Destination Marketing Organization scenario: You have a good looking destination website with appealing content on its pages, but you’re not getting the traffic or engagement you want. With Google’s ever-changing algorithm, it’s not enough to have great content and an attractive website, you have to put in the work to make it search engine friendly with SEO tactics.
It’s important to ensure your SEO agency shares the same visions and goals as your organization. Here are five basic expectations from a healthy SEO engagement:
- Transparency & Open Communication: First and foremost, the SEO agency you choose to work with should be transparent. You should know at all times what they’re working on and why. They shouldn’t have secrets or not be able to explain how they’re attempting to capture more organic traffic for your site.
At the beginning of an SEO engagement, ask for an Annual SEO Account Plan that lays out the tasks that will be completed each month/quarter. Make sure the plan can change at any time due to algorithm changes or specific content needs. Also request that they provide a list of all tasks completed each month in your monthly report.
- Barrier Analysis: At the beginning of any SEO engagement, an agency should comb through your site to ensure there aren’t any technical barriers that would stop the search engines from being able to properly index your website. Barriers can include everything from content issues and inadequate meta tags, to improperly optimized images and missing sitemaps.
- Establish Goals: Your agency should start by gathering as much information as possible before setting up clear SEO goals (with you) for your site. They should do an in-depth review of your analytics, extensive keyword research, a competitive analysis, as well as collect as much information as possible from you about your destination, your current KPIs, and what you’ve done in the past.
- Monitoring & Reporting: Your agency should be monitoring your site’s traffic constantly and providing recommendations based on traffic sessions, bounce rates, session durations, and site searches. All goals and event tracking should also be monitored. They should be providing a monthly report that speaks to changes in organic traffic, paid campaigns and social referrals, how your site compares to the industry average and changes in performance. This report should also include everything that was completed on your site and recommendations made for the month. The most important thing about this report is that it provides you with everything you want to know about your site at a glance and any questions you may have are answered.
- Monthly & Quarterly Site Health Checks: SEO is an ongoing process and must include monthly and quarterly tasks in order to maintain a healthy site. Tasks should include crawl error reviews and corrections, broken link and spell-check scans and corrections, duplicate content scans, toxic backlink reviews, and analysis and review of your Google Analytics and Search Console accounts.
Search engine optimization is ever evolving, and ensuring your site is search engine and people friendly requires your agency to do all these things and more. These are just the basic essentials of a good SEO engagement. You can find many helpful resources online that explain the newest trends in the digital marketing world. You’ll also want to ensure your agency keeps up with the newest trends to be able to provide you and your destination with the best value
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If you’d like to discuss SEO engagement options, reach out to learn more about Simpleview’s digital marketing services.
