SEO, short for 'Search Engine Optimisation', is the task of looking at keywords related to a business, product or service. This ensures that Google understands the content on the website and uses the content in SERPS, which is short for 'Search Results Pages', and this can lead to visitor website traffic for free, known as organic, editorial, or natural search results in search engines like Google.

An SEO Company should identify keywords and this can be classed as longtail keywords, which means keywords with other words around them. The SEO company should also identify relevant search terms with traffic potential and focus the content to achieve these keywords.

There are various tasks involved in SEO and these can be broken up into 4 types:

• On-page SEO (on-site SEO)
  • The actual website content being delivered in way that explains clearly to search engines, to help them use the data.
  • Generating Title and Meta data to explain the page content.
  • Ensuring the content is of a good quality and relevant to the search terms you are looking to achieve.
  • Internal linking to other content on your website.
  • Optimising content images to be sized correctly with ALT text to explain the image use.
• Off-page SEO (off-site SEO)
  • This is external SEO factors such as backlinks that point to the website content.
  • Guest blogging.
• Technical SEO
  • This is ensuring the website is correctly setup.
  • Site load time.
  • Mobile usability.
  • Checking for crawl errors.
  • Ensuring no duplicate content is on the website.
• Local SEO
  • Focussed content for local ranking, to help the audience local to your business find your website.

Black Hat SEO is something to avoid and if you come across any SEO company that recommends this - walk away.

• Link spamming from thousands of websites
• Keyword stuffing on your page content
• Over-optimised HTML tags and headings
• Hidden texts and links
• Buying backlinks
• Using other website content

If you have PPC or Google Ads, then SEO will play an important role in your Digital Marketing. How SEO and PPC work together is simple, if Google likes your page enough to rank it on page one, then, to have the same keywords as PPC, the quality score will be higher and thus save you money.

SEO is carried out with technical and on-page content changes to ensure the content is formatted for SERPS to understand. How SEO is done will depend on the agency, but all agencies will have similar tools and work to the same effect, if they follow Google guidelines.

If you are asking yourself "How will SEO help my business?" then we suggest you look at what SEO is doing. SEO will help bring traffic to your website for FREE which results in sales or leads that are generated daily from search engines.

SEO is paid for labour service where a consultant will look over the website content and fix/edit the content. So yes, SEO is a paid service to an agency.

If you are asking whether SEO can help your business, then the answer is YES. We would suggest you learn more about SEO tasks to understand the benefits for your business.