What are the Elements of a Perfect SEO Team?

What components of an SEO software team are most important to you?

Is this something you think about often? Maybe you’re like Hector, a marketing manager who’s been hired on to oversee all marketing initiatives for his company, and you don’t know the first thing about what makes an SEO agency or team great. And you may not have time to think about it, either. After all, what with trying to outrank Amazon (the ultimate struggle) on top of your other marketing duties, you’re swamped with trying to stay afloat, not even to speak of being competitive.
Like Hector, you may have already hired an SEO agency and found they came up short in terms of communication, organization, and, most importantly, results. This doesn’t give Hector the most confidence in external SEO teams, but there’s no way he can do everything he needs to do by himself, so he’s willing to try again. This time, he wants to make sure he knows exactly what to look for in an SEO software agency before he signs on the dotted line.

Sound familiar?
Many one-person marketing teams or small businesses run into this same issue when approaching SEO marketing agencies. When you’re the head of operations, marketing, or customer service, it’s hard to really hone in on any one aspect of your business without another part of it suffering. This is why the best leaders delegate. But how can you be sure who you’re delegating to is going to do the best job? What if there was a way to pre-determine that the SEO agency or team you hire will produce quality work?

Luckily for you, there is.
We’re spilling our secrets on the best elements of the perfect SEO team. These components are tried, tested, and true, and with a competent, strategic mix of these service areas, we’re sure your business will thrive.

What Makes Up an SEO Software Team?

Through your experience as a marketer, you may have already guessed that an SEO team isn’t just made up of one person watching Google Analytics real-time stats all day. In fact, there are more than 5 service areas that can make up an SEO software team.

A top-tier SEO team may include:

• • Content
  • Optimizations
  • Outreach and PR
  • Technical
  • Social
  • Paid Media and PPC

Many teams have all components, but sometimes the best teams only have a few. It really depends on what the needs of your business are. If you run a small business and are on a budget, a healthy combo of content, optimizations, and outreach may do the trick. If you have a bit more room and budget on board, including technical work to really get to the root of potential problems, or paid SEO to propel you forward in a competitive landscape can really help. The icing on the cake is social: far-reaching and incredibly engaging.
At an SEO agency like CanIRank, one that caters to your unique business strategy, each client team is crafted to include key components integral to a business’ specific success. Success doesn’t always look the same for every business, so why should your SEO team?

Let’s learn more about the elements of a perfect SEO team and how you can get each service area working for you.

Content Strategy

There’s so much more to content strategy than just writing a blog here and there to increase traffic. In actuality, it encompasses the entire website, including everything from how many categories and subcategories you display on your ecommerce site from the names of the services you list on your SaaS business. Should the Contact Us section get its own place on the menu? Is it better to list each service on its own individual page? These are questions best answered through content strategy.

In some cases, content is the backbone of an SEO strategy. Engaging, credible, and high-quality content can steady bounce rates, help position you in competitive spaces, and best of all, sell your product. Think of your business’ story and how you want to get its key messages across. Exceptional content will help you tell that story to your customers — and Google — by organizing your site in a way both users and search engines can understand.

Optimizations

If content strategy relied on how to tell your brand story, optimizations allow businesses to narrow down the “who”. This service area deals with structuring your site around primary keywords, secondary keywords, and related terms, as well as checking other on-page tags that may be hurting your site’s chance at ranking well. Too many heading tags? Are all your meta descriptions too similar? These are just a small sector of issues that optimizations can fix in a clear and concise manner.

It’s important to note that a well-optimised site isn’t just keyword dumping, or throwing your primary keyword into every paragraph. Google hates that and, for the record, so does your demographic. No one wants to read an article about how effective an SEO team is with SEO written every five words. Optimisations is strategic; it boosts content, making sure that the people who need to see your site or learn about your business are able to find it easier and faster than before. It’s about honing the focus of your site.

Outreach and PR

You may have an image of what a PR, or public relations, person is in your head already: someone who stops at nothing to get placement for their brand. (And maybe clogging up your small business phone system for hours on end with pitching calls.) This is partially true, but outreach and PR as a service area has a stronger focus on strategic authority- and link-building as a means to boost those well-written and well-optimised pages you’ve worked so hard on. It is finding like sites and forming partnerships that will bolster the credibility of your site in the long run.

But what’s the big deal with authority building, anyway? Many small teams may not notice that authority building and link building plays an integral role in your site’s ranking. Backlinks, links from other sites, and internal links create a delicate fabric that allows each page to feed off each other. If your site is linked to from a site that has a higher DA (domain authority) or website relevancy score, then you can reap the benefits in the form of an increased backlink profile, a boost in search rankings, or even more direct traffic.

Technical

Technical SEO may appear daunting at first, but if your site is going through some otherwise unexplained issues, getting a technical expert on your SEO team is your best bet to reverse the damage. Having issues with XML sitemaps or page speed? Need to jig around your URL structures? Or are you unsure what any of that really even means? A technical SEO expert can help.You may be thinking all SEO is technical to some degree, so what makes technical SEO so special? In short, technical SEO is the act of optimising and restructuring a website. It is similar to what an optimisations specialist might do, but instead of working on the front, customer-facing end of your website, technical SEO experts work in the back-end. They optimise the infrastructure of a website so search engines like Google can better crawl or index them properly. This is in your best interest because sometimes all the on-page optimisations in the world can’t fix something hidden deep in your code. A technical expert is a great addition to an SEO agency team because they do the deep digging to make sure your site is functioning at optimal speed.

Social

Using social media as a platform for SEO may not be the most obvious choice, what with the heavy importance of components like content, optimisations, outreach, and technical, but it has its own place in boosting your rankings.

Social for SEO can work hand-in-hand with outreach. While a link posted on Twitter or another social media platform may not solely count for a whole lot, sharing links via social media is a great way for relevant influencers and sources to find your content and share it further. In some cases, they may even link to it. In an SEO team, a social expert may work directly with outreach and PR in a similar strategy, or they can be tasked with increasing overall brand awareness by managing social accounts, interacting with influencers, participating in social media chats, or engaging with audiences. The power of social media isn’t to be underestimated, and neither is the place of social in an SEO agency team.

Paid Media and PPC

Some may not categorize paid media or PPC (pay-per-click) as organic search engine optimization because of its assumed heavy price tag, but for those who are able to include this one-of-a-kind service in their SEO software team, the benefits are endless.

PPC marketing is the act of purchasing a campaign that pushes your site to the forefront of your most coveted search. For example, if you need your homepage to gain more traffic through the keyword ‘luxury mattress’, then you would purchase a PPC campaign that allots a certain amount of money to getting clicks for that keyword. There’s a myth that PPC is insanely expensive, but that isn’t always the case. Each campaign can cost varying amounts of money, but through some careful maneuvering and attention to detail from a paid SEO team member, you can manage costs and still get great results. A well-designed PPC campaign is fast with guaranteed results, extremely targeted, stable, and increases brand visibility all while adhering to your budget.

Conclusion

A perfect SEO software team is essential to creating and executing a solid SEO strategy. After all, your strategy is only as good as who you get to execute it, and sometimes as a one-person team, you may need to delegate. Make sure you’re delegating to the right team; the team known for attracting better quality leads and generating millions in organic traffic for businesses just like yours. CanIRank’s SEO team knows what it takes to increase your organic traffic for the long haul. Get a free trial and hire the best team for your SEO efforts today.