When looking for a digital marketing agency or partner, it is absolutely crucial to know what you’re getting before signing that dotted line. This means knowing exactly what your contract entails as well as what results you can expect. While this may seem obvious, when it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), the lines can get a little bit blurred.

What Really Is SEO?

Put as simply as possible, SEO is all optimizations that can be made to your website to help its organic performance. Basically, a three letter acronym for a highly technical, complicated, strategy-based process. It’s code, it’s content, on your website and off. Search Engine Land did a really good job of compiling all of the pieces of SEO into one easy to digest format. Check it out below.

Download: Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors

Did You Notice Anything?

How many times does this graphic say blogs? How about content? While there is a large correlation between content and your SEO performance and overall rankings, the two are not mutually exclusive. There are so many technical pieces that go into SEO outside of putting pen to paper and creating engaging content.

1. For example, how dense is your code-to-content ratio?
2. Is your website easy to crawl?
3. Do you have toxic links from other websites pointing to your page?
4. What’s your business listing like on the SERP?

If you’re looking for someone to manage your website’s SEO, these are the types of questions you need answers to, and, eventually strategies to help make these improvements.

What If I Just Want Blogs?

That’s fine! In fact, I encourage you to hire a content partner, especially if you don’t have the time or resources to create in-house. It’s just about the expectation.

If you hire someone to write blogs, and they wind up doing full SEO strategies, awesome! But, if you’re hiring someone to do full blown SEO and all you’re getting is blog content, then that’s a problem. Knowing the difference between content strategies and organic performance strategies is the key to setting yourself up for a great working relationship and ongoing SEO success.