SEO Services: Web Audit, On-site and Off-site SEO

More and more, companies are becoming aware of the crucial importance of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) which can be defined as the process of improving the visibility of a website on search engines via « natural » search results in contrary to Search Engine Marketing (SEM). The purpose of this article is to give a quick overview of the SEO process. Indeed, the fact is that SEO can be divided into three main logical steps: web audit, on-site and off-site SEO.

Introduction

As an introduction, for some background about SEO, you can look first at this presentation made by Rand Fishkin, the CEO and Co-founder of SEOMoz.

Web audit

As a general rule, a strategic web audit is often the first step of any SEO service. Its purpose  is to web presence of a website  in order to identify  areas where a better technical delivery can be achieved. A comprehensive web audit is the most effective way of ensuring a website to be crawlable, indexable and accessible by both search engines spiders and visitors.

While it often requires technical skills, a web audit needs to take into account the sector in which a company is evolving as well as its strategy towards its competitors. A professional SEO will thus cross technical, web analytics and marketing data to provide the most operational recommendations.

Once fixed the main technical issue and defined a coherent web strategy, the next logical steps is to improve the rankings of a website on the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) through on-site SEO.

On-site SEO

On-site SEO refers techniques that are performed on a website,  and are thus called « on-site ». Typically, on-site SEO follows a web audit and focuses on the optimization of the overall architecture, structure and content of a website. In particular, such services as keyword research, analysis and optimization are performed. The latter one usually needs to be combined with effective copywriting. But it often needs to be completed by a link-building campaign in order to be effective.

Off-site SEO

Off-site SEO refers to techniques that are not performed on a website, and are thus called « off-site. » Indeed, to improve effectively the rankings of a website, one needs the acquisition of incoming links, commonly referred to as backlinks. This is often one of the most difficult part of a SEO consultant.

SMO (Social Media Optimization)

More and more, especially since the last update of Google’s algorithm, SMO needs to be performed in order to improve the visibility of a website on social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter.

Conclusion

I hope this article gives you a good overview of the SEO process. As you can see, SEO requires mainly skills in order to make your website a success. It often needs to combine analytical, marketing and communication aspects in order to be efficient. In comparison to other traditional marketing services, SEO is still cheaper and far more effective.