turnover. The SEO agency’s role will be to advise you on the best way to maintain SEO positions and traffic.

The risks of redesigning a website are real. We observed that even with excellent preparation, a website redesign sometimes results in a 10-20% loss of traffic. Imagine the loss in sales!

That’s why the agency’s expertise will be crucial in order to minimize this risk. Then, it will be a matter of clearly indicating to Google where the website’s new pages are located, and thus preserving the website’s positions and reputation.

New domain name

Is the business name changing? Or do you want to improve the URL to help people find you better? There is a risk of losing traffic and positions on Google. The SEO agency’s role will be to advise you on the best approach to URL structure, and to help you manage 301 redirect issues. The end goal is to maintain positions, and to ensure that Internet users recognize the website and come back.

How to choose an SEO agency?

You’ve got a project to submit to an SEO agency, but what agency to choose? What questions to ask? What questions should the agency ask you as well? And what are the pitfalls to avoid?

What questions to ask a prospective agency?

Start with your project and the service you want the agency to provide:

Is it an audit, a long term consulting service, or a fixed term project?

Do not hesitate to ask them all the questions you need answered in order to decide if the agency can meet your needs. As an option, if you want the SEO agency to put in place the advice and recommendations you are looking for, ask them as soon as possible. Many agencies do not want to "touch" their clients' websites.

Then check that the agency has good references, in the field you are in or in general, and ask them for case studies with concrete results obtained with other clients, as well as the role that the agency has played in the process of getting these results.

Finally, and it goes without saying, discuss the agency's approach together, whether it follows the instructions for Google Webmasters, etc. This is about being on the same page and agreeing on the method to use.

What questions should the agency ask you?

During the meeting with the agency, pay attention to the questions they will ask you. These questions, or their absence, will give you the working method’s overview, and the agency’s involvement (or not) with their clients.

A good SEO agency will take care of your needs and seek to understand your objectives, your business issues, in order to become as familiar as possible with the company and its industry, and thus offer the best offer to meet your expectations.

If you hear the following questions, you are in front of a quality agency, it’s a good sign!

  • What are your targeted keywords?
  • Who are your direct or indirect competitors, online or offline?
  • How do you manage the content on the website (CMS, team, internal or external)?
  • What is your SEO strategy to date?
  • What is your SEA strategy?
  • What team structure (marketing, technical, content writing) do you have or are you planning to put in place?
  • What is your overall marketing strategy?
  • What other websites do you manage?
  • What analysis tools do you use for the website data?

Pitfalls to avoid

Watch out for scams! No SEO provider can guarantee a given position for a keyword on a search engine. Unfortunately, there are unscrupulous SEOs out there who you have to learn to unmask before they make damages on your SEO, and jeopardize your reputation with Google.

How to measure an SEO agency’s performance?

You have chosen a partner SEO agency. Now we advise you to set up performance criteria in order to measure the quality of the service provided in relation to your goals.

Success can be measured in terms of:

  • traffic gain
  • Average position improvement
  • Traffic quality improvement (conversion rate, bounce rate)
  • Turnover increase
  • Increase in the acquisition channel’s profitability

Why choose SmartKeyword?

At SmartKeyword, our mission is to make your team autonomous in your SEO strategy’s implementation and management.

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We noticed that there are no suitable tools for digital marketing professionals who are not SEO experts, but must manage e-commerce or marketplace websites with hundreds or even thousands of pages, and for which SEO is the main acquisition channel.

It’s for them that we created SmartKeyword: the winning combination of a comprehensive online SEO platform and personalized coaching. We pass the know-how on to you; a dedicated coach guides you through SEO key stages. You take control of the strategy from the start, you carry out SEO actions, and analyze your reports on a daily basis in your SmartKeyword account.

More than an SEO platform, more than an SEO agency, SmartKeyword is the SEO solution that e-merchants have been waiting for a long time!

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Conclusion

SEO agencies are strategic partners that can be particularly crucial in large-scale projects, such as website redesigns or new website’s launches.

Since Google's Panda algorithm update focuses on a website’s content, SEO agencies can no longer offer a standardized SEO offer. They have their offer personalized to the company's needs. In this context, you are responsible for steering SEO projects, and for the agency’s proper integration into your business in order to obtain optimum results. This requires you to have at least one in-house resource, whether you choose to outsource or keep your SEO in-house, totally or partially.

That’s why SmartKeyword focuses on increasing your teams’ skills while offering a simple and powerful platform. The platform prioritizes keywords to target, precisely measures gains in positions, traffic and turnover by group of keywords. Therefore, we give you the essential solution to a successful SEO strategy!