The reply to this question is not going to be a quick one or two-line answer. While that might be the case if you asked what a dairy farm (produces milk), or dressmaking company (makes dresses) does, what an SEO company does is going to take a few paragraphs to explain.
The reason for that isn’t that it is too hard to explain what an SEO company is, it’s that each SEO company is unique. It is unique in many ways such as the types of services it offers, the number of services it offers, its size, number of employees, and in the exact way in which it achieves its results.
To help us answer the question, ‘What is a SEO company?‘, it will help us if we define what the goal of most SEO companies is. That goal is ‘to help businesses grow’. At first, it might seem to you to be a very simplistic answer, however, if we were to consider every SEO company’s list of services, they will all ultimately be leading towards that simple, but very important goal.
If we consider that further, let’s examine why a business would employ a SEO company. We can point to specific actions and objectives which might include creating better content for the company’s website, protecting online reputations with online reputation management or to improving the search engine rankings. However, these, and the many other services an SEO company might provide, are not the reason that the company has been employed.
Simply creating content, protecting a brand’s reputation and better search engine rankings, are merely a means to an end. That end, or final goal, is that the company grows thanks to the increased sales which happens as a result of the services that the SEO company has provided.
When you employ an SEO company, the relationship which you enter is one where the success of your business is enhanced as a direct result of the objectives that you’ve agreed with them being met. What those specific objectives are will depend on the discussions, research, and the SEO audit which the SEO agency should carry out prior to any agreement being made.
The audit is what tells them, and you, what the current state of your SEO is, and what needs to be done to improve it. It’s a bit like taking your car in for a service and the mechanic listing everything that needs fixing. Unless you are a qualified mechanic, you’d let them get on with the work, and the same applies to SEO.
An SEO company has the knowledge, experience, skills, and tools to assess your SEO audit and then devise a strategy and specific plans to address the issues it has revealed. This is not only to fix them but to go further in pursuing the goal of growing your business.
That pursuit can consist of a whole range of services that an SEO company can provide you, the core one being to boost the visibility of your website in the search engines, especially in Google. It could do so by making changes to your current site structure, and that will include changes that happen on your website as well as many that happen off it.
An SEO company will plan and research all these activities, implement them using proven industry standard techniques and will regularly report back to you with their results. Everything they do will be done for a particular benefit. It might be to improve the content on your website, to increase backlinks to your website, or merely to tidy up the metadata on your web pages.
Ultimately, all of it comes back to that goal which every entrepreneur and business owner must surely have, and that is to grow their business. A SEO company is the way and means of helping you to grow your business, and once it does that, the original question of what an SEO company does will most definitely be answered.