Most businesses with an online presence work towards having their content appear on the first page of search engine results. To appear the first page, your SEO must be impeccable; hence these businesses hire SEO experts to do the tough work for them. What these agencies won’t admit to their customers is that there are lots of challenges in SEO. The requirements for ranking change almost daily and there aren’t any easy shortcuts. These agencies withhold some information, not because they are malicious, but because they want to maintain trust and strong relationships with their clients, and at the same time avoid unwarranted attention to these SEO concerns. Here are six secrets that your SEO agency keeps from you.
Quality content alone won’t do the trick
Much as the “content is king” saying is true, quality content alone will not rank. That said, good content with no one to read it is useless. Therefore, aside from writing good content, you need to work to make that content visible. This means that you have to get the content posted by the best publication channels. If you are syndicating your content, you have to go for the Crème Del a Crème networks. Also, you have to get your audience interested in reading your older pieces by linking back to them. You can only realize increased traffic and social shares when you work towards getting your content seen.
Rankings cannot be guaranteed
When you hire an SEO agency, your goal is to make your content visible, but no one can guarantee which position your content will rank on search engines. Since there are very many variables at play during ranking, agencies cannot tell you for sure that you will rank for using a particular keyword even if it has a huge search volume. Also, Google, the biggest search engine globally, no longer uses one-to-one keyword mapping in its ranking criteria. Instead, Google’s algorithms bring results according to their semantic understanding of a user’s query. Google warns businesses against trusting agencies that claim to guarantee #1 ranking or say that they have a special relationship with Google.
SEO content writing does not guarantee quality traffic
Have you ever searched a query on Google and you did not click the first result on the first page, or you did not look at all the results on the first page? According to studies, more than 70% of users ignore the paid ads on Google’s first page. Also, some results on the first page do not always have relevant or new information for the readers; thus they get high bounce rates, which hurt their blogs or websites.
An expensive mistake that most sites make is using too broad or too specific keywords. With broad keywords such as flowers, you are unlikely to make sales as the user intent is not clear. Too specific keywords, on the other hand, are not always safe because users at times are not sure what they are looking for and being specific denies you the chance of appearing in their results. Thus, you need to ensure that you strike a right balance for your keywords to rank.
No one knows everything about SEO
SEO is expansive and even established agencies do not know everything about ranking. As mentioned earlier, the requirements for ranking change almost on a daily basis as Google releases new algorithms. Also, agencies do not know what these algorithms look like entirely, and anyone who claims to know them fully is lying. No one can claim to know the future of SEO for sure. However, agencies have specialized SEO knowledge from the tips provided directly by Google and the studies that are regularly conducted by SEO experts.
Going viral does not happen often
Going viral happens rarely, and you must be wondering how this is the case if you’ve read several articles that give tips on how to go viral. These tips are not wrong. There are several things that you can do to broaden your chances of going viral. Nonetheless, there is no way to consistently predict your chances of going viral because even the best content can fail to spark interest amongst target audiences because users’ interests are fickle. That said, agencies increase your chances of going viral with research on users’ current interest and perfect timing.
Agencies need to work with you
An SEO agency alone cannot do the magic and make your site rank higher. Agencies need to know your mission, target audience, brand, and other factors intimately, to help you rank. This calls for you to work closely with them through the entire project.
To rank higher on SERPs, you ought to work with a reputable SEO agency. One that accepts that while its SEO experts do not know everything about ranking, they keep an open eye for any new information and make adjustments to give you the best chance to rank the first page and get quality traffic. Visit https://serpbook.com/blog/agency-rank-tracker/ for more useful information about SEO and ranking.