If you want great SEO in Hobart, you first need to understand what it is and how it impacts your business. This article will look into that, but we’ll also give you the top 10 things that all Hobart SEO agencies should offer. These are:
- 1. A full site audit
- 2. SEO strategy
- 3. Keyword research
- 4. Competitor analysis
- 5. Optimising existing content
- 6. Fixing technical SEO issues
- 7. Creating new written content
- 8. Link building
- 9. Local SEO
- 10. Reporting
For those looking at this wondering where a few other things are, such as PPC advertising and social media management, we’ll touch on those later. The reason they haven’t been added to this list is they are more activities for a digital marketing agency in Hobart. SEO is one part of digital marketing – a speciality within the larger scope of digital marketing.
With that out of the way, let’s get started. What on earth is SEO?
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of driving more organic traffic to a website through search results. We’re going to use a camping store for a few examples along the way today. So, if customers search Google for ‘camping stores in Hobart’, the top organic search results (not paid advertisements) will be those with the best SEO.
This means pages and websites are optimised with certain keywords and other elements to prove their value to Google. As a search engine, Google is always trying to give people the most relevant results for their searches. But it takes a bit of focus on the entire website, not just one page.
Our camping store should be trying to improve Google rankings for a range of keywords relevant to its business. By optimising their website for search engines, companies can try to get higher rankings and therefore more customers clicking through to their website. Check the video below from Ahrefs for some great explanations.
Why does it matter for your business?
Many people will argue that SEO is crucial for every business. The fact is, that’s not really the case. It’s crucial for those who rely on an online presence to generate income. There are certainly benefits for all businesses, but it might not be high on the priority list for everybody.
For example, a business in a small town with very little competition doesn’t necessarily need a strong online presence if all of its customers already know about them. However, our camping store has plenty of competition. When customers search Google for where to buy a tent, the camping store wants to be right at the top of the search results.
Digital Synopsis reports that pages appearing on the first page of Google’s search results for any query end up getting 95% of the traffic. This means if you’re not on page 1, people aren’t going to find you.
Key things your SEO company in Hobart should offer
Know you understand the importance of SEO, let’s take a look at what it really entails. When you hire SEO services in Hobart, there are certain things you should expect to receive. As you go through these items, remember that not all SEO campaigns require every single one of these activities. However, this list is designed to show you what an SEO specialist in Hobart should be able to deliver. Ideally, you’ll get a package tailored to your specific needs.
Every business has different goals. You may want more website traffic because you sell products online. That’s a no-brainer. If you’re a business consultant, attracting website traffic might not be about sales but more designed to establish yourself as an authority. Your website’s main goal could be to have people sign up for a newsletter and you conduct email marketing with your signed-up client list. This is why you should always have great communication with your Hobart SEO company.
Here are the top 10 SEO services you should expect.
1. A full site audit
Most SEO engagements start with a site audit. The site audit looks at a whole range of things, such as how your website is structured, whether you have broken links, and whether your pages load quickly. There are actually far too many things to list here, but the site audit is a crucial part of any SEO campaign.
From the audit, your SEO expert can get an idea of what needs to be fixed or optimised further. This may inform how your monthly SEO package is tailored. For example, you might want more technical work done to optimise your website before worrying about getting any new content published.
2. SEO strategy
Strategy is all about how you move forward. As we mentioned, the strategy might be informed by the site audit. Essentially, this is where your SEO agency will sit down with you, discuss your goals and work out what needs to be done first. Together, you can agree on a course of action moving forward.
This could include 2 months of working on the website’s existing SEO, before moving to publish new content in the following months. Backlinks might be a bit further down the track. Every strategy looks different depending on your business, your competitors and the current state of your website.
3. Keyword research
This is where the work really begins. All Tasmania SEO companies should be conducting very thorough keyword research. It involves finding the right keywords that your business should be trying to rank for on Google. All keywords have a certain level of difficulty, so ideally your SEO experts are looking for keywords that are relevant to your business, and have a decent monthly search volume, but a lower level of competition.
Put it this way. A broad word like ‘camping stores’ is going to be extremely hard to rank for because of the competition. It may get 3000 searches a month, but if you’re never going to be on page 1 of Google’s search results, what’s the point? Rather, find something like ‘Hobart camping stores’ that has 300 searches a month but you’re a realistic chance of ranking on Google’s first page.
It’s important to note that keyword research should always be ongoing. A good agency won’t pick a big list and just keep using those. The keywords you target should constantly evolve, and your agency should always be discovering new opportunities.
4. Competitor analysis
Competitor analysis often occurs in conjunction with keyword research. Most good SEO agencies in Hobart would ask you for some input here. You might already have a good idea of who your main competitors are. If not, your SEO team can look at the keywords you want to rank for and find some of the main competitors who are already ranking.
This activity helps to narrow the focus on keywords too. If your main concern is outperforming a competitor down the road, then your agency should put effort into ranking higher than them. Again, you want your agency to be realistic here. Just like the competition for keywords, it makes no financial sense to try and outrank, say, eBay or Amazon if you’re an online retailer. But you should try to outrank other smaller businesses in your niche.
5. Optimising existing content
The existing content on your website can be an absolute goldmine for an SEO campaign. This includes both your website’s main pages and all previously published blogs. Somebody experienced with search engine optimisation in Hobart can identify which content already ranks reasonably well, and then it can be improved.
For example, if our camping store has plenty of pages ranking between numbers 11-20, with a bit of effort, those pages may be able to get into the top 10 and appear on Google’s first page of results. Generally, optimising this content involves a bit of technical off-page SEO as well as updating the written content to be more Google-friendly.
6. Fixing technical SEO problems with your site
We’ve touched on this a bit during the site audit, but it’s worth mentioning separately. Off-page SEO or technical SEO is all about what lies behind the scenes of your website. There is simply too much to put into this single article, but this off-page work is important.
For example, technical SEO could include improving page load speed, which is important for both SEO and the customer experience. Speak to your agency about how you prioritise this work. Certainly, at Content Solutions Australia, we’re happy to do a few page fixes each month while also producing new content. But we can also spend the first two months completely fixing the technical SEO if that’s more beneficial.
7. Create new written content
Creating new written content is another task that all SEO agencies should be providing. People always say content is king, and that’s quite true when it comes to SEO. New content usually means publishing new blogs and articles that target certain keywords and boost your site’s overall domain authority.
It could also include adding new service pages on the website or even creating specific landing pages for keywords (more on that later). This type of work should always be done by a professional copywriter who understands SEO. Unfortunately, a lot of SEO agencies outsource the content side of things, which can have mixed results if they look overseas for written content. Don’t be afraid to ask your agency if all copywriting is done in-house.
8. Link building
This is also known as backlinking, and it involves getting other reputable websites to link back to yours. From an SEO agency point of view, this involves a bit of outreach. The most common way to get links back to your website is to approach relevant websites and ask if you can publish a guest blog that includes a link back to your own site.
If we’re honest, link building can be a shady business, with many companies offering a huge amount of links per month. Most of those links are paid for, and they’re irrelevant to your business. What people don’t realise is these bad or toxic links can actually negatively affect your SEO. So, if it takes some time to do genuine outreach and find some authentic link-building opportunities, it’s worth it.
One link from a quality website is worth more than 100 rubbish links generated by dodgy link farms.
9. Local SEO
People talk a lot about local SEO, but there really isn’t a great deal of difference between local and normal SEO. All it means is that the business relies heavily on local customers. It might be a restaurant, accountant or our humble camping store. These types of Hobart businesses need to rank well for local searches, such as ‘camping stores Hobart’ or ‘camping stores near me’. By comparison, online retailers don’t need local SEO as much, because their customers can be from anywhere.
However, this is why outsourcing SEO activities overseas is so problematic, and many agencies still do it. Even a task as simple as keyword research. Anybody can load up Google Search Console and find a few keywords. But they don’t understand the local business landscape or the types of keywords that your target audience might realistically search for.
Your SEO agency doesn’t need to be in the same town, but they should be in the same country to understand what you really need in terms of local SEO.
10. Report on results
Finally, all Hobart SEO should come with reporting. It’s important to ask for flexible reporting too. The numbers that matter to you might not matter to somebody else. Again, it goes back to your business goals and strategy. In the early stages after hiring SEO services in Hobart, you might not see any large increases in website traffic. But you’ll see better site audit reports, for example.
Your agency should agree with you on what types of figures you’ll get each month. Honestly, SEO is a long-term proposition, so the results may vary from month to month. What you’re looking for is an overall trend upwards in rankings, and of course, more website traffic coming through.
What else might your SEO agency in Hobart offer?
There are a few important aspects of online marketing in Hobart that not all SEO agencies will offer. Remember, SEO is a specific set of activities aimed at increasing organic website traffic. It’s not a word that’s interchangeable with all aspects of digital marketing in Hobart.
Some of the following activities are often confused with SEO, but technically aren’t part of the process. Still, if you want a full digital marketing agency in Tasmania, these are some of the other add-ons you might get.
PPC advertising
Pay-per-click advertising is something that can be done through search engines and other online platforms. In fact, there are countless ways to pay for advertising online, but PPC is quite specific to search engines and social media platforms.
In very simple terms, Google assigns a value to certain search queries, and businesses can ‘buy’ those search queries for advertising. The values are assigned according to the amount of competition for those words and also the number of monthly searches a keyword generates. Your marketing people would write an ad that appears at the top of the organic search results on Google, and you pay if a user clicks on the advertisement.
There is no genuine link to SEO, however, it’s still a good way to increase your paid website traffic.
Social media monitoring
Your activity on social media doesn’t directly affect your SEO, but it CAN have an indirect impact. A strong social media presence is another way to drive traffic to your website. This, in turn, results in more visitors and Google might determine that increased visitors mean your website should be ranked higher for certain searches.
So, if you hire a marketing company in Hobart, there’s every chance they will want to improve your social media presence and activity. If nothing else, a captive audience on social media can deliver more customers to your website and increase your sales.
Other forms of content
Content doesn’t just come in the form of blogs. Many SEO companies focus primarily on written content because they know it works. The more blogs and articles you publish that target specific keywords, the higher your domain authority. But other content is also extremely important.
Videos and infographics are always good in Google’s eyes, and the presence of a video can boost a page’s SEO. Plus, if you create amazing infographics, you may find this generates a few backlinks if other people use your images.
Landing pages
Landing pages are part of your website, but not. Let’s explain a bit further with an example of a camping store. You might have a PPC ad on Google targeting the keyword ‘tents for sale in Hobart’. When users click the ad, you can create a sales page specifically for tents, where all the copywriting is urging people to take a certain action like buying tents online, downloading a catalogue or visiting the store. This is called a landing page. It looks exactly like your website and is technically part of your website, but you won’t find it in any of your menus.
This is important because if you pay to get visitors who are interested in tents, why take them to your main homepage? The customer then has to search for tents, which is frustrating and could cause them to leave. Rather, give them all the info they need to buy a tent, and you’re more likely to convert a sale.
Need an SEO company in Hobart?
If you’re looking for an SEO company in Hobart that offers a high-quality service tailored to your needs, you’ve found it. Here at Content Solutions Australia, we offer several packages designed to grow your business. But everything can be tailored to suit your business goals. We work closely to understand your business and what you’re hoping to achieve. If we don’t think we’re the best-placed agency to help, we’ll tell you honestly.
Contact us today, and find out how we can grow your online presence and drive more potential customers to your website with SEO that works.
