What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Types of Search Engine Optimization
What is SEO for Small Business?
What is an SEO Virtual Assistant?
What are the Benefits of Hiring An SEO Virtual Assistant for Your Small Business?
What are the Tasks of an SEO Specialist VA?
- Competitor Analysis
- Guest Posting
- Monitor Backlinks
- Video and Photo Sharing
- Infographics
- SEO Reporting
- Traffic
- Conversion
- Performance
- Return on Investment
What Tools Should an SEO Specialist Need to Have?
How to Know If You Are Hiring The Right SEO Services For Your Small Business?
Whenever SEO is mentioned, people, especially business owners, have varying reactions.
Some think SEO is straightforward enough to handle themselves as long as they work a few hours per week. Others are intimidated by how technical it is and how the algorithm shifts every few years.
Truth be told: yes, SEO is complex, but it is not as intimidating as you think.
If you have been considering optimizing your website and improving your social media and content strategy, this article is perfect for you!
We will walk you through what is an SEO virtual analyst/assistant and how hiring one can benefit your small business in the long run.
But first, let’s jump into the basics!
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the complex process of improving your website’s online visibility and organic search results ranking in the search engine results page (SERP). Leading search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo routinely update their algorithms side-by-side, choosing the victors of the race toward reaching the top of the results page.
However, it is imperative that websites must satisfy the search engine’s algorithm with as many elements as possible to top the results page.
Factors such as good content, popularity, and a neat and aesthetically neat and pleasing website, of course, done by a web design VA, can help in the optimization process. By improving these key areas, small businesses will get a higher chance of ranking on the first page of the search results, thus increasing traffic and customer conversion rates.
Types of Search Engine Optimization
Because of the complexity of search engine optimization, it is split into two sub-categories: Onsite and Offsite SEO.
Otherwise known as on-page SEO, it refers to all techniques used to increase the visibility of the web pages of your website. This includes optimizing title tags and meta descriptions, posting engaging blog entries and content, and building pages that are user-friendly and easy to navigate.
The basics of offsite SEO usually involve extrinsically widening your reach through creating social media profiles, guest posting, blog commenting, and article submission, to name a few. It relies heavily on endorsers who share links to your website.
What is SEO for Small Business?
SEO for small businesses is technically making your business visible in geographically relevant searches. It is an efficient method of promoting your local online presence. It aids small businesses in marketing their products and services to local customers at the precise moment when they are looking for them online.
What is an SEO Virtual Assistant?
If you are looking into hiring an SEO virtual assistant, then you are heading in the right direction.
SEO virtual assistants are vital growth facilitators for your business as they have a complete grasp of search engine algorithms and are excellent at applying the best strategies to optimize your website.
Some of the roles they can perform are the following:
- Analyze your user engagement and that of your competitors
- Conduct keyword research
- Facilitate and implement onsite and offsite SEO strategies
- Aid you with digital marketing
- Help you gain a competitive edge by evaluating your competitor’s SEO strategy so you apply them to your advantage
What are the Benefits of Hiring An SEO Virtual Assistant for Your Small Business?
Aside from it being a good business decision that you will make, there are numerous benefits of hiring an SEO VA:
- Research and strategically use effective keywords that your target audience is using in their search
- Refine your content and social media marketing strategy
- Rank your website in the leading search engines
- Build a cost-effective and long-term digital marketing plan
- Increase your website traffic, conversions, and leads
- Bolster your online presence
- Facilitates trust and credibility for your brand
What are the Tasks of an SEO Specialist VA?
Keyword research is one of the foremost and crucial role players in your overall SEO strategy. It enables you to zero in on your content and marketing efforts, alongside your virtual assistant for marketing, on the subjects your target audience is interested in. An SEO specialist can help you choose and use keywords. In addition, they will help you create a picture of the ideal keywords that will cover all the customer’s search behavior.
Although keyword research is tedious, an expert VA can narrow the alternative and ensure that your site receives highly-targeted visitors.
Search engines love a coherent website.
Their algorithms can assess the structure of your website and inform users of its content and relevance to their search, and reward it through an increase in ranking in the SERPs.
SEO virtual assistants can help you create topic clusters to organize your web pages into a logical hierarchy.
Subsequently, a well-structured website also means users can easily navigate and find the necessary information. Hence, the more user-friendly your website is, the longer they will engage with it, and the higher the conversion rate will be.
Metadata setup is also a task that you can assign to your SEO VA.
In a nutshell, metadata is what makes up a portion of the HTML on that pages and aids in search engines comprehending the web page content.
Your virtual assistant will ensure that each page has a properly setup metadata tag that includes title, viewport, meta content type, or description. If you happen to have a 10-15 year-old website, you can ask your VA to remove it to free up some metadata space.
One of the most popular analytics tools to monitor demographic or user-behavior information is Google Analytics.
Your virtual assistant can set up a business account with Google Analytics to gather data and produce reports so you can monitor your SEO progress over time.
Your SEO virtual assistant can research the SEO strategy of your competitors and compare them to your own to identify areas you can improve.
Although this is quite a feat and a drawn-out procedure, it is definitely worthwhile trying, as it can significantly boost your stats in the long run.
The best way to build links is to blog!
Guest posting refers to publishing your blogs or articles as a guest on another person’s blog site with a backlink to your website. Through this, you will have access to that blog’s following, expanding your reach and increasing your small business’ visibility to a new set of audience.
As such, your SEO specialist VA’s tasks involve the following:
- Finding popular blog sites.
- Reaching out to their corresponding owners, drafting, and writing.
- Meeting the requirements of the host blog site.
The adage “quality over quantity” will never grow old or overused, especially monitoring backlinks.
Having more backlinks does not automatically equate to better rankings. This strategy occasionally works against you since Google may drop your site’s ranking if it associates with questionable linking schemes or websites.
Things will go downhill for you if these spammy websites link back to yours without your knowledge.
Your virtual assistant can help you track who is referring to your website and evaluate the relevance of the links to ensure that no spam sites are linking themselves to you.
Adding images and videos is crucial when posting social media content or writing a blog. If your SEO specialist is too caught up designing cutting-edge techniques, you can delegate this task to your SEO VA.
Your virtual assistant can help you create and optimize videos, give titles, create thumbnails, write SEO-friendly descriptions, and add easily accessible call-to-action buttons to your YouTube videos.
In addition, your SEO virtual assistant can also do the following:
- Optimize your YouTube channel to boost results even more
- Assist you in expanding your social channels by using custom images and videos while keeping SEO in mind.
Infographics are a great way to entertain and draw the attention of your audiences to your sites and blog. You can assign your VA to create infographics for your blogs.
Because SEO can take time to produce results, you need proof that your investment with a virtual assistant is worthwhile. SEO reporting can help you gauge how your SEO plan and strategy is producing quantifiable outcomes.
SEO virtual assistants are also aware that you might just have cursory knowledge of marketing jargon and ideas. The good news is these VAs are skilled at striking a balance between creating understandable reports and giving optimum details to demonstrate the effectiveness of your strategy. The following metrics should be included in your reports:
Traffic is the information about brand awareness in combination with new visitors, time spent on site, and bounce rate. You will see where the sources of traffic are coming from, what devices people use to access your website, and the top-performing pages.
Conversion demonstrates the connection between your SEO strategy and sales.
Your virtual assistant should incorporate conversions before the sale, e.g., sign-ups for a newsletter or free trial if you have a long sales funnel.
Moreover, this metric will demonstrate how SEO affects the buyer’s journey at each level. The report should include the following:
- The ratio of paid to organic leads
- Conversion rate
- Average cost per conversion (paid search)
Performance will let you know how your rankings have improved through SEO. Your VA will provide the following data:
- Keywords you rank for
- The corresponding position of the keywords in search results
This is the most critical metric since this will show you if you see monetary gains after hiring virtual assistant services. It will also provide statistics about current SEO investment returns as your VA creates projections for future ROI.
What Tools Should an SEO Specialist Need to Have?
SEO specialists require specialized training to do their work effectively.
Soft skills such as excellent communication and analytical skills and attention to detail are also crucial. Moreover, extensive training and experience are tremendously vital as well.
If you are unsure how to screen an SEO VA, get acquainted with some of the tools and software that SEO professionals use. While reviewing the resume and experience of your prospective SEO virtual assistant, keep an eye on the following SEO tools and software:
- Google SEO Tools such as Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, Google Search Console, and Google Trends
- Ahrefs
- Semrush
- Moz
- KWFinder
How to Know If You Are Hiring The Right SEO Services For Your Small Business?
The SEO agency that you will hire for your small business should have a solid processes to help set up your business for long-term success, get higher traffic and conversion rate.
This should include but not limited to:
- Customized strategy building
- Brainstorming
- Quarterly goal setting
- Weekly and monthly meeting
- Routine Roadmap analysis
Final Thoughts
Hiring an SEO specialist to work on your website entails a substantial amount of money. Thus it is critical to ensure they concentrate on the tasks that are most relevant to their position.
An SEO virtual assistant can help lighten some of the weight by handling some of the more time-consuming tasks we have mentioned above.
Find the best virtual assistants for SEO at Virtual Assistant Talent! All of our SEO virtual assistants are experienced with on-page and off-page seo strategy and can guarantee you great results. Definitely, a value for your money.
Talk with one of our consultants today!
References:
https://invedus.com/blog/what-can-an-seo-virtual-assistant-do-for-your-small-business/
https://smartvirtualassistants.com/blog/what-can-an-seo-virtual-assistant-va-do-for-your-business
