CEO of Letterdrop, former Product Manager on Google Search
TL;DR:
Hiring an SEO agency is a big investment, so it's important to know what to expect from them.
Your agency should conduct site audits, develop a keyword strategy, and use internal data to understand your business and customers.
Content distribution is your responsibility, not the agency's.
The agency should help with internal and backlink building, as well as moitor and update content for SEO.
So, you've hired an SEO agency to help you meet your traffic and conversion goals. For that much money, you (and your CFO) expect results that actually move the needle for your business.
If you haven't worked with a good agency partner before, it may be difficult to tell whether you're dealing with a bad one.
That's why knowing how they're helping you meet your goals is so important. In this guide, we'll show you a checklist of what you should expect your SEO agency to be doing for you.
Site Audits: Make Sure Your Website Is Following SEO Best Practices
Your agency should make sure that your site is following best practices. Think basic housekeeping. There will always be optimizations you can do, so I recommend companies perform the 20% of steps that will get you 80% of the SEO benefit.
Here are some examples of best practices they should be taking care of:
📢 Tip:
You can also do this yourself with tools like Semrush and your web developer if you have the patience.
Keyword Strategy: Understanding What Your Customers Are Searching and What to Go After
Your agency is likely using a Keyword Research Tool like Semrush or ahrefs. This will give you high-level insights into what people are searching.
Copying Keywords From Competitors
Your agency might ask you for your competitors to see what pages they've created and what they're ranking for.
That's a good starting point; you can use your competition as inspiration, but blindly copying your competition is not a good way to succeed.
They likely have higher domain authority than you. Running their playbook, but ten steps behind them isn't going to get you results fast.
Use keyword research tool estimates from tools like Semrush as a guide
It's also important to remember that these tools give you estimates, and keyword estimates can be inaccurate, missing zero search volume keywords. You can't stop here and need additional sources to find the right content ideas.
Using Internal Data and Customer Conversations
It's important that your agency goes beyond keyword tools and actively try to understand your business and what your customers actually care about. The best way to learn what qualified leads are looking for is by asking them directly.
The agency should be helping you mine keywords from:
Online forums and communities. They should sit down with your marketing team to find out where your ICP is active online and pull questions and keywords from there.
Customer Support tickets. The agency should chat with your Customer Support team to learn about frequently asked questions and problems your customers submit tickets for.
Sales calls. They can sit in on Sales Calls or watch recordings to understand what customers want.
It's more likely than not that your agency won't do these things for you, but hopefully they at least ask you for this information.
You can use tools like Letterdrop's Gong integration to directly pull marketing insights and content ideas from customer conversations.
Extracting insights from sales calls automatically
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Keyword Clustering and Prioritization
Once you have these keywords and your agency understands what your customers want, it's time for them to prioritize and organize them into content pillars.
These help you build topical authority around the topics you want your site to rank for. Following this kind of hub and spoke model helps improve your SEO rankings.
You have limited resources, so deciding in which order you want to tackle these keywords is important. Make sure your SEO agency gives you a prioritized list of pages to create along with the reasoning behind their decision.
If you're really early (in which case, I'm not sure if you should be hiring an agency), we recommend ditching this strategy and going for lower-hanging fruit content.
Google is always changing, and SEO is getting more competitive. The one thing you can control is creating really good content that answers search intent. It's more important than ever to stand out on the SERPs in today's search climate. Pure AI-generated content and keyword stuffing aren't going to cut it.
Your agency should evaluate how much effort to put into each piece of content based on competitive analysis. If it's competitive, they should be:
Writing well-thought-out pieces that include information gain, multiple media formats, and unique opinions that aren't easy for your competitors to copy.
Working with and interviewing SMEs on your team for unique insights and perspectives.
Creating unique assets like images and charts.
Making sure that content is SEO optimized.
📢 Tip:
You can turn Zoom or Loom recordings with subject matter experts into blog post drafts using Letterdrop.
Most agencies use keyword-stuffing tools that tell you to optimize SEO content by repeating a certain keyword X times. Keyword stuffing and copying other pages doesn't work and won't get you ranking.
📢 Tip:
You don't have to figure it all out yourself. Letterdrop makes sure your content answers search intent, covers topics, optimizes for information gain, follows EEAT, and is optimized for technical SEO — it's easy enough for your grandma to use.
What's Fair To Expect of an Agency When it Comes To Content?
While it's important to hold agencies to certain quality standards as mentioned above, it's unrealistic to expect them to be able to write brand and tone-specific content as well as in-house writers.
At the end of the day, all you should care about is that they're writing content that drives new business. It should be:
Capable of ranking
Accurate
High-quality
Educational
It's unfair to demand excessive edits from a third party just to fit your brand style. You'll never be happy with the content you get and slow down your output if you operate like that.
At the same time, you should not accept drivel that you wouldn't be proud of giving to your customers.
Distribution: You Need to Invest In It Yourself
Content distribution is half the battle. Most agencies don't take care of distribution — although it would be nice if they did. Whether you hire someone to sit down and work on distribution or do it yourself, it's your responsibility to take care of this.
SEO is a demand capture channel, after all. You need to invest in demand creation by:
Repurpose content for push channels like Twitter, LinkedIn, and email.
Make sure your content is properly formatted for each channel. Think about character limits and image dimensions for individual social platforms. You don't want clunky formatting to drive away qualified eyeballs.
Make sure your related posts are set up properly. They should point to pages that people want to read.
📢 Tip:
You don't need to worry about hiring someone or having to juggle this yourself. Letterdrop takes care of distribution, allowing you to schedule socials from the publishing page and repurpose videos or blogs into socials.
Link Building: Finding Linking Opportunities
Internal Link Building
Given how important internal links are to both Google and users, your agency should be helping you find other pages on your site that you can link to.
Identifying internal link opportunities is one thing, but adding them is another. You can use Letterdrop to both identify and automatically add internal links for you, both on individual pages and in bulk across your site.
Letterdrop automatically identifies and publishes internal links across your pages
Backlink Building
Backlinks are digital referrals from other websites showing search engines that your content is trusted and valuable.
They help improve your website's visibility, authority, and search engine rankings, which is why your agency should be:
Writing guest posts and co-marketing with other companies
Content Refresh Monitoring: Updating for SEO
Your agency should track analytics and spot which pages drive traffic and conversions using GA4 and Google Search Console. Based on this data, they should be able to tell which pages need to be updated or removed.
This manual approach can take hours. There's no guarantee they can get to all your pages, given how much data they have to sift through and how many other clients they're tending to.
Letterdrop integrates with Google Search Console to give you a real-time overview of which pages need to be refreshed, including:
Make Sure You're Getting Your Money's Worth with an SEO Agency
Knowing what to expect from your SEO agency means knowing whether or not you're getting your money's worth.
Honestly, most agencies end up falling short of expectations. You're better off hiring an in-house writer or even a freelancer to take care of content creation since it requires a deep understanding of your business and your ICP. Outsourcing a companion SEO tool like Letterdrop is also recommended since most high-level SEO checks done by agencies are checks you could do yourself.
We're actively thinking about the future of SEO with Letterdrop. Talk to us if you want to optimize content from top to bottom.
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