SEO Retainer Service – Ongoing Optimisation & Reporting
Following an initial SEO Audit, most business require an on-going SEO Retainer service to further improve search engine rankings. The scale of the retainer service depends on your business requirements, the competitive nature of your industry, and your marketing budget.
SEO Retainer packages start from $ 800 per month and can easily go up to $ 2000 per month depending on your needs.
What is covered with a retainer service?
This also depends on your individual business needs and goals and needs to be tailored to suit your needs. However, SEO Retainer services typically include the below services:
Do you want to improve search engine rankings?
Enquire today!Link Building
Links are the foundation of the internet. Without links, the world wide web would not exist. Therefore, link building has always been the most important factor for search engine optimisation, and it will most likely stay that way. Some SEO experts disagree and put all their efforts into content marketing and social media which is also important, but link building is still #1.
In laymen’s terms, links are “votes” for your website, and the more you have, the more important you seem to search engines. But unfortunately it’s not as simple as getting as many links from random websites across the internet – this was a common tactic in the 1990s which doesn’t work anymore. Search engines have very sophisticated algorithms these days to differentiate between a legitimate link, a high or low value link, or a spammy link.
To improve search engine rankings, it is important to links from high value and legitimate websites that are relevant to your industry. Legitimacy and relevancy have many different faces and are determined by factors such as domain authority, trust rank and if the content topic is relevant to your industry.
High quality links can be sourced from article websites, government websites, industry specific community sites, etc. Another opportunity is to get links from local organisations with high domain authority.
Citation Management & Optimisation
Web properties mentioning your business name, address and phone number are classified as online citations, for example online directory listings. Especially important for local rankings, citations need to be up to date and consistent.
Identifying existing citations and creating new ones is a key proportion of my SEO Retainer service, as it also ties in with link building – most citations sources allow a link to your website and therefore citation management is a sub-set of link building.
I also offer citation management as an add-on or stand-alone service.
Content Improvements & Updates
If not covered in an initial SEO Audit, your website content may require some tweaking to ensure the targeted keywords are included. Content should also be refreshed from time to time as Google looks at differences every time your website is crawled.
Should you decide to offer additional services, content for appropriate pages can also be addressed as part of the SEO Retainer service.
Content Marketing
Many SEO experts consider content marketing to be the new link building. While I agree that content marketing is important, it is not necessarily crucial for every business. It really depends what industry you’re in, what your competitors do, and what your budget allows – content marketing can be very time consuming and therefore quite costly. I will assess your business needs and recommend content marketing activities as required.
Social Media
Similar to content marketing, social media is a form of outreach and a way of “getting your name out there” which either generates traffic to your website or directly to your store.
For many businesses, social media is becoming more and more important, for some even more important than search engine optimisation itself. It really depends on the nature of your business and needs to be discussed.
Google My Business however, which is integrated into Google’s social media platform Google+ and Google Maps, should definitely be included in your SEO efforts if you offer services locally or if you have a store front business.
Monthly Technical Checks
If your website is technically sound, there should not be much to worry about. However it is crucial to perform monthly checks in Google Search Console (previously known as Webmaster Tools) to see if there are any manual penalties reported, if all your page are being indexed, etc.
Other checks include looking for content duplications across the web. Quite often website content is copied which can lead to ranking problems.
Rank Tracking & Reporting
Tracking of search engine rankings is very important to see how effective your SEO efforts are, and to be able to react if rankings suddenly drop. I use a tool called AccuRanker which is one of the best in the industry.
In addition to providing a monthly overview of rankings, I also report on website traffic and conversion metrics via Google Analytics and/or Tag Manager. These metrics will be defined at the beginning of the retainer service to see what makes sense for your business.