@tjrobertson52

Most SEO agencies want you to think that SEO is really complicated. They'll send you proposals with 20 super technical sounding things they need to do to optimize your website. The truth is, while there are hundreds of things you can do to improve your visibility online, there are really only two things that make up 90% of the difference.

They aren't technical at all. The first is creating content optimized for the terms people search for before purchasing your products or services. The word optimize there can be kind of scary.

There are dozens of things you can do to better optimize your content, but there's just a few that make up most of the difference. You wanna get the main term you're trying to rank for in your H1 and meta title, and if possible, your URL slug, and then get any smaller secondary terms in H2s or subheadings. This, of course, applies not just to new content you're creating, but any content that already exists on your website, including most importantly, your homepage.

And the second thing that matters are links or mentions of your brand around the internet. `n`nMore specifically, you want links from relevant sites that Google trusts, and mentions from the pages that large language models are already citing when people are looking for your products or services. Now for local businesses, there is a third important factor and that's your Google Business Profile.

You wanna make sure that's completely filled out and you wanna get as many reviews as possible. Why do SEO agencies propose this big list of technical sounding tasks? Well, there's two reasons.

One is it makes it look like you're getting a bunch of work for your money, when in reality most of these tasks are one time tasks that don't take a lot of time. And two, it makes it much easier for them to take credit for any gains you have in visibility. Your visibility is naturally going to go up and down based on algorithm changes.

And if you're a growing business, your visibility is naturally going to go up as a result. This makes it very easy for SEO. Agencies to take credit for all the wins.

If they've given you a list of 20 tasks they've done to improve your visibility, it's easy to be like, oh yeah, those wins are definitely because of those things we were doing. And then it's equally as easy to explain away the losses. You can just say, oh, there was an algorithm update, it was outside of our control.

And of course, both of those things actually do happen. It's the sliver of truth that makes them believable. The things that actually make a difference though, are much easier to track.

If you create a new piece of content or you optimise An existing piece of content. It's easier to track how much traffic that content gets from search as a result.