SEO Agency Chicago

Author: admin

  • Different Ways SEO Agencies Work

    SEO companies or agencies work in different ways. Finding the right SEO for your organization requires more than just looking at their proposals. A cultural fit and understanding priorities are a good start. In addition, being clear on how the SEO operates, their methods, and communication are important.

    SEO Recommendations and Implementation

    When engaging an SEO company, understand how they communicate recommendations. There are different ways to manage an SEO program. How it is done depends on what your company needs. The challenge is aligning your needs with the way the SEO Company operates.

    Independent SEO Activity

    Some SEOs will operate autonomously, making changes as needed. This can help with the speed of implementation. It also reduces the burden on company marketing teams. To work in this environment, several areas of trust must be established.

    Technical understanding of your website. Different CRMs and hosting environments have specific requirements. You must be confident those implementing changes have a full understanding of the web site.

    Your business. When implementing changes, Your SEO must ensure they align with your brand and can write authoritatively and properly about your products and industry. Trusting the agency to implement changes can only happen when this happens.

    Recommendations and approved SEO changes

    On the other end of the spectrum is a pre-approval process. In this process, the agency provides you with a “current state” and “prosed state.” This can be for content, technical change, or the user experience. There are several advantages to this process.

    The first obvious advantage is ensuring the changes fully align with your brand and correct product information. There are times when what is good for SEO implementation may need to be adjusted to keep in step with the brand or product information.

    The second advantage is having a way to audit changes. Occasionally, things may need to be reversed, or other organization members will have questions. A proper recommendation process will provide parties with documentation of changes and why those changes were made.

    When SEO Engagements Start

    When the SEO engagement starts, there will be a series of communication and quite a bit of activity. This establishes confidence in the agency and implementation. After the initial activity, the level of communication will decrease.

    Creating a regular communication schedule and updates will help ensure your SEO agency can keep on track. It will also help ensure you can have confidence in your agency’s work.

    Requesting monthly reports is one way to keep track of what the SEO agency is doing. Having a regular call in addition to the reporting can also be helpful. As your agency gains your trust, you can allow them greater latitude. A good SEO relationship ultimately develops into a partnership that allows the agency to operate more independently and frees up your time to manage other aspects of your responsibilities.

  • Google and Page Speed

    Google has had Page Speed at the top of everyone’s list. As a result, companies and agencies alike have bent over backward to try to improve the page speed on their websites. How much does page speed really matter?

    Page Speed Measurement Compared to Experience

    In Google Search Console(GSC), there is a section called “Experience.” It is a simplification of the user experience boiled down into technical performance metrics. At a high level, it is as basic as “Good”, “Needs Improvement,” or “Poor.” Then, you click into the individual core web vital metrics to find the issues for specific URLs. Here are some of the metrics you’ll see.

    What is interesting is that the experience you have navigating the website might not reflect what the Core Web Vitals pick up. You may feel like the page loads appropriately, while the FCP for Google Search Console tells you the page is slow. We see pages where Google is showing a 3-second load, but we can’t even count 1-mississippi before the page loads. What’s up with that, and how much should you worry about it?

    First, always look to improve consumer experience. Use GSC to highlight possible issues. If these align with your experience, then address them right away. If not, then look beyond GSC to identify areas for improvement. Look at things like bounce rate, unexplained high exit rates on pages, or changes in user flow that don’t make sense. Your priority should be user experience, then Google Search Console speed warnings.

    Second, put GSC in perspective. Google has (I suppose) done a good job at measuring technical aspects of a website. But, these do not always translate into issues for users. The page speed issue is chief among these. Google is measuring what it’s code is determining as a meaningful page load, but the user experience can start properly before all the code is loaded. So, if you’re going for improved User Experience, then prioritize that over technical metrics from Google.

    Technical Speed Issues

    If you’ve addressed the issues directly impacting user experience, then turn back to GSC and start picking away at the technical issues highlighted in the Experience section. The trick is to prioritize the issues highlighted by Google and your available resources.

    Look for metrics that are way out of line with what GSC views as good, even if your own experience shows it to be okay. Can these be addressed by re-ordering code (blocking js), adding some tools, or reducing the overall page load?

    You may be a few short steps from big improvements in Google’s eyes. See if you can address them.

    But here is the thing: If you are running into issues you really can’t address, chances are, you are not alone.

    Google seems to have the Eutopian view of the web that is out of step with the vast majority of the sites that make up the web. What this means is that we are all graded on some type of curve, not an absolute scale. So, if you address the real User Experience issues first, then fight through what you can of the GSC warnings, there’s a good chance you are already, technically, ahead of most websites.

    While Google’s objective is laudable, its methods are too steeped in a reliance on technology to measure human experience. I’ve been on enough calls with people to accept that they are sincere in their belief that their tools and AI are superior methods to measure user experience. But, the reality we see would suggest that the tools are not quite as good as they believe them to be.