If you are wondering how to grow a digital marketing agency, the only thing you need to keep in mind is that the success (and scalability) of an agency is directly linked to the results you bring to your clients. The faster you help your customers attain their goals and the higher return on investment (ROI) you can offer them, the more loyal your existing clients will be and the more potential customers will come to you.
In this article, we’ll tell you about the best strategies for delivering higher SEO ROI to your clients and thus, ensuring faster growth of your agency!
1. Set Clear and Well-Aligned Goals
A solid goal should be at the heart of every successful agency marketing strategy. Without it, you will find it much harder to determine steps to take, measure success, or find ways to improve your approach for maximum outcomes. Without it, it will be much harder and longer to deliver a good ROI to your clients.
To set up your marketing agency strategy for success, follow these steps:
- Start by analyzing your client’s full profile and understanding their short-term and long-term objectives.
- Run a thorough audit to assess current SEO performance and benchmark point A.
- Identify point B–business-aligned SEO outcomes you are hoping to achieve. This will be your goal, and it has to be detailed, specific, and accomplishable.
- Outline the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will let you measure success.
2. Focus on High-Impact Keywords
If your ultimate goal is to deliver better SEO ROI, respectively, the core aim of your strategy should be to drive conversions, as they demonstrate tangible outcomes of your work.
To do this, you may want to adjust your keyword strategy—instead of targeting more general terms, prioritize high-impact, bottom-of-the-funnel keywords. Basically, since they belong to the bottom of the funnel (BOTF), these keywords have the highest conversion potential as they typically involve a strong purchase intent. They typically include words like “buy,” “for sale,” “purchase,” “pricing,” and similar.
Here’s how to target such keywords for your marketing strategy step by step:
- Brainstorm all variations of keywords that people might use to research your product or service category.
- Combine the general queries with BOTF modifiers like “pricing,” “cost,” “buy,” etc.
- Use a reliable keyword research tool to assess search volumes and competition for each query and target high-impact ones. You can browse the best SEO software for agencies to pick a research tool that will work for you.
- Use Google to browse your selected keywords and analyze search results to detect the search intent behind each.
3. Focus on Delivering Content That Converts
One of the most effective content marketing techniques for conversions is to create BOTF articles. After you target high-impact BOTF keywords and analyze the search intents behind them, develop a content strategy that addresses relevant BOTF topics and perfectly aligns with search intent.
Some types of BOTF content that you can leverage include:
- Product alternatives
- Reviews and testimonials
- Case studies
- Use cases
- Competitor comparison
- Product demo videos
- Webinars
- Pricing page
If you align these content types to intent and optimize them for SEO well, they can give you lots of high-potential traffic and boost conversions. A case study of one agency revealed that BOTF articles that use BOTF keywords and are tailored to users’ intent at this stage of the funnel get 25x higher conversion rates compared to the top-of-the-funnel (TOF) articles.
4. Work on Technical SEO
When handling SEO for clients, improving the site’s technical performance should be one of the first things you do. Although technical optimization doesn’t drive traffic directly (as your keywords and content), it basically lays the foundation for customer experience and defines whether visitors will engage with your site or leave. At the same time, it helps you make a website better understandable, accessible, and crawlable for search engines, helping improve the indexing process.
Be sure to integrate the following technical optimization techniques to give your clients higher ROI:
- Identify duplicate content and specify canonical URLs for them to ensure that Google crawls and indexes the right page.
- Create detailed sitemaps to let Google understand your site better and encourage crawling for important pages.
- Leverage robots.txt files to prevent the crawling of unimportant pages (but be very cautious with it).
- Optimize multimedia files for optimal quality and lower weight.
- Continuously test and improve site speed to keep it running smoothly.
- Optimize the navigation, design, and appearance of a website for mobile users.
5. Build Trust and Recognition Through Effective Link-Building
Backlinks give your clients greater online exposure and let them attract traffic from external sources. They also act as a universal trust signal for both search engines and visitors. In the long run, high-quality backlinks can grow recognition, trust, and loyalty, securing better ROIs, which is why they should be prioritized in your marketing strategy.
Here are some proven tactics that can help you generate quality backlinks that improve your client’s reputation and trust:
- Focus on producing top-notch content that serves users’ needs and brings unique insights. Consider creating types of content that frequently receive backlinks, such as research, case studies, etc.
- Produce high-value visual assets, such as infographics and data visualizations–they have to be appealing and clearly communicate important data so that other sites want to share them.
- Analyze your competitors’ backlink profiles to see which mentions bring them the most outcomes and use these insights in your own agency marketing strategy.
- Use proactive link-building approaches, such as guest posting and the skyscraper method, to gain even more links.
6. Use Local Optimization for Maximum Impact
Local optimization takes an important place in a winning marketing plan, especially when your clients have physical business locations, such as an office or a store. In this case, this type of SEO helps you ensure that prospects find your client and they receive a steady flow of foot traffic, which can eventually also positively affect ROI.
To utilize it, follow these simple steps:
- Claim a Google Business profile for your customer. Fill it out with relevant and up-to-date business information and optimize it using relevant target keywords.
- Come up with tactics that encourage existing buyers to share their reviews on your site and in Google to increase the trust level.
- Actively engage in customer communication on behalf of your client and answer both positive and negative reviews.
- Create listings in online business directories and pitch content to local news sites and blogs to obtain local references.
7. Leverage Analytics to Measure the Success
Analytics and accurate data are the two primary pillars of agency success and growth. With their help, you can assess your existing strategies and make informed decisions that let you accomplish greater goals. At the same time, tying your performance to analytics can help you demonstrate to your clients the work you’ve done and the outcomes they can get from it.
So now that you know how to improve SEO to get better ROI, let’s quickly discuss how to measure SEO ROI after your efforts. To do this right, all you need is to detect how much your client has spent on your services, subtract it from the revenue they received during the same period, and divide the result by the cost of SEO multiplied by 100. This simple formula will give you a specific percentage of return on your client’s investment.
8. Educate Your Customers on the Mechanics and Long-Term Value of SEO
Using the aforementioned agency strategies should help you deliver ROIs that impress your clients and keep you happy. Yet, an important thing to note about search engine optimization is that it takes time. After you make improvements, search engines need some time to index and rank pages. Sometimes, the first notable results can be seen in weeks or months. And this is a huge reason to educate your clients on the mechanics of SEO work.
Explain to your customers how their positions, visibility, and trust improve through various optimization techniques and highlight the long-term benefits they get beyond ROI. Educating them will help you set adequate expectations from the start and demonstrate the value of your work. Besides, delving behind the curtains, your clients will learn how to sustain their SEO results in the long run.
Conclusion
In order to grow your agency, you need to make sure that your customers attain their goals and stay happy with your services. Respectively, delivering higher SEO ROI can directly help you scale your business and achieve success.
Leverage the techniques and tips we shared with you earlier to make your optimization efforts yield!