July 9, 2024
High-performance SEO tools combine comprehensive features, durability, speed, and accuracy.
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They come with capabilities like extensive keyword research, in-depth crawling, real-time backlink analysis, and comprehensive competitor monitoring. This is essential for agencies to manage multiple client project tasks simultaneously while ensuring efficiency.
Choosing a high-performance SEO tool, for agencies, based on their method of work and client requirements is crucial. The right tools streamline workflows, enable teams to provide quality services, allow easy expansion in offerings, and even provide actionable insights quickly.
When looking for a tool, SEO and digital marketing agencies should critically evaluate the available options before making a purchase.
In this article, let’s look at four things agencies need to look at while adopting a high-performance SEO tool.
1. Define the SEO Agency Goals
There are three aspects that will help marketing agencies define this: target market, scope of services, and customer requirements.
The target market could include B2B SaaS companies, private contractors, large enterprises, ecommerce businesses, or local stores. After deciding who to serve, teams can determine their offerings in a tangible way.
It can be helpful to look at the existing SEO agencies in those markets. This can shed some light on current market trends and accepted industry standards.
Finally, learning about customer requirements will assist digital marketing agencies build workflows around their offerings. For instance, if an agency wants to help their customer start a blog, they should build content creation workflows around their keyword research offering.
Combining the insights from the three aspects above can immensely aid in figuring out the action items within each workflow for each offering. Consequently, marketing agencies can easily pen down what they want from a high-performance SEO solution on a feature-by-feature level.
Let’s dive in and see how the services agencies wish to offer translate to features.
2. Look for Must-Have Features
Regardless of the niche served, marketing and SEO agencies have to provide certain core services. These core services encompass optimization procedures that are fundamental for a business’ healthy online visibility.
For instance, keyword research can be considered a ‘core SEO service’. It identifies phrases and terms the target audience uses (AKA keywords) to find and seek relevant information, products, or services, and integrates those terms into the website content, thereby improving search engine rankings.
Moreover, each core service includes multiple workflows within it. Keyword difficulty analysis, competitor monitoring, trend analysis, long-tail keyword identification, etc., are some workflows that are usually included in keyword research. These workflows guide processes like content ideation and internal linking.
Here is a quick list of other core SEO services agencies might want to offer to their clients:
- Website auditing
- Core Web Vitals monitoring
- SEO log analysis and crawling
- Sitemap and robot.txt optimization
- On-site issues (broken link, duplicate content, etc.)
- Link building
- Rank tracking
- Link quality assessment
- Broken link identification
- Backlink acquisition
- Content creation
- Writing posts and pages
- Updating content for relevance
- Creating lead magnets
Keep in mind that the way agencies classify their service offerings can vary. This can change how teams group the individual action items and, ultimately, translate them to features they can look for in high-performance SEO tools.
3. Prioritize UX and Scalability
After deciding the services to be offered, identifying the workflows around them, and translating them into features, agencies need to look at the needs of their own SEO team members.
Tools that are easy to use and come with an intuitive user interface (UI) can ensure faster time to value and improved productivity. Even new team members can be quickly onboarded due to the small learning curve.
It can be beneficial to check out detailed customer testimonials of high-performance SEO tools you are considering. Moreover, sharing demo videos of various options with the team members to get their initial thoughts can be beneficial.
Another team-specific aspect digital marketing agencies need to look at while selecting high-performance SEO tools is scalability.
It is a possibility that loyal clients, sometimes, seek more services or agencies themselves want to enter new markets. Choosing software that keeps up with these changes without halting or drastically altering current SEO workflows becomes crucial.
A good rule of thumb is to select software that facilitates seamless team collaboration and can integrate with other tools in the present tech stack. This will also make it easier for agencies to expand into new niches and provide additional services.
4. Budget Considerations
These high-performance tools can be pricey, due to their robust architecture, performance, and comprehensive capabilities. Additionally, it may also necessitate experienced personnel to manage the workflows around it.
While choosing such high-performance SEO solutions for agency clients, it is crucial to focus on how much it will cost in both regards: the price of the tool and the human resources required to extract the value out of it.
To zero in on your budget, focus on how much the clients are billed. Agencies can refer to the standard pricing in the marketing industry to determine this. It also depends on the scope of services provided to the customers.
The next thing to look at is tool pricing. Usually, for SaaS solutions, software is priced in two ways: usage-based and feature-based. Both methods can come with tiers and have distinct advantages.
Usage-based pricing has lower entry barriers and agencies only pay based on their use. For instance, keyword research tools can charge based on how many analyses you do. At the same time, feature-based pricing can be great for power users and makes it easier for SEO agencies to predict their revenue.
Marketing and SEO agencies can simplify this further by requesting customized quotes from the vendors and comparing them with their estimated expenses and deal size for a typical client. This can be beneficial to put things in perspective and facilitate more informed decision-making.
Wrapping up
Choosing the right high-performance SEO tool can help agencies streamline workflows, provide quality services, and increase client satisfaction. While selecting such a tool, teams need to focus on tangibly identifying the services they want to provide their customers.
This will help them list the features they need in a high-performance SEO tool. It is also essential for marketing agencies to adopt a tool that is easy to use by the internal team for faster time to value and seamless onboarding of new teams.
Moreover, SEO and marketing agencies need to future-proof their business by selecting tools that can make it easier for them to provide additional services down the line. Solutions that empower teams to communicate well and offer integrations with other tools should be prioritized.
Finally, agencies should analyze their operations and their clients’ expectations to determine whether they should go with a tool that charges based on usage or features.
Author Bio: Lucy Manole
Lucy is a creative content writer and strategist at Marketing Digest. She specializes in writing about digital marketing, technology, entrepreneurship, and education. When she is not writing or editing, she spends time reading books, cooking and traveling.
