When you do a local search for an SEO service provider in Sydney, it’s likely that you will find hundreds of companies or even individuals who offer SEO services with different range of services and prices. Then there are also SEO services that are offered as extra to the main services they offer, such as SEO hosting companies that offer search-engine-optimized hosting accounts. With all those different offerings, it could be a difficult decision for you to choose the right SEO Sydney for your needs.
All these “SEO services” providers have different characteristics, and it’s really important for you to know these different characteristics if you want to find the right SEO provider. There are a lot of elements to examine the full characteristics of an SEO service, but in order to make it simple, as a start we can checkout the elements that matter a lot in determining whether the service is right for your needs, these are the SEO techniques and the level of SEO services offered by the provider.
SEO Techniques
Basically, there are three kinds SEO techniques known in the industry; White Hat, Black Hat and Grey Hat. Which one suits you best? Let’s take a look at the details.
White Hat
White Hat technique is basically SEO by the book. When a provider is applying this kind of SEO technique, it means they will comply to Google’s guidelines to the last detail. No spamming or taking advantage of any kind of loophole involved in the strategy. Because it complies with all the rules, White Hat is the safest SEO method that will not risk your site of getting blacklisted or banned by the search engines.
However, it takes a lot of work and time to get your site on top of search results when using this strategy. White Hat SEO providers will focus on your content that should be original, continuously updated, and provide real information that attracts real visitors instead of just to feed search engines’ crawlers. They will also modify all your Meta tags to comply with the rules, get relevant inbound links that are not so easy to get, work on your social signals and many others.
White Hat SEO is perfect for your company website carrying your brand name and image that you want to be listed in major search engines for long-term. For such important website you need to make sure that you play it safe. But also remember that a lot of so called White Hat SEO providers actually don’t offer White Hat SEO services, so you have to be careful and make sure they genuinely offer a White Hat service.
Black Hat
This is an SEO method that’s mainly focusing on tricking or manipulating search engines into thinking that the target website deserves to rank high in search results. Usually Black Hat SEO method relies a lot on automation to create substandard pages and to build an incredibly large number of irrelevant inbound links. There are various other SEO techniques that are considered as unethical by major search engines, including cloaking, posting spun content, keywords stuffing, creating blog network, and many others.
This method could make a website ranks very fast to the top of search results, but it would only last for a short period of time, then the website will be banned or blacklisted. Now this may sound unfavorable for us, but if you have an affiliate website in a highly lucrative but extremely competitive niche, then the Black Hat method could be an option. A lot of online marketers actually could gain a few hundreds or even thousands of dollar of profit by ranking their affiliate sites in a short time using this Black Hat strategy. But obviously this is not a good option for your company website.
Grey Hat
Grey Hat method is somewhere in between White Hat and Black Hat strategies. It applies many White Hat methods, especially when it comes to content, Meta tags and keywords, but when it comes to inbound links, the strategy may not be so “ethical”. So it’s all about balancing between risk and reward. A lot of these Grey Hat strategies are actually taking advantage of some loopholes in search algorithm. The key is to stay ‘under the radar’ and do the rather unethical methods moderately, just enough to make your website ranks well in search results but not too much that can get it banned from the search engine.
Levels of SEO Services
There are several levels of SEO services available, which might also be confusing if you’re new to this. Some of these so called SEO providers don’t even provide actual SEO services, they simply call it that way.
Not SEO
This is the kind of service that’s advertised as SEO but actually it’s not. Just like those hosting companies claiming to provide optimized hosting account. But actually they only provide automatic Meta tags to make sure your site could be indexed by search engines, it doesn’t actually help your website to rank better.
There are also some “SEO providers” who simply help you with PPC marketing and other advertisement campaigns, manage your social media accounts or commission blog posts in order to generate traffic and track the results. These are simply marketing campaigns, while SEO should be able to optimize your actual website in order to rank better in search results.
Barely SEO
Some SEO Sydney providers – mostly individual providers – only offer Meta tags modifications and backlink services. These services might give your site a little boost, but barely enough. You would be lucky to get to top 100 position on search results by relying on these alone.
Decent SEO
When an SEO provider is offering title and Meta tag modifications, link building and keyword research, these services can qualify as decent SEO. This might give your site a nice boost to rank well in search results.
Comprehensive SEO
Besides everything that you get from decent SEO, providers that offer comprehensive SEO services will also manage your content, site’s authority, video posts as well as working on your website’s social signals. All these will give powerful boost to get your website to the top.