Search engine optimization (SEO) is the backbone of digital marketing. The higher your site is on the search engine results page, the more likely the web user will click on it and check out what you’ve got.
To note, 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine. Thus, you can’t ignore an SEO campaign in a world where most people go online to search for information and products. (1)
As you know, SEO is a multifaceted digital marketing strategy and requires expertise for you to witness positive results. That’s why many companies outsource this task to SEO companies.
In this regard, it helps to know what it’ll be like working with a Toronto SEO agency. Here’s what you can expect:
A Variety of SEO Services
A reputable Toronto SEO agency offers several services. These include the following:
- Content marketing: It helps to increase your visibility and drive traffic to your website. In fact, 90% of marketing experts include content marketing in their strategies. You need lots of optimized content to see good results. The best SEO agencies will create a content strategy based on keyword research findings and provide highly optimized articles on a regular basis. (2)
- Social media marketing: A strong social media presence helps your website rank higher. Your digital marketing agency can help you with this. They’ll optimize your social media profiles, create a strategic posting schedule, and even engage with your followers.
- Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising: While SEO optimizes your entire website for Google search, paid advertisement can help boost organic keyword ranking. This way, you can dominate both paid and organic search results.
- E-commerce marketing: This is the process of optimizing an online store to improve its visibility and rankings in search engines. SEO agencies can help you optimize product descriptions, enhance site architecture for better crawlability, design campaign landing pages, get qualified leads, and improve user experience to reduce bounce rates and increase conversions.
- Technical SEO: This includes securing your site with HTTPS, making your site structure easy to navigate, adding meta tags, improving web design, implementing faceted navigation, enhancing page load speeds, making your site mobile-friendly, and rectifying crawl errors and duplicate content issues.
The list doesn’t end here, though. There are many other services these Toronto SEO agencies can offer, depending on your needs.
Planning Your SEO Strategy
The Toronto SEO agency you’ll hire will first comprehensively audit your existing online presence. They’ll assess your website’s structure, content, keyword density, backlink profile, and technical SEO elements. This way, they can identify strengths to capitalize on and areas of improvement.
After the audit, the Toronto SEO experts will conduct an in-depth competitive analysis. Knowing the SEO practices of your competitors will help identify gaps in their strategies that your company can take advantage of. The analysis will typically target keywords, issues concerning your content, and link building strategies.
Next, they’ll help you set smart SEO goals. These include ranking targets for specific keywords, increasing organic traffic, boosting conversion rates, and enhancing user engagement. Aligning these goals with your overall business objectives will ensure your custom SEO strategy drives relevant results.
Ongoing Communication and Reports
For a successful partnership with a Toronto SEO company, they must communicate with you and send reports regularly. This will ensure you’re always informed about the progress of their SEO plan and how it’s impacting your website performance.
Your chosen agency will establish a favorable communication schedule. It could be daily, weekly, or monthly, depending on what works best for you and what you agree on. If you’ve contracted a local Toronto SEO company, it may be possible to collaborate physically time after time. During these meetings, you can discuss changes in strategy and address any concerns.
They’ll also provide comprehensive reports, typically listing performance metrics like organic traffic volumes, rankings for target keywords, conversion rates, bounce rates, and the overall return on investment (ROI). These will give you quantifiable insight into how well the marketing agency is doing its work.
Costs and Contracts
Every SEO Toronto company charges a distinct price for their services. It all depends on your project’s scope, the agency’s expertise, and the specific needs of your business. Expect them to offer several pricing structures, including monthly retainers, project-based fees, or hourly rates.
To note, SEO is often less expensive than other digital marketing strategies like paid ads. For instance, Grammarly gets about 22.2 million monthly search visits, which would cost about USD$5.1 million per month if they were to buy the same traffic via Google Ads. You’d want to compare your SEO project costs versus paid traffic in the same fashion and see how much you’re saving. (3)
If your SEO project is long term, you may want to work with the monthly retainer structure. But if it’s a one-time partnership, working with a project-based fee would be better. And on the other end, hourly fees work perfectly for consultation services or smaller tasks.
Beyond costs, the SEO agency will require you to sign a contract agreement. This outlines the duration of the service, the scope of work, confidentiality agreements, payment terms, and contract termination provisions.
Make sure you fully understand the contract terms before appending your signature. You can always negotiate the terms and settle on what favors you both.
Conclusion
Working with a Toronto SEO agency successfully requires a profound know-how of what to expect. The article has outlined such details. But remember that these are but general guidelines. Your working relationship with your chosen expert is often subjective and you can define the rules as you see fit. The end goal is achieving impressive SEO results.
References
- “124 SEO Statistics for 2024,” Source: https://ahrefs.com/blog/seo-statistics/
- “Content Marketing Statistics for 2024,” Source: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/software/content-marketing-statistics/
- “Grammarly’s SEO Strategy: 11 Interesting Insights,” Source: https://ahrefs.com/blog/grammarly-seo/