How Does an SEO Specialist Affect the Company's Success?

For many companies, a website is the main source of attracting customers. To be profitable, a resource must have steady traffic that ends up with the conversion. Conversions to the site can come from various channels, such as clicking on an advertisement or banner, redirects through links from other sites and social networks, and organic traffic – when users enter queries into a search engine and choose a site from the available options.

SEO specialists optimise a website so that it is ranked according to the queries of its target audience, occupies high positions in search results, and generates more clicks from Organic Search. This article will discuss the responsibilities, necessary skills, and benefits that such professionals bring to a business.

Benefits of Organic Traffic

First, let's review the main benefits of promoting a website in organic search. This will help understand why a company should use the services of SEO specialists.
 

• The popularity of organic search.

Most users search for relevant information, goods, or services by making a query to a search engine. Google is a key traffic driver to websites and purchases. For this reason, a website promotion strategy almost always includes search engine optimization (SEO).

• Organic traffic is free.

Like other processes related to website promotion, SEO requires investments. But unlike contextual advertising (paid search), which is also displayed according to queries, displays, and clicks in Organic Search do not depend on the advertising budget. With proper optimization, this type of traffic occurs naturally and is profitable for the company.

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• SEO brings long-lasting results.

Optimising a website is a complex process that requires certain skills and time. But once an SEO Specialist has successfully achieved results and pages begin to rank in higher positions, a resource can receive stable traffic without any additional action. According to Google, an SEO Specialist gets initial ranking results after 2-3 weeks, and it takes 4-12 months to achieve considerable results that yield high conversion rates in search. Achieving substantial SEO results often requires the expertise of dedicated SEO agencies in USA.

• Organic traffic offers a competitive edge. 

Search engine optimisation isn’t just optimising a website and creating quality content. It’s also about getting the content seen by your target audience. This is where organic traffic comes into play. It allows online businesses to boost their online presence and provide a competitive advantage.  

• Organic traffic leads to increased ROI.  

Unlike paid traffic, organic traffic has a higher likelihood of turning visitors into customers because people prefer organic results as they come from credible sources. If the website creates good content with a high search engine ranking, it’ll attract more visitors without spending much money in the long run.  

Although good organic traffic can be attained slowly, it can still lead to increased ROI or return on investment as it’s more likely to provide higher conversions while minimising the overall marketing costs.  

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What is an optimised website?

An SEO Specialist like those from Dagmar Marketing knows the basic principles of how search engines rank sites and adapts the resource accordingly. Let's look at the results of SEO methods and their impact on the success of a company.

✔   A website contains content that is relevant to user queries.
When selecting pages to show, search engines consider the relevance of the query to the words and phrases in a site’s content. An SEO Specialist analyses how users search for information (user intent) on a particular topic, selects relevant keywords and uses them to create relevant content to collect target clicks.

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Result: The site ranks for the queries of the target audience.

✔   The site meets the recommendations of search engines.
Pages that rank at the top generate more organic traffic. When ranking, search engines evaluate site performance according to multiple criteria. An SEO specialist must measure and eliminate problems that reduce the visibility of the resource and implement the main search engine recommendations.

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Result: an increase in the site's search ranking, with its pages occupying higher positions.

SEO Specialist tasks

Now, let's talk about the actions useful to a website, which are usually performed by a specialist in the field of optimization.

1. SEO audit of a website.

A comprehensive website analysis is required in all cases when a company is interested in receiving organic traffic. It allows evaluating a resource according to numerous parameters that influence its position in search results. It is also necessary to repeat an audit from time to time to check whether errors have been eliminated and no new problems have appeared.

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SEO indicators important for auditing

• Page indexing.

URLs start to rank once they are indexed by a search engine, and it is worth monitoring the indexing of important pages.

• Statuses given by the server.

The success of the page is indicated by a code 200. But the resource may also have URLs giving 4xx or 5xx codes, for example, 404 (Not found), 500 (Internal Server Error), 504 (Gateway Timeout). The presence of such pages on the site may have a negative impact on its overall position. If a redirect is set up from one URL to another, the page response code will be 3xx.

• Mobile optimisation.

Users actively use smartphones to search for information and make online purchases. Search engines, in turn, assess whether the site is adapted to different screen sizes to display the highest quality options.

• Page loading speed.

Fast loading speed is an important criterion of a website's quality for search engines. If a page is displayed slowly, its usability is reduced, which might lead to fewer conversions. When analysing a site, it is important to monitor the performance of all URLs and determine what exactly is affecting the speed.

• Filling out and optimizing title and description.

Title and description form the appearance of a page in search results (snippets) and help search engines determine the subject matter of a page when ranking it. It is important to check the presence of a title and description for all pages in the index, their uniqueness, and length.

2. Improvement of on-site optimization.

After the audit, an SEO Specialist draws up a plan that focuses on fixing technical problems and applying other techniques that affect the site's visibility. This process may include such steps as:

• setting up redirects from unavailable pages to relevant ones.
• improving loading speed by compressing images, caching, code minification.
• setting up internal linking between pages.
• eliminating duplicate content by setting up "mirrors" and canonical links.
• fixing markup issues and adjusting the viewport meta tag to ensure the site is displayed correctly on mobile devices.
• others.

3. Keyword selection.

Keywords are words and phrases that match user queries. They are placed in a website’s content so that search engines select them as relevant results when ranking.

An SEO Specialist analyses the statistics of queries in the target region (by their search volume and keyword difficulty), selects promising keywords for a website, and uses them to build a semantic core.

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Examples of the use of keywords from the semantic core:

• terms of reference for copywriters who write texts for the site.
• link texts (anchors) for internal linking and link building.
• contents of title and description.
• alternative text to images (alt attributes).

4. Track user behaviour on the site.

User behaviour of how they navigate a website can say a lot about the usability and quality of your content. Search engines also take into account certain behavioural factors when ranking.

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Using basic Google Analytics data along with advanced tools like heatmap by Hotjar and usage recordings on your site by Crazy Egg, SEO specialists track important metrics, such as session duration, bounce rate, and the number of pages viewed. This makes it possible to:

• find out whether the content of the site meets users' expectations.
• identify problems with the structure, speed of page display on different types of devices, and so on.
• use the information to improve the site internally.

5. Building a link profile of the site.

Apart from internal optimisation, external links from other sources affect the site's ranking. If a resource is often cited, this indicates the popularity and value of its content. Consider partnering with a reputable link building service agency to enhance your website's external link profile and boost its overall search engine ranking.
An SEO Specialist can analyse a link profile and monitor the process of adding new backlinks:

• monitor the total number of all links and referring domains.
• monitor the quality of referring sites.
• select anchors and landing pages.
• check the indexing of new URLs.

6. Website performance report.

During the optimisation process, an SEO Specialist regularly collects data on the resource — the number of displays and conversions from organic search over a certain period, e.g., a month and also analyses user actions after the transition to the site.

Another important factor of the report is the site position for important queries and its dynamics compared to the previous period. This allows finding out the website's current position in search results and tracing the impact of SEO techniques on its visibility.

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What other skills does an SEO specialist have?

There is a lot of information and tips on how to optimize a website. But there are differences between a beginner with a basic knowledge of SEO and a seasoned professional. Several tasks should be considered when it comes to SEO. However, not all beginners have adequate knowledge to handle them effectively. This is why many agencies use white label SEO to provide higher-quality services to their clients.  

Technically, white label SEO refers to hiring another company to do some SEO projects for the agencies and sell the services to their clients. These companies employ a team of SEO experts who deliver excellent results and get a great ROI for the agencies’ clients. For example, if you’re running an SEO agency, you can work with a reliable company that offers white label SEO Australia. That way, you can take advantage of the different skills of an SEO specialist.  

That said, working with a white label SEO company can be great if you have complicated SEO projects such as real estate SEO, etc. After all, an SEO specialist has an in-depth understanding of the following than someone with basic knowledge:

Knowledge of current optimisation trends and search engine algorithms.

The field of SEO is quite dynamic. Search engines are constantly updating their algorithms and adding new ranking criteria. To get satisfactory results and keep up with the competition, a specialist must constantly monitor current optimization trends and implement them in practice.

Understanding the metrics and KPIs used to evaluate the effectiveness of optimisation.

An SEO Specialist pays attention to certain metrics that help assess the effectiveness of optimization, such as Organic traffic, Search rankings, and Dwell time. If you monitor the data for visitor conversions, you’ll be able to analyse the profit Organic Search made. You can calculate ROI (Return on Investment), taking into account the expenses for optimization services.

The ability to use analytics tools

For example, in Google Search Console, a specialist can get statistics on clicks and displays, internal optimization issues, external and internal links. Google Analytics provides information on user actions after they’ve navigated to a website. The Google Ads Keyword Planner tool displays statistics on search queries.

Special platforms for SEO specialists, such as SE Ranking and Siteliner, can combine statistics from different sources. They can be used to get detailed information about page positions in search engines and select keywords, perform a comprehensive analysis of your and your competitors' websites, and synchronize the service with other analytic tools.

Conclusion

An SEO Specialist adapts a website to search engines to increase its ranking and attract free, targeted traffic.

An optimized resource contains high-quality and relevant content with important keywords, is ranked for the queries of potential customers, and is convenient for visitors. Such a website generates more sales, orders, and other conversions, affecting company profits.

An SEO specialist can achieve the ultimate goals ranking for organic traffic with the help of:

• a website audit to assess its strengths and weaknesses.
• a strategy aimed at internal and external optimisation.
• regular analysis of the effectiveness of the site and the positions taken by its pages.

SEO is a process-intensive operation, and while it may not achieve next-day results, a proper SEO strategy will pay off in the long run. Once your site ranks with organic traffic, it’s just a matter of keeping up with trends and changes with search algorithms. Therefore, if you want your site to succeed and build conversions, a qualified SEO Specialist is an effective solution to develop your brand. And you can also consider using a specialised agency as well.

Be sure to check out this engaging podcast episode on how to start a successful SEO agency:

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