What Should an SEO Agency Be Doing to Help You Rank #1 & Why

If you’re engaging an SEO agency in Singapore and you’re still not getting results after 6 months, you’ll want to run through this checklist.

SEO takes time, but there should be a reasonable time frame. Besides, you ought to be knowing what key strategies that your agency should be executing for your website.

There isn’t any reason for your SEO consultant to keep you in the dark, particularly if there are little to no results to show.

Yet, that’s not to say there aren’t good SEO agencies in Singapore. In fact, you ought to be engaging a good one as SEO implementation will bring long term benefits to your business.

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What Are The Benefits of Hiring an SEO Agency

First of all, you save precious time and money when you’re hiring an SEO agency. You don’t have to learn SEO from scratch and spend on expensive courses to pick up advanced SEO skills from seasoned specialists.

Performing SEO isn’t as simple as stuffing a few keywords on the page title. There could be as many as 200 ranking factors (or more) that are affecting a website’s position on Google search results.

Then, there’s the suite of SEO tools that you need to purchase to monitor and audit the SEO performance of your website. These tools can end up costing you tens of thousands of dollars per year, and they’re often under-utilised.

Hiring a local SEO agency in Singapore enables you to focus on your core business instead of distracting your focus with SEO fundamentals. Not only do you save on buying expensive tools, but your business revenue also increases as you get more organic traffic to your site.

Experienced SEO agencies are armed with the necessary expertise. Besides, they’re also updated with the latest SEO trends, which may change in a matter of months.

What Should an SEO Agency Be Doing to Help You Rank #1 & Why

1. Understands your goals and requirements

No. The first thing that your SEO agency in Singapore should do isn’t jumping into link-building or generating dozens of new keywords. Instead, your agency ought to spend a few hours understanding your goals and requirements.

Why?

Every business is unique, even if they are in the same industry. Depending on your goals, budgets and the available resources, you’ll need SEO marketing strategies that are tailored to your business.

Therefore, the first step that any SEO agency should take is to understand your business needs. Expect some questions like these to have a better insight into your business:

  • What are the goals that you want to achieve with the SEO campaign? Is it brand awareness, free-trial sign ups, e-commerce sales or other measurable KPI?
  • Who are your target audience and competitors?
  • Which are the respectable online publications in your industry?
  • How do you stand out against your competitors?

2. Can Offer a detailed Audit of your Website

Before any SEO strategies can be implemented, the SEO consultant needs to run a detailed audit on your website.

Why?

In SEO, your website is akin to a patient and the SEO consultant, the doctor. Without performing an audit, it is like blindly conducting a surgery without knowing the underlying conditions.

An SEO audit is performed to assess various factors of the website, including

  • On-page SEO analysis
  • Off-page SEO analysis
  • Technical SEO analysis
  • Keywords analysis

These assessments will return useful data that will help shape the SEO strategies for your website.

But that’s not all. An experienced SEO consultant will also assess the website in terms of brand values and whether it is appealing to the customers.

After all, user experience is part of SEO success.

If your website is not mobile-friendly, your SEO agency may suggest the following remedial actions:

  • Choose a website theme that is mobile-friendly, particularly if you’re building on WordPress.
  • Improve the page loading time by compressing images, minifying CSS and Javascript and use caching.
  • Use pop-up dialogues that don't block the entire screen.
  • Ensure that menus and clickable links are spaced out appropriately.

3. Can Zero in on Competitive edges and Content Gaps (Articles, Blogs)

Your SEO agency needs to have the eyes of a hawk, particularly when trying to rank in Singapore local search. Often, the audit report summarises the strength of your websites that ought to be taken advantage of.

In other words, the agency needs to be able to spot competitive edges or content gaps on your site.

Why?

In SEO, you want to outrank your competitors on competitive keywords and strengthen those that you’re already ranking.

However, some strategies may take lesser efforts and time. It is up to your SEO agency to identify keywords that are reasonably easy to rank and publish optimised blog articles. If you’re already ranking for some keywords, the SEO agency can beef up the position with link-building or on-page optimisation.

Leveraging these opportunities can make a difference in terms of how long it takes before your SEO campaign produces results.

4. On-page optimisation (Technical SEO, GMB optimisation, Onsite content etc.)

When it’s time to get the actual work done, the SEO agency ought to start with technical SEO, onsite content and GMB optimisation.

Why?

In Singapore, systematic execution of the on-page optimisations, including GMB, content and technical SEO is key to driving local traffic to your business.

GMB optimisation helps your business to gain visibility on the Google Map & Local Pack.

Google my business optimisation

Meanwhile, you’ll need technical SEO to ensure that your website is crawlable, fast and has an optimised site architecture. To increase organic traffic, you’ll need to publish updated content that is relevant to what users are searching for.

These are the bare minimum if you want to please Google’s search algorithm.

5. Off-page optimisation

Publishing optimised content isn’t enough if you’re ranking in highlight competitive keywords. Your SEO consultant ought to be suggesting off-page optimisation as the next step.

Why?

Off-page optimisation involves building backlinks to your website. Backlinks, especially from relevant and authoritative sites, remain a major ranking signal for Google.

Your website’s authoritativeness will increase as more links are built to it through legit link-building strategies. As a result, your website will get a better position on Google search result and enjoys an increase in search traffic.

You’ll want to avoid SEO agencies that are practising Black-hat techniques like PBN or reciprocal linking. These strategies may result in Google penalties, which wipes off your site from the search engine.

Besides link-building, there are also off-page optimisation techniques that don’t focus on getting backlinks, at least not directly.

Social media marketing helps to connect your brand with prospective customers and kicks off conversations. It is a good strategy to boost your brand standing amongst the public.

Your SEO agency should also actively pitch for guest blogs, especially to authoritative industry publications. It helps to increase the authoritativeness of your site, which is important for Google.

Striking up a PR campaign to get your brand mentions on social media or blogs also helps in SEO. Whether it’s linked or unlinked, it tells search engines that your brand is popular and therefore merits a boost in ranking.

We’re in an age of influencer marketing and your SEO agency should take advantage of that. When properly executed, you’ll have users sharing and engaging with your content, and possibly build a few backlinks indirectly.

6. Content marketing

Unlike common misconceptions, SEO and content marketing are not separate entities. Both are overlapped in many areas. Therefore, your SEO consultant ought to be strategising on content marketing in the SEO campaign.

Why?

There is no point in creating great content if you don’t market it to the target audience. When it comes to Google, keyword research and search intent are key to successful content marketing. Publishing optimised content that is relevant to users queries helps to get your website found on Google.

Content marketing also helps with your link-building strategies. It’s an effort to reach out to authoritative sites and influencers to share and link to your site. Indirectly, you’ll have better brand exposure and also increase traffic to your site.

7. Regular reporting

Numbers, charts and graphs track progress in an SEO campaign, and they should be made available to you.

Why?

As the client, you ought to know how if the SEO strategies taken by the agency are producing results. Charts and numbers will show you the truth.

By having detailed reports, you can then fine-tune the strategies and make adjustments on areas that are not showing the desired results.

Sometimes, a Google algorithm update may decrease your site’s search visibility, and a report will help in mitigation plans.

SEO strategies aren’t fixed templates. They continue to evolve in line with the changes taken by major search engines.

You should be receiving reports that contain important SEO metrics, including:

  • Organic traffic
  • Keyword rankings
  • Click-through-rate
  • Time spent on site and bounce rate.
  • Backlink profile

8. Proactively Recommending Improvements

Your SEO agency should regularly suggest improvements, based on the current trends and findings in the report.

Why?

SEO isn't static. Expect changes in trends and practices in a matter of months. Besides, your competitors aren’t staying idle either.

Therefore, you’ll need to always be on your toes and stay one step ahead to improve or maintain your site’s ranking.

A good SEO consultant will recommend changes accordingly to the latest best practices or the existing condition of your website.

For example, you may receive these recommendations:

  • Publish more optimised contents.
  • Increase link-building effort.
  • Create a PR campaign.
  • Remove unnecessary plugins.
  • Improve your business presence on social media.
  • Switch to a faster hosting provider.

9. Prevent Negative SEO attack

Besides knowing how to get your website to rank, an SEO agency in Singapore should also be capable of fencing off negative SEO attacks.

Why?

The world of SEO can sometimes be rough. There are occasions where competitors adopt low-handed tactics to hurt the SEO ranking of your website.

Usually, these involved building a huge number of spammy links to your website, hoping to trigger a Google manual penalty.

While Google has claimed that it’s able to pick up and ignore spammy links, you’ll still want to be safer than sorry.

Therefore, you’ll need an SEO agency that can pick up these attacks and implement measures to neutralise malicious efforts.

These measures involved contacting the webmaster of the sites and requesting the links to be removed. As a last resort, the spammy links are manually disavowed.

10. Suppressing negative keywords

An SEO agency needs to be good in online reputation management. Not only does the agency need to rank webpages, but it also needs to be able to prevent certain articles from ranking on Google.

Why?

When you’re running a business, it is impossible to keep every customer happy. There are occasions where a disgruntled customer had a bad experience and start writing about it in a blog or social media.

Such a negative review may pop up on Google when other users are searching for reviews on your business.

Negative reviews hurt business, even if it stems from a misunderstanding that can be easily resolved.

Your SEO agency should be able to plan out a contingency plan to suppress the negative reviews from getting visibility on Google.

It could be publishing articles targeting the same keyword, guest blogging, or start a PR campaign to push the negative review down the search result.

Why Should You Hire Heroes of Digital Over Other Agencies?

If you’re searching for the best SEO agency in Singapore, you’ll want to check out our company, Heroes of Digital.

Our team has a string of proven results with businesses of various sizes in Singapore. We’re equipped with the latest SEO skills and tools, including our proprietary HeroSEO Powersuite.

We don’t believe in a one-size-fits-all solution, which is why we spend time understanding our client’s needs and budget.

Then, we plan and execute SEO strategies that are customised to their goals and requirements.

The result? Increased search traffic (and revenue) for happy clients who continue to engage our SEO services.

Learn more on how we can increase traffic and conversion for your business with proven SEO strategies.

Xavier Tan
Co-Founder
Xavier is the Co-Founder of Heroes of Digital. He started social media marketing and SEM long before it became popular in Singapore. His passion is in helping businesses grow through effective lead generation. He has overseen campaigns for Amara Hotel, NTU, Marina Bay, L'Oreal, and 100+ SMEs.
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