What are the different stages of an SEO service?

Are you looking to hire an SEO agency to improve your website’s search engine performance, but aren’t sure how a natural SEO project actually works? In this article, we’ll explain the different steps involved in working with an SEO service provider.

Step 1 / Definition of the client’s needs and objectives

The agency must be able to accurately understand your business and commercial challenges in order to effectively carry out its mission. It must also understand your market, your competitors, the specifics of the services or products you sell, and your audience (or personas).

All this information collected at the start of the collaboration will allow the service provider to target the keywords relevant to your business and activate the best levers in terms of SEO.

Step 2 / The Audit Phase

A technical SEO audit of your website is an important step in the project because it highlights any issues that may be blocking your site’s proper ranking . Depending on the volume of pages to be analyzed and the complexity of your website, the audit can take several days, or even several weeks (for larger sites).

The agency checks all the technical elements necessary for the proper exploration and indexing of your site by search engine robots (crawlers).

This complete analysis is then returned to the client in PDF format with all the technical optimizations to be carried out, classified in order of priority.

Semantic audit (keyword targeting)

The next step is to analyze the keywords your website is already ranking for and identify those you could rank for. In other words, the visibility opportunities you’re missing.

This step is essential in any SEO project. It determines the project’s success. Certain keywords or phrases are more searched for than others. The file provided will serve you throughout your SEO project.

The semantic audit thus allows:

To identify keywords with the highest search volume , as well as long tail keywords;

To ensure that your site uses the same language as Internet users searching for your services or products on the Internet, a necessary condition for being found on Google;

Competitive audit

The competitive audit allows you to position yourself in relation to your competitors: organic traffic, number of keywords, positions on Google, backlinks, domain authority, etc.

This will help you understand what efforts you need to make to catch up with your best competitors on the internet.

Step 3 / Technical and semantic optimizations

After the audit phase, technical optimizations should be carried out on the site. Often, the client collaborates with a technical service provider (web or digital agency) to develop their site. In this context, the SEO agency can assist the client in their discussions with their technical service provider to ensure that the optimizations have been implemented correctly.

The agency’s editorial teams make suggestions for modifying existing texts while respecting the client’s brand identity and editorial policy. They can either write the content in question or assist the client’s internal teams in optimizing it.

These optimizations, if numerous, can spread over several months. The agency conducts regular updates (monthly or weekly) with the client to ensure that the roadmap is being respected. This step is part of monthly support, one of the SEO services offered by the SEO agency .