What Does An SEO Agency Do

A professional SEO agency should generally deliver on-site SEO, off-site SEO, and technical SEO such as:

• keyword planning
• website audit
• page-speed enhancement
• removal of crawl errors
• content optimisation
• sitemap installation
• SSL installation
• backlink building
• SEO analysis, recommendations, and reporting

These are all vital processes for a fully functional, user-friendly, and responsive website that abides by all search engine regulations. 

 

Why SEO

People don’t just search for something online — they Google it.

Speaking of which, over 70,000 Google searches are made every second, translating to 227 million searches an hour, and over 5.4 billion searches per day.

Almost every business in the world, whether big or small regardless of what industry it’s in, has some web presence, and they’re all competing for the few top positions in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

By partnering with a strategic SEO provider, you’ll have a full team of SEOs working towards your digital success.

So, whatever your goal is – to drive traffic, generate leads, maximise sales, or increase brand awareness – we got you covered.

How Does SEO Work?

It all starts with search engines, especially Google.

Search engines deploy crawlers that go around the internet, gathering content and all information they can find to build an index.

An index serves one key purpose: it makes information quick to find.

When an online user runs a search query, search engine algorithms quickly sift through the index to provide the most relevant and important information (links) in the search engine results.

Google doesn’t just provide one result, but a list of them, arranged in order of relevancy and usefulness.

In comes SEO.

SEO is the process of improving your website for search engines.

The goal is to help search engines understand your website, its value, and its connection with relevant keywords.

It’s the glue that holds every piece of your digital marketing strategy together and the pipeline or highway for driving organic traffic to your site.

Why Is SEO Important

• Boosts User Experience (UX): At the core, SEO is not about search engines. It’s about practices that enhance your website’s functionality and user experience.
• Inspires Trust: People trust search engines. So, appearing at the top of search engines for a particular list of keywords means your website will be trusted too.
• Good for your site’s social promotion: Consumers are more likely to help you promote your website on social media after they’ve also found it on Google.
• SEO gives you a competitive advantage: With two sites designed the same and offering the same list of services, the odds are high that the one optimised for search engines will enjoy more traffic, which translates to more business and sales for you.
• More clicks to your website: More than 90% of online users don’t bother checking what’s on the second page. They’re more likely to click on the five top results and ignore the rest. Meaning, getting your website in the top 5 results allows you to dominate search engines.
• Google Ads vs. SEO: In Singapore, in creating high–quality leads, organic SEO is five times more effective compared to PPC advertising
• SEO attracts the best leads in Singapore: Inbound leads from SEO have 14.6% close rates, while outbound leads (that come from cold calling and direct mail) have a 1.7 % close rate.
• SEO is best for B2B marketers: In Singapore, 57% of B2B marketers state that SEO is the main lead generation channel which is also more effective compared to other initiatives.
• The first page means a huge advantage over competitors
• In Singapore, 1st-page captures 92%, and the second page captures 5% of all search traffic.
• The best 3 positions dominate: The first 3 organic listings capture 55% of all desktop search traffic and 45% of all mobile search traffic.
• Highest purchase intent: In Singapore, 30% of all Google searches that come from mobile include a location. And 78% of location-oriented searches resulted in an offline conversion.

An astonishing fact: over 70,000 Google Searches Are Conducted Every Second

Search engines have evolved a great deal since they started, and so is SEO.

Today, SEO isn’t just about ranking for popular search terms.

It’s about positioning yourself to be found when it matters the most to the user.

Our skilled and experienced team of SEO experts has been doing this for a long time to understand how the game is played.

They can help you achieve search engine visibility for valuable keywords, turning casual internet users into paying customers.

Note that:

• 93% of all online experiences begin with search engines
• 75% of search engine users say they never scroll past the first search engine result page
• 61% of online shoppers say they never purchase a product online without researching it first

How SEO Can Help Your Business

Imagine what ranking on the first page of Google could do for your business.

Our SEO campaigns and strategies are Google-update-proof, and that’s because we’re always keen on following Google’s guidelines.

We also know how to turbocharge the process.

We understand that your website’s potential to rank well in the SERPs is only as high as the quality of content you produce.

Our mission is to help you put your best foot forward so that your website can rank appropriately.

In doing so, we can help you rank well, and make sure your website can be found where your prospects and customers expect it to be.

Everything our agency does serves a strategic purpose.

Creating kick-ass content is only a starting point.

We don’t just outline content ideas for our clients. We instead try to create a roadmap for each client we get to achieve scalable, sustainable growth.

We’re all about helping you hit the business goals that matter.
It goes beyond churning out more content and hitting the publish button.

At MediaOne, we consider content as a business asset. It’s the fuel that powers a successful SEO campaign.

Not only that, it’s also the fuel that powers link building, PR, sales enablement, lead generation, and any other digital marketing strategy that can move the needle for your business.

That’s what makes us different from other SEO agencies.

We understand that crafting and publishing great content – while rewarding and fun – isn’t the ultimate goal, but a means to an end.

Our strategies are built around helping you achieve specific business goals, with SEO being how we make it happen.

Common SEO Strategies by Agencies

Here are some effective SEO agency strategies based on recent statistics, organized into a table:

Strategy	Statistics	Source
Organic Search Importance	Organic search generates twice as much revenue as any other channel for B2B companies.	AgencyJet​
First Page Results	Only 0.78% of Google users click on results from the second page.	AgencyJet​
Top Three Results	Over half of clicks go to the first three search results.	AgencyJet​
Content Depth and Freshness	Updating content with depth and new keywords improves rankings.	AgencyJet​
Page Load Time	The highest e-commerce conversion rates occur with load times under two seconds.	AgencyJet​
Backlinks	Top-ranking pages have 3.8x more backlinks than pages in positions 2-10.	AgencyJet​
Voice Search	Voice search accounts for 20% of all Google searches in the US.	Backlinko
Video Content	Videos are 50 times more likely to drive organic search results than plain text.	Markitors
Long-Form Content	Content over 3,000 words gets 3x more traffic and 4x more shares.	Markitors
Mobile Optimization	87% of smartphone users use search engines daily.	Markitors
Keyword-Rich Domains	Domains with strong keywords rank 1.5 spots higher.	Markitors
Local SEO	46% of all Google searches are for local businesses or services.	Single Grain​
Review Impact	Reviews impact local rankings and are trusted as much as personal recommendations.	Single Grain​
Google My Business Listings	Complete and accurate listings receive 7x more clicks.	Single Grain​

These statistics highlight the significance of various SEO strategies, from optimizing for mobile and local search to leveraging video content and maintaining fast page load times. By focusing on these areas, SEO agencies can effectively enhance their clients’ online visibility and engagement.

Why Outsourcing SEO To An Agency Is A Necessity

It doesn’t matter if you’re a seasoned marketer or a newbie. The first step to making SEO work for you is ensuring that you’re at the top of your SEO game. You have to know what still retains water and what’s no longer effective.

Google and other search engines frequently change their algorithm and SEO practices to ensure that users get the most accurate results. This did not happen previously, so monitoring these changes and ensuring your site follows them can be a bit of a challenge.

Fortunately, there are professional SEO agencies who have the expertise required to optimise websites and carry out A/B tests to make sure you’re nailing every aspect of SEO.

How to Choose the Right SEO Agency

They should have these traits:

• Their ranking on Google.com.sg
• Whether they have a well-defined process – better still if they have ISO certification of PMP
• The depth of their employee knowledge as ascertained by certificates and their ability to answer in-depth SEO questions
• The quality of their reporting, analysis, and recommendations
• The transparency of their processes
• The skilful use of a variety of SEO tools such as AHrefs, Semrush, Mangools, Majestic, ScreamingFrog, Keyword Hero, and Google Analytics to analyse and objectives of the SEO strategy
• Their ability to forecast, analyse and prepare SEO campaigns for major search engine algorithm updates
• Diversity of client portfolio: whether they can handle niched industries, small clients complex campaigns
• Strength of client portfolio: have they undertaken complex international SEO campaigns for large MNCs
• Their proven experience in e-commerce SEO
• Their ability to provide a comprehensive SEO strategy that is both technical and on-page content-related
• Their ability to tie keyword research to the client’s definitive business objectives
• Their ability to integrate SEO into their SEM, social media, and conversion programmes
• The presence of awards and accolades for their SEO work
• Being mentioned in various national and international media for their SEO work

Only MediaOne ticks all these criteria. So make sure you do your homework before entertaining an agency that claims to be on par but charges less.

Think about the pain of calling it quits with an agency in which you had invested so much of your time, emotions, and resources – someone with whom you had planned a future, and planned to grow together.

Not choosing the right experts can mean that you’ll have to break up with them sooner or later, disappointed. Disappointed that they couldn’t live their side of the bargain.

It could be that they overpromised on what they could deliver or didn’t understand SEO well enough to deliver any real results. Worse, it turns out they were just selling SEO for a quick buck.

As you begin your search for the right SEO agencies, try to make sure the SEO consultant has the following must-have qualities and features:

Realistic Offerings

Watch out for companies that overpromise and use guarantees.

An SEO company can only promise to improve your rank position. But they cannot guarantee the first position.

Depending on the industry, some competitors are just hard to beat the same way some keywords are hard (nearly impossible) to rank.

Moreover, SEO is a long game, an ongoing process.

Nothing about it can be guaranteed, as search engine algorithms are beyond anyone’s control. You also cannot guarantee that your competitors won’t be working just as hard.

Any promise of an overnight ranking, thousands of high DA backlinks, and guaranteed results should raise a red flag.

Experience

Don’t be quick to jump in bed with any consultancy without first looking at how long they have in business.

The length of time they have been up and operating directly indicates their level of experience.

Choose one that has been in the business long enough and serviced clients from multiple industries to know what works and what doesn’t.

Transparency

The agency you choose must be transparent about its pricing and SEO processes. They must lay it out there in the clear for you to see and decide for yourself.

Whether they’re dealing with a small business or a multi-national corporation, their pricing and SEO processes must remain pretty much the same.

A good SEO service agency will provide up-front prices. You get to look at your budget and tell if the agency is within your price limit, which saves both of you time.

Case Studies

A Good SEO expert should not just be willing to hand you their case studies. They should be excited when showing them to you.

It’s like an opportunity they have been waiting for, an opportunity to let their work speak for itself.

Case studies highlight a company’s work, give concrete examples of its performance, and, most importantly, validate its expertise and skills.

They’re testaments to a company’s ability to deliver on its promises.

Testimonials and Reviews

Testimonials and reviews can be compared to a vote of confidence from customers.

A customer must be really happy with your services to put out a positive word about your business.

When a client complains about an agency, the odds are good that you could be next. The same applies when a customer says something nice about an agency’s services.

The more testimonials an agency has the more they’re likely to have been in the business long enough.

The general rule of thumb is to go with an agency that at least has 100 online reviews and testimonials.

Hiring FAQs

Here are all the right questions you’re allowed to ask before you can go ahead and entrust them with your SEO needs:

“Can you itemise the list of deliverables?”

The agency you’re about to hire must be willing to break down what they intend to do as part of their SEO strategy. They should prepare a flow of activities that they intend to do.

Any agency that responds to this question reluctantly should not be trusted. SEO is hard work. It’s certainly going to take the agency hours of research and putting one and two together to pull this off. The least they could do is to be transparent about it.

Read this bearing in mind that SEO is always evolving. So expect their flow of work to change with time.

The least you can expect is for them to be patient with you. At this point, you’re allowed to ask them a series of service questions, including:

1. Mind listing all the services offered under this package? How will you be delivering them every month as part of your SEO strategy?
2. How many hours of work is dedicated to each service per month?
3. What technical aspect of my website do you plan to audit or fix?
4. How many pages do you intend to optimise at the start of your work?
5. Will you be creating new landing pages? If so, how many will they be?
6. How many internal and external articles do you plan to produce in a month?
7. How many quality backlinks should I expect from you?
8. How much time will you be dedicating to campaign analysis and reporting?

So this is how you know the agency can be trusted: instead of drafting something really quick, they’ll ask you for some time to work on a strategy. They’ll then reach back to you with a one to three-month strategy — and starting from the fourth month onwards, they’ll promise to reach back again with an adjusted strategy based on the results they’d have received in the first phase.

That’s a good answer, mostly because it shows that the agency is adaptive. Their services are bound to evolve with time, and they’re keen on analysing the results they get instead of reacting to their gut feeling.

“Do you have any long-standing customers or two that I can speak to?”

You want to dig for some reviews on the company before you can go ahead and hire them. If the agency is as good as they want you to think, they should at least have several businesses or companies that are willing to vouch for them.

Bonus point if the agency can get someone from a similar competitive business sector as you. The company they recommend should be able to talk about their expertise and run you through the details of the project and the role that the agency played in making it a success.

“Will I own the content and links post-campaign?”

Once the service is terminated, who’ll own the published content and the backlinks? Will the ownership transfer to you or remain with the agency?

The thing is, any content that was published under your budget belongs to you. Anybody that tries to convince you otherwise is attempting to blackmail you, is a big scam and should be avoided at all costs.

A good SEO company almost guarantees more traffic for your website, but a poor candidate will adversely impact your online presence.

It is crucial to choose carefully. Here are some questions that will help you make the right choice when hiring.

“How long have you been doing this?”

It is advisable to go for an experienced firm. Google periodically updates its ranking algorithms, and you need someone who is aware of such developments.  The company should provide a portfolio of former clients alongside a list of completed projects.  This allows you to gauge whether they are experienced enough to handle your task.

“How will you improve my SEO ranking?”

If you want to rank high on Google, you need an effective SEO strategy. Lazy tactics such as integrating random keywords and using low-quality backlinks can generate sporadic traffic, but consistency and client retention will remain unattainable.

A good SEO will elaborate on the strategies they implement to improve the visibility of client websites. If they refuse to elaborate on this front, move on to the next company. You want a provider that promotes transparency.

“Do you follow Google’s recommended practices?”

Complying with Google’s (and other search engines) best practices is mandatory if you want to build regular traffic to your website. Google works to optimize search results by applying up to 500 changes to its algorithm every year.

Some companies use underhand methods to rank high on Google. This is against Google’s best practices. The consequence of such violations is lowering your ranking on search engine result pages. Reduced visibility on Google means less traffic, which translates into lower revenue.

“What is your pricing model?”

Various SEO services in Singapore use different pricing models. It is critical to know how much a company charges so that you can adjust your budget accordingly.

The majority of SEO agencies charge according to the complexity of the project at hand. For example, a personal blog will cost you less money than an e-commerce website.

When discussing the pricing, remember to ask about the modes of payment.

Things have changed tremendously with Google paying less attention to links and more to some 200 factors. Any SEO company that’s still obsessed with links just shows how backwards they are.

A good agency should be more focused on optimising your website. They should be more focused on creating quality content that will see to it that they’re able to get you a varied link portfolio, not an exaggerated number of links that won’t get you anywhere.

“How will we contact you?”

It is advisable to have contact with your agency in case something goes wrong. Ensure that you know the agency’s preferred communication channel, and also provide them with your contact. Lastly, inquire on how to reach them during emergencies.

“How direct and transparent is the communication?”

You should be allocated to a fulfilment team that you’ll be working with throughout the duration of the project. This is the team tasked with the role of delivering SEO results to you.

In this case, the firm will break down the structure of this team to you. Make sure you understand which member of the team is responsible for a particular task in the campaign.

“How do you gauge progress?”

After all your objective is to increase the traffic, leads, conversions, and revenue generated by your business website. The process is itself an investment that must have positive results. 

This particular question aims to discover how your potential hire will know that their strategies are working.  Ideally, they should mention conversions and a higher ROI as the critical metrics for gauging the success of your business.

“Can you adapt your strategy to my industry?”

The majority of SMEs in Singapore are hesitant to invest in SEO, as they are uncertain if it will work for their industry. The truth is, some SEO strategies may work in one niche, and fail in another.

That said, an experienced SEO knows how to adapt its strategies to work across several industries. If you pose this question, they should respond comfortably.

“How do you handle penalized sites?”

It is almost impossible to restore the stature of a website after penalisation. There are, hover, some SEO experts that are capable of doing this near-impossible task.

“Do you offer other services?”

Working with a single agency is more convenient than enlisting the services of multiple service providers. Before signing an agreement, ensure that you know any other services on offer, such as search engine marketing, website design, PPC advertising, social media marketing, and so forth. A company that offers such services will save them time and resources that would have otherwise been used searching for others.

“Can you ‘guarantee’ #1 ranking on Google Singapore?”

Asking this question is the best way of telling apart legitimate SEO marketing companies from SEO salespeople. If an agency is after your money, they will ‘guarantee’ you the #1 spot on Google’s search results. 

In reality, not even the best agencies can guarantee you the coveted top spot on search engine result pages. Instead, a company should pledge to increase your search traffic consistently over time, and if possible, rank #1 for an easy term.

“What happens if I terminate the contract?”

You should know the implications of terminating the contract before the completion of the project. Most SEO companies in Singapore require the client to sign an agreement that covers a minimum period (a few months). This is understandable, as SEO takes time to have a noteworthy impact on your business.

If circumstances force you to break the contract, you should know the potential consequences. Such circumstances include poor results, improper conduct, lack of funds (rare), and many others.

“Why should we hire you over other SEO agencies?”

Similar to other open-ended questions, this one doesn’t have a perfect answer. Instead, it is intended to bring out red flags.

Answers such as we offer cheap services, we ‘guarantee’ results, we will build many backlinks, and so forth, are sufficient proof that you shouldn’t hire that particular company.

On the contrary, you should hire a company that responds by showing you their past successes, current and past clients, and their reputation in the SEO marketing industry.

Key SEO Tactics to Promote Website Performance

With Google unpredictably changing its algorithm focus on the following 11 hacks, you will soon notice a significant improvement in web traffic and conversion rate. 

1. Focus on User Experience (UI)

If you haven’t been paying attention to your website UI, you need to start doing so to ensure your site reigns supreme. The Core Web Vitals update in June 2021 focused on user experience and not content like most of the previous algorithm updates.  

Simply put, Core Web Vitals are signals that Google collects from the site pages to determine the degree of user experience they offer visitors. It focuses on three primary factors, namely:

• • Stability
  • Responsiveness and interactive
  • Website loading speed

The main reason why Google focuses on the three is that its primary focus is to provide the best engagement and experience to users across multiple devices. Mobile signals are more critical today, following the 100% mobile-first indexing launched in March 2021.

The bottom line is to focus on the three signals to enhance your website ranking. Test the pages using Google Search Analytics and other third-party tools to stay in the know. 

2. Shift to entity-based SEO

What is entity-based SEO? Entity-based SEO is a term that describes your brand or industry contextually. Unlike conventional SEO, this focuses on broader concepts and topics that enable search engines to provide searchers with accurate results.

The picture below shows that some phrases and keywords have different meanings. Capri is a drink while Capri Sun is an island in Italy. Therefore, content optimised for this keyword may be displayed to the wrong audience. 

Google has an advanced semantic search feature that deciphers the search intent based on keywords and the user’s previous browsing history. 

An SEO expert should help Google correctly interpret your site by including words relevant to your niche in the content. 

Achieve this goal by using domain authority and internal links so that Google successfully adds your website to the highly valuable E-A-T knowledge graphs. E-A-T stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. 

Google’s main objective is to rank website pages from authoritative sources at the top of SERPs. In the eyes of this major search engine, the more expertise you have on a particular niche, the more qualified your website is for a top stop in search results.

A good SEO would carry out extensive keyword research to find words and phrases that should be in the content. 

3. Polish Your Website Internal Linking

Internal linking creates a network of all the pages on your site using relevant keywords. It’s essential for SEO because the pages don’t get equal traffic. Some of them are orphaned and need to be revamped to match the performance of the rest.

A few months ago, Spencer Haws did an experiment on his website, and the primary objective was to get a clearer understanding of the benefit of internal links. He added internal links to 47 blog posts without changing their content. The ranking of 76.6% of those blog posts improved significantly.

Photo Credit: NichePursuits

Similar results were achieved in other experiments. The results are clear proof that proper internal linking helps Google better understand websites. The links are also used to determine the value of a particular web page. 

Be different from the competitors by adding the “Related Article” to direct readers to other articles on your website that contain additional information.

However, John Mueller recently stated that including too many internal links on each page can harm site SEO. He explained that such actions make it difficult for search engines to know the relevance of a website page to another and the site structure. 

4. Leverage Google Discover

Google Discover is new to most people, even experienced SEOs. Simply put, it’s a personalised mobile news feed powered by artificial intelligence. 

Google relies on a user’s previous browsing history and patterns to determine which content to display in the news feed. In a nutshell, it’s a query-less search meant to help users find information much faster – they no longer have to conduct the normal search.

How the user engages with your content determines whether it will be displayed in their news feed. 

Unfortunately, the content is often fetched from news-related websites and not commercial websites. A recent experiment that involved more than 11,000 URLs shows that 99% of all clicks were to news websites. There other niches that are highly favoured are;

• • E-commerce
  • Hobbies & Activities
  • Sports & Entertainment

Arguably, this feature doesn’t favour other websites, but all is not lost. To increase the chances of your blog post being featured in this news feed, it must be highly engaging. Including a Max Image Preview meta tag can also help you get more traffic from Google Discover. The meta tag directs Google to display your blog post with a large image.

How do you insert the meta tag in an article? Copy-paste the following tag in your blog post HTML source code.

It’s important to note that articles posted on Google Discover often generate maximum traffic the first three days after posting. Therefore, this strategy should only be used to supplement the primary website SEO strategy. 

5. Update Existing Content

An SEO consultant needs to make sure your website content be regularly updated to continue ranking well. This hack is informed by the fact that Google and other search engines prioritise pages with the most recent content.

Numerous sites have reported a sharp increase in ranking and organic traffic after updating old blog posts. Check the screenshot below.

Changing the publishing date won’t cut it though, your SEO agency needs to add fresh content that enhances the existing one or discusses the topics differently. The agency needs to perform extensive research to find new data and information to add to the existing articles. 

They should go the extra mile to create infographics and charts and post them on your website and social media channels. From their activities, you will get backlinks from other authority sites if they both contain recent information.

As more fresh content is created, they will need to update the images. In the screenshot below, the 2015 screenshot looks stale even though some of its content is still relevant.

An in-depth page-level analysis will help uncover content gaps. An SEO agency will use the results to know which topics you should include in the posts to make them relevant to your modern-day customers. 

Your SEO will also look at the keywords that a post no longer ranks for and either incorporate them into existing articles or write fresh blogs.

6. Convert High-Performing Blog Posts into Videos

99% of digital marketers say they will continue using it in 2022 and beyond. It’s one of the most preferred content types today as it’s more engaging than text and other formats. 

Sure, creating brand videos is a good idea, but consider converting high-performing blog posts into videos. Research shows that webmasters with video content on their sites record a 41% increase in traffic than sites with only written content. 

It’s also important to note that video increases organic traffic by 157% from search result pages for target keywords. 

Apart from more exposure in the Google results pages, you should look to boost the video’s chances of winning a featured or rich snippet. 

Photo Credit: Setupad.com

In addition, your SEO agency needs to perform YouTube SEO. Note that this form of SEO is different from Google SEO. In the latter, an article can take weeks to rank on the first page, while on YouTube, video has to get maximum exposure in the first 24 hours after posting to rank higher than the existing videos.

7. Voice Search Content Optimisation

A recent poll conducted in the United Kingdom in 2021 showed that 55% of people aged between 16 and 24 years old had a smart speaker. 

Photo Credit: Statista

Your SEO agency will make your website more discoverable by optimising the content for voice search. This is achieved by researching to identify questions that the target audience uses to conduct voice search queries. 

Definitely, the questions will be natural-sounding, so long-tail keywords should be used more often. Concisely, the long-tail keywords should complement the short-tail keywords.

Save time by starting with Google auto-fill, people also ask, and related searches. 

Photo Credit: Setupad.com

Over time, the keywords may change, so it’s recommendable to conduct keyword research frequently. your SEO agency will update the content with identified new keywords to improve ranking. 

8. Analyse Search Intent

How well do you know the kind of content your users want to see when they use a target keyword? Search intent is all about the type of information that the users want to see in SERPs when they search.

Your keywords should be grouped into four categories and based on search intent.

• • Commercial
  • Transactional
  • Navigational
  • Information

You should use the map below as a guide when grouping the keywords.

Photo Credit: SemRush.com

The keywords will give you an idea of what your ideal customer expects to find in a blog post or web page. It will be instrumental in your content creation process as you will know which topics to discuss.

For example, if most of the keywords are in the commercial category, you should write more product reviews to convince the customers that it’s OK to go ahead and place an order. Do the same for other keyword groups to get the best results.  Get your SEO agency to perform this and keep you abreast of their plans and progress.

9. Regularly Audit Your Site

A site audit will uncover errors that have been holding you back from realising your brand’s full potential. It will pinpoint the exact blog posts that should be improved, pages whose speed needs to be cranked up, which pages generate the most sales, and more.

All this information will help you continue ranking at the top and generate sales. It will also improve your technical SEO by identifying broken images, broken links, canonical points to redirect, and more.

It’s not possible to do a complete site audit manually. Many SEO agencies renowned tools such as Ahrefs Site Audit to check all the website pages and get a report quickly. The tool requires users to confirm they own the website domain before it starts crawling the pages. 

Photo Credit: Setupad.com

A good SEO agency will use the report to start fixing your website instead of blinding expecting that the edits will improve the site. Some of the recommendations may be too technical, so it would be wise to send the report to your SEO team or outsource the tasks to a reputable SEO agency instead of trying to wing it all yourself.

10. Apply Technical On-Page SEO

On-page SEO is closely linked to the performance of the site in terms of ranking, organic traffic, CTR, and conversion rate. 

Hence, your SEO agency should ensure that all the elements are optimised to offer customers the best user experience. Immediately they land on your website, they should know that they are on the right website and you have the solutions to their problems.

Some of the technical on-page SEO areas your SEO agency should focus on include;

• • Check internal links
  • Optimise content for readability
  • Confirm the images are optimised (have alt-text and compressed to promote page load speed)
  • Create a short and descriptive URL and include the target keyword
  • Add the target keyword in the title
  • Write compelling meta descriptions to boost CTR
  • Use PageSpeed Insights to detect other technical issues

11. Do A Content Gap Analysis

A content gap analysis will enable your SEO agency to locate common keywords competing for an audience with your competitors. It also goes deeper to offer new topic ideas for your blog. For the report to be comprehensive, you need to add URLs and domains of all your main competitors. 

Tools like Ahrefs will scan all the pages in the competitor websites and list keywords that your website should also be ranking for, but it’s not currently.

With this information, your SEO agency will create better content. Rest assured, you will notice a sharp increase in organic traffic and site ranking if you optimise content with these keywords. 

Photo Credit: Setupad.com

Make sure that the content your SEO agency creates matches your target audience’s search intent. 

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A Good SEO Agency Actively Participates In These Blogs & Forums – Is Yours?

A well-qualified SEO agency consultant should be well-clued into the latest search engine algorithms and policies.

He should be actively subscribing to and participating in popular SEO blogs and discussion forums. Make sure you check that he is aware of, and involved in blogs such as:

• Google Search Blog

(URL: https://www.blog.google/products/search/)

The largest and most popular search engines runs one of the most successful SEO blogs. The blog brings you to date on all the changes that are happening around Google search.

• MOZ

(URL: https://moz.com/blog)

Moz was started in 2004. It’s one of the most resourceful SEO blogs on the internet, having written thousands of blog posts targeting both beginners and advanced SEO practitioners.

One of the most popular articles in this blog is the comprehensive SEO guide they wrote for beginners.

• Yoast

(URL: https://yoast.com/seo-blog/)

Yoast is a must-have tool for any SEO practitioner. But what many people still don’t know is that the platform also runs a resourceful SEO blog you might want to check out.

The Yoast blog covers different aspects of SEO in great depth. Moreover, their blog is divided into two sections – content SEO and technical SEO.

• Ahrefs

(URL: https://ahrefs.com/blog/)

Ahref is a widely used backlink analysis and keyword research tool. It’s one of those tools that no SEO expert would want to miss in their marketing pellet.

The company is also involved with blogging, where they try to educate the masses about SEO using case studies, written content, and videos.

• Search Engine land

(URL: https://searchengineland.com/)

Search Engine Land is a popular multi-author blog that was started in 2006 by Danny Sullivan.

On average, about 135 blog posts are published on the platform every month. Their topics are a bit random but exhaustive. The majority of the articles average a word count of 1035.

• CognitiveSEO

(URL: https://cognitiveseo.com/blog/)

Cognitive SEO is a keyword research and analysis tool, with a multi-author SEO blog on the side. Their blog posts are lengthy, averaging a word count of 4,000.

The company publishes at least five SEO posts every month. They try to cover SEO exhaustively tackling the toughest topics into easy-to-digest snippets for everyone.

• Distilled

URL: (https://www.distilled.net)

Distilled was started in 2005 by Will Critchlow. Will is also the co-founder of an online university for SEO called Distilled U, and an SEO conference dubbed Search Love.

• Backlinko

(URL: https://backlinko.com/)

Backlinko is single-authored by Brian Dean. It is considered one of the best sources of information for SEO, especially the technical aspects such as backlinks.

• Hobo-web

(URL: https://www.hobo-web.co.uk/seo-blog/)

Hobo-web is the most underrated SEO blog in our opinion. Their blogs are welcomed by amateur digital marketers as well as experts alike because the treatment of the topic of SEO is comprehensive and top-down.

• SEMRush

(URL: https://www.semrush.com/blog/)

SEMRush was started with beginners in mind. It’s a content-rich SEO blog with thousands of well-written and researched blog posts.

It’s a popular multi-author blog that attracts the contribution of well-established SEO bloggers in the digital space such as Gael Breton and Ryan Stewart.

A Respectable SEO Agency Should Have A Strategy For These Trends – Does Yours?

In the world of SEO, change is the only constant.

Make sure that your SEO agency keeps adjusting everything for your campaign to remain relevant.

• A Rise in Voice Search

As mentioned earlier, voice search becoming more popular and is soon expected to go mainstream. By the end of next year, experts predict that 50% of all searches will be voice searches.

• Mobile-first Indexing

Google introduced mobile-first indexing in March 2018. Many people believe that the change was long overdue, given that 57% of web traffic comes from mobile devices.

Mobile SEO Trends 2021

• 69% of mobile device users buy from a website that contains the answers to their questions.
• In Singapore, the cut-offload time for a mobile device is 5 seconds.
• Websites that take more than 5 seconds to load have a 70% lower mobile session rate.
• A delay of one second loading time means a 20% drop in conversion.
• In Singapore, 57% of users do not recommend a business with a mobile-unfriendly website.
• Around 30% of all mobile searches were made right before visiting a store
• Around 43% of consumers search the company’s website and then are in the store.
• 66% of e-commerce searching comes from a smartphone but 35% of sales come from them.

• Blockchain Technology Impacts SEM and SEO in Singapore

Many people know of blockchain as the technology that operates Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. However, its effects go beyond this industry. One of the many sectors that stand to benefit from this emerging technology is SEO in Singapore, and probably the entire digital marketing industry as well.

• The Rise of Amazon Search Optimisation

One of the emerging SEO trends in Singapore is Amazon search. Although there is a still long way to go before it can compete with Google, Amazon Search is on the rise. Many SEO experts are predicting significant growth in Amazon search optimisation this year.

• Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

Mobile optimisation is an integral element of SEO in Singapore. Google’s accelerated mobile pages are an excellent way of increasing the page speeds for mobile pages. However, Google has now downplayed AMP due to the rising complaints about its restrictiveness.

• GDPR

GDPR refers to the General Data Protection Regulation. It is a law that governs the collection, use, and sharing of personal data. Companies with European customers must seek consent before collecting personal data. They must also inform the clients on how they intend to use such data, as well as whether they plan to share it with third parties.

• Social Media SEO Trends and Statistics 

For delivering content and engaging the audience LinkedIn is the most effective social media platform at 82%, followed by Twitter at 66%, YouTube at 64%, and Facebook at 41%.

Backlinks and social media links are not the same things.

In 2021, social media marketing and backlinks rank as the 2nd and 3rd most effective ways to increase traffic.

For shopping sites, Google search is 10 times more effective than social media search.

Statistics You Should Be Aware Of

Search Engine Market Share in Singapore – December 2021
Google	96.45%
Bing	1.47%
Yahoo!	1.42%
DuckDuckGo	0.26%
Baidu	0.2%
Ecosia	0.06%

General SEO Statistics

• Google, Bing, and Yahoo! handled 96.45%, 1.47%, and 1.42% of all searches in December 2020.
• 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine.
• 46% of all searches through Google are local.
• 70% of clicks go to organically sourced pages and the remaining 30% of clicks go to PPC pages
• 70% and 30% of clicks in Google search results go to organic and AdWords respectively. 
• In Singapore, 97% of consumers research a company via the Internet (desktop and mobile devices).
• 50% of people performing local searches on mobile devices are looking for business information.
• 72% of Google searchers visit a store within a 5 km radius.
• 46% of Google searchers feature local content with SEO intent.
• Businesses at the top of Google receive a 34.36% CTR.
• 21% of people access more than one of the search results.
• 75% of people do not go beyond the 1st page.
• Websites containing videos have a 53% more probability of being shown on the 1st page of Google.
• 50% of all search requests are at least four words long.
• Posts with images every 100 words or so receive double the number of shares.
• A combination of SEO with PPC advertisement can give 25% more clicks.
• Compared to other paid search advertisements, SEO is 5.66 times more effective 
• 73% of consumers trust online business reviews.
• 56% of local businesses don’t claim their Google My Business listing.
• In 2021, 92% of traffic comes from the first page of Google.
• 9 out of 10 consumers select a result from the first page of Google. 
• 28% of searches that include local intent will result in a purchase.
• 78% of searches contained location information that leads to offline conversion.
• Around 50% of all searches will be voice-based by 2021.
• 21% consider search engine algorithms as their top priority and 79% of marketers write for users.
• By 2021, the smartphone will derive 54% of online sales.
• Standout SEO Stats & Interesting Marketing Facts for 2021
• 61% of digital marketers think that SEO is the key to success in online business 
• 41% of digital marketers allocate their budget to SEO
• 34% of companies allocate less than $1,000 each month to their link-building 
• A poorly designed mobile website is not recommended by 57% of users
• By searching for mobile, 88% of customers call or visit a store within 24 hours
• 56% of the companies in Singapore give less than 25% of their budget to link building.
• 82% of digital marketers who implemented an SEO strategy feel that SEO is very effective for their overall marketing.

Content Marketing Statistics 2021

• 57% of SEO experts in Singapore think that in search marketing content creation and marketing is the number 1 way to drive the best results
• 65% of Singaporean digital markers think link building is the toughest part of SEO
• 111.3% organic traffic of a company can be increased by updating the existing content with fresh content
• Compared to general content, video content is 5 times more likely to drive a conversion
• Approximately 25% of Singaporean markers don’t use outsourcing for their content75% of the business takes services from any copywriting agencies. Additionally, 45% of the content is created on an ad-hoc basis
• In Google, the average page 1 result contains1890 words of content
• 72% of SEO experts think SEO campaign relevancy is the key to success
• Regular basis content creation for a blog can increase by 434% higher indexation rates compared to websites that do not update their content on a regular basis
• In Singapore, around 40% of marketers publish content once per week
• Blogging (65%) is the most used content format in Singapore
• 56% of marketers in Singapore have a plan to increase the content marketing budget

Some Factors That Drive Demand For SEO in Singapore

Issue	Detailed Findings
Increased digital usage and online content consumption	Having 84.5% of Internet users, Singapore has the 2nd highest Internet penetration in Southeast Asia. Along with digitalization, online content consumption is continuously increasing. In the Southeast Asian region, online content consumption is at an all-time high in Singapore.
Time spent on Social Media is at an all-time high	A study exposed that around 96% of internet users in Singapore have at least one social media account which is also higher in the Asian region. And the average time spent is 2.5 hours every day. 3.2 million Of people get access online by their mobile which is 42% of its total population.
Consumer behaviour is changing rapidly	Compared to other Asian countries, Singapore is the country where a higher number of consumers do product research and read product reviews through the internet. And 73% of Internet users in Singapore purchase at least one product or service online. These driving factors make SEO essential for the success of any business online.

SEO Challenges in Singapore

Issue	Detailed Findings
Limited talent and skills of digital marketers	Approximately 57% of marketers think that the main obstacle to success is the production of low-quality content. That’s why still many companies see SEO services as an unnecessary expenditure in Singapore.
Limited access to rich media	A shortage of rich media resources also appears in Singapore. Even many believe that the cost of hiring a reliable digital artist is also not viable for many businesses.
The desire to get quick results	It is a common tendency of most businesses in Singapore to get short-term results from their SEO investment. They want to get the best ROI early on in their agreement. It’s another big challenge faced by SEO agencies in Singapore.

An Overview of the Pricing of SEO Packages in Singapore

On average, it costs S$1020 per month to implement SEO in Singapore. This translates to a price of S$34 hourly.

Here is a breakdown of the pricing of the three most popular SEO packages in Singapore, namely Standard, Professional, and Enterprise.

SEO package	Standard	Professional	Enterprise
Annual cost	S$12240	S$24960	S$37200
Monthly cost	S$1020	S$2080	S$3100
Manpower hours	180	390	600
Hourly cost	$34	$78	$160

Customer support is available for all three packages. If a client requests additional hours other than the ones specified in their selected package, they will have to incur additional costs. The same applies to consultancy services. In most agencies, the minimum engagement period for an SEO agency package is six months.

Technical Terms Your SEO Agency Should Be Intimately Familiar With

• 10 blue links: This is the format used by search engines to display the search results on a searcher’s query; all ten organic results appear in one format.
• Crawling: The process used by search engines to locate your web pages on the internet
• Black hat: Entails an array of SEO practices that go against the quality guidelines and rules set by Google
• De-indexed: This is one or a given number of pages that Google removes from its index
• Featured snippets: Refers to those organic answer boxes appearing at the very top of your SERP when you enter certain queries.
• Google My Business listings: This is a comprehensive listing availed to local businesses
• Indexing: The process through which the search engine organises and stores content after crawling.
• Intent: As far as SEO is concerned, intent refers to the users’ expectations from the words or phrases they feed in the search bar.
• Organic: Refers to the earned placement in SERPs, which is the opposite of paid advertisement
• People Also Ask box: It is one of those boxes Google displays on the right edge of your search results to show the list of questions (and answers) other people have queried on the same topic as you
• Query: This refers to any word or phrase you type into the search engine’s search bar
• Ranking: The process of ordering the search results in terms of their relevance to a given query
• Search engine: This refers to any information retrieval program used by users to search for items databases that match the inquiries input by users. Good examples are Yahoo, Google, and Bing.
• URL: An abbreviation of Uniform Resource Locators, refers to addresses or locations for pieces of content distributed on the web
• Traffic: Refers to visits to a given website
• SERP: An abbreviation of Search Engine Result Page, refers to the page displayed on your screen after conducting a search engine search
• SERP features: These are search results displayed in a non-standard format
• White hat: Refers to SEO practices that adhere to the quality guidelines of Google.
• Webmaster guidelines: This is a list of guidelines that are regularly published by any search engine to help owners of websites to publish content that can be easily found and indexed by the search engine.

The Mode of Operation of Search Engines – Ranking, Indexing, and Crawling

• 2xx status codes: Ever seen something like ‘204 – No Content!’ on your screen? That’s a 2xx status code. They are a class of codes that shows the status concerning the inability of the server to perform your request. They always start with a 2.
• 4xx status codes: Ever seen something like ‘404 – File Not Found!’ on your screen? That is a 4xx status code. These status codes show that your request for a given page resulted in a specific error. They always start with a 4.
• 5xx status codes: Ever seen something like ‘502 – Gateway Error!’ on your screen? These status codes indicate the inability of the server to perform a given request. They always start with a 5.
• Advanced search operators: These are special commands and characters you can type in your search bar to be more particular with your search. For example, you can add an asterisk (*) in a search query to indicate that some words are missing to which Google will respond by figuring out the missing words and returning the right results.
• Algorithms: Refers to a formula or process that is used to store and retrieve information.
• Backlinks: Also referred to as “inbound links” are a set of links from other sites that point directly to your website.
• Bots: Also referred to as “spiders” or “crawlers”, they are to scour the internet in an effort to locate content
• Caching: This is a saved version/form of a given web page
• Caffeine: Refers to Google’s own web indexing system. To be more precise, Caffeine is a collection of internet content or index while Googlebot is Google’s crawler that sets to find the content
• Cloaking: When you show your human visitors sets of content that are different from the content you show to search engines, you are said to be cloaking.
• Citations: Also referred to as “business listings”, they refer to a single internet-based reference to a local business address, name, and phone number (or NAP)
• Crawl budget: This is the average value of pages a given search engine bot is capable of crawling on your website.
• Crawler directives: This is a set of instructions that directs the crawler regarding the manner you want your site to be crawled and indexed
• Distance: As far as the local pack is concerned, distance refers to the proximity or location specified in a query and/or the exact location of the searcher
• Engagement: These are sets of data that depict how visitors interact with your website from search results
• HTML: Abbreviation of Hypertext Markup Language, refers to a programming language used to make web pages
• Google Quality Guidelines: These are detailed guidelines often published by Google to show a list of forbidden tactics that have been flagged by Google as being manipulative and/or malicious.
• Google Search Console: This is a program feely offered by Google to site owners to help them monitor the performance of their sites in search results.
• Index Coverage Report: Google Search Console will show you a report detailing your website’s indexation status. That report is called the Index Coverage Report.
• Index: This is an extensive database of the content the crawlers have gathered and found fit to serve up the searchers.
• Javascript: Refers to a programming language used by web developers to add dynamic elements to any static web page.
• Internal links: They are the opposite of backlinks. Internal links link several web pages within your own website.
• Login Forms: These are pages that will only allow visitors to view the content after they have typed login details.
• Manual penalty: This is the “manual action” imposed by Google on you when a human viewer determines that some pages on your website violate the quality guidelines set by Google.
• Meta robots tag: These are pieces of code used by the crawlers to figure out how to crawl your web page and index the contents.
• Noindex tag: This is a meta tag that directs the search engine to refrain from indexing the page on which it is located.
• Navigation: As far as SEO is concerned, Navigation refers to a list of different links provided to help visitors navigate the pages on a website. They are often listed in the header section of a website (“top navigation”, in either side column (“side navigation”), and sometimes at the bottom (“footer navigation”).
• PageRank: It is a component of the algorithm used by Google. PageRank analyses the links and measures the quality and quantity of links directed to a specific webpage to determine their importance.
• Personalisation: A search engine is said to have done personalisation when it modifies an individual’s search results by considering the individual’s unique factors such as search history and location
• Prominence: With the local pack in mind, prominence refers to the state of a business is well linked and well known in a locality of the real world
• Relevance: With the local pack in mind, relevance refers to how well the local business or entity matches the searcher’s query.
• Search forms: These are miniature search bars or search functions on a site designed to help visitors find specific pages on the site.
• Robots.txts: These are files that tell the search engine what parts of your website it should and should not crawl
• Sitemap: Refers to a list of several URLs on your website that crawlers use to discover content on your website before indexing it.
• Search Quality Rater Rules/Guidelines: These are guidelines given by Google to human raters to help it determine the web page quality
• Spammy tactics: Very much like “black hat” tactics, spammy tactics violate the quality guidelines of the search engine
• URL folders: Refers to anything that appears after the website’s TLD (“.com”), often separated by several slashes (“/”). Take “mediaone.co/blog” for example; the /blog part is considered to be a folder.
• X-robots-tags: They work similarly with meta robot tags. They instruct the crawlers on how to crawl a website and index its pages.
• URL parameters: Refers to pieces of information that appear after the question mark (“?”) in a URL to change that page’s content (referred to as Active Parameter) or to simply track information on the page (Passive Parameter).

Keyword Search

• Commercial investigation queries: This is a unique query the searcher uses to compare services or products between two sellers to determine the one that suits them best.
• Ambiguous intent: Ambiguous intent occurs when the searcher enters a search word or phrase whose goal cannot be explicitly determined, hence requires further specification
• Keyword difficulty: Most SEO agencies will define Keyword Difficulty as an estimate, in terms of a single numerical score, which shows how hard it is for your website to outrank your competitors’ websites.
• Informational queries: These are queries the searcher types in the search engine to look for information i.e. an answer to a given question
• Long-tail keywords: These are queries that contain more than 3 words. They tend to be more particular than their short-tail counterparts.
• Local queries: A local query is used by the searcher to look for something situated in a particular location. This is how local queries look like: “gyms in Singapore City”, “plumbers near me”, etc.
• Regional keywords: These are keywords that are unique to a particular locale. You can use Google Trends to see whether the term “pop” or “pop” is popular in Singapore City or not.
• Navigational queries: These queries help the searcher reach a specific location. If you type New York Times in the search engine, for instance, it could mean you want to be shown the New York Times website.
• Search volume: Refers to the total number of a given keyword searched. A great keyword research tool will show you the estimate of monthly search volume
• Seed keywords: These are primary words used to describe the service or product
• Seasonal keywords: When a certain keyword becomes popular during a specific season of the year, they are referred to as seasonal trends. For instance, such terms as “Halloween costumes” would be popular a few weeks leading to October 31.
• Transactional queries: These are queries made by the searcher with an intention to make a purchase action.

On-Site Optimisation

• Alt-text: Those HRML texts are displayed in place of a photo when the image fails to load properly. Alt texts describe the images present on a website
• Duplicate content: Duplicate content is shared between multiple pages in one domain or between two or several domains.
• Anchor text: You should use anchor text to link to pages
• Geographical modifiers: These are terms used to describe a physical service area or location. For instance, “pizza” is not a geo modifier but “pizza in Singapore City” is.
• Image compression: The strategy of reducing the size of the image on your site in an effort to make the pages load faster.
• Header tags: Header tags are HTML elements used to show headings on a page
• Auto-generated content: Refers to any content that has not been created by humans, I.e. it has been programmatically created
• Image sitemap: This is a sitemap that contains the pictorial URLs on a site
• Link accessibility: Refers to the ease with which crawlers or human visitors find a link
• Keyword Stuffing: A frowned upon as a spammy tactic that involves overusing a given set of important keywords and/or their variants within the content to increase the likelihood of attracting the attention of the search engine.
• Link volume: The number of links present on a page.

10 Steps to Running a Successful SEO Campaign

SEO is a long game.

It’s a process that requires a lot of patience and plenty of research to find out what connects with your target audience.

In consequence, our SEO campaign has to begin with you, the client. After all, no one understands your business and goals better than you.

So, before we embark on anything, our team will first have to check with you and try to understand your business.

Our work procedure demands that they first learn about your target audience, competition, and business model to effectively develop an SEO strategy that’s specifically tailored to your business needs.

Here’s a 10-step guide we follow to create an effective SEO strategy for every single one of our clients:

1. Your Goals

Our experienced team of SEO marketers and consultants will closely work with you to define your marketing goals and set the groundwork for your SEO strategy.

2. Site Audit