It’s likely no shock that the most sought-after SEO services, as offered by standard SEO agencies, closely align with the four distinct types of SEO.
However, in a broader sense, SEO services can be categorized into three primary groups, each encompassing its unique range of services and outcomes:
Foundational SEO services:
- Keyword research
- Technical SEO audit
- On-page setup
- Competitor analysis
- Website blog content
Off-page SEO services:
- Link audit
- Link building
- Linkable asset creation
- Guest blogging
- Content marketing
- Barnacle SEO
Local SEO services:
- Citation building
- Review acquisitions and management
- Google My Business optimization
This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it includes the most widely adopted SEO services to date.
Also, though we’re breaking out services into their individual parts, they don’t always come à la carte. For example, you may sign up for “organic SEO,” which includes all of the above.
Let’s explore!
Types of foundational SEO services
Foundational SEO services include tactics that you can mostly implement with one dedicated project, then monitor occasionally afterward.
For example, while keyword research, on-page optimization, and technical SEO certainly require attention in perpetuity (you don’t “set it and forget it”), the lion’s share of work gets done in one fell swoop.
Keyword research
SEO keyword research is the process of finding and analyzing keywords that people use to investigate the products or services you offer so you can rank for them on search engines.
It’s the first phase of developing an SEO strategy.
Keyword research investigates:
- Keyword difficulty
- Keyword search volume
- Keyword search intent
- Content requirements
- Competitor keyword rankings
- Manual SERP analysis (search engine results page)
- Estimated value of a keyword ranking
- Seed, long-tail, and semantic keywords
Keyword research helps uncover a long list of keyword opportunities, as well as the exact ingredients you’ll need to rank for each keyword. Most importantly, it helps you choose rankable keywords.
As a service provided by an SEO company, keyword research may come bundled with on-page optimization or content development, or you can sign up for keyword research à la carte.
Technical SEO audit
Think of a technical SEO audit like a diagnostic machine your auto mechanic uses: it identifies and diagnoses what’s wrong with your technical SEO so you can fix the issues.
Just like an auto mechanic can’t fix your oil leak without first knowing why it’s leaking, a technical SEO can’t fix your technical foundation without first knowing why it’s broken.
A technical SEO audit includes a handful of different audits, all that seek to diagnose the collective performance of your website such as:
- Site structure
- Page speed
- Duplicate content
- User experience
- Crawlability
- Mobile-friendliness
- Security
- Structured data
- Interstitials (pop-ups)
- Core Web Vitals
- Multilingual designation
- Google Search Console
Since technical SEO rarely requires daily inspection (unless you’re a huge eCommerce brand with thousands of pages), businesses typically outsource technical to an SEO expert.
As part of the engagement, the consultant or agency will either conduct a one-time technical SEO audit (i.e., an entire investigation and diagnosis of critical technical SEO factors), or they’ll include implementation and fix the issues along with the audit.
On-page setup
As we mentioned, you should perform on-page SEO every time you publish a new article or web page. But in most cases, at least when it comes to SEO services, on-page optimization is a project-based, one-time activity that uses keyword research to optimize an entire website at once (page by page).
On-page SEO services typically include the following:
- Website audit
- Keyword research
- Meta tag optimization (HTML)
- Header tags optimization
- Internal linking
- Keyword optimization
- Content development and optimization (content, images, media)
Competitor analysis
Typically, competitor analysis is something conducted during link building (i.e., competitor backlink analysis). However it’s not uncommon to find competitor analysis as a one-time service provided by an SEO agency.
Here’s what a typical competitor analysis report includes:
- Competitor research
- Competitor SEO performance analysis
- Competitor backlink analysis
- Competitor benchmarking
Website blog content
Last, but certainly not least, website blog content.
72% of online marketers describe content creation as their most effective SEO tactic. And on average, companies that blog produce 67% more leads/month than those that don’t.
Makes sense, considering that without high-quality content, Google will have nothing to rank to begin with.
As a service, blog writing for SEO usually includes:
- Content strategy
- Writing, editing, posting
- On-page optimization
- Updating old blog posts
- Social media publication
Types of off-page SEO services
In most cases, off-page just means link building (it’s 99% of the job).
It’s no surprise that the most popular off-page SEO services include (you guessed it) different types of link-building services.
- Link audit
- Link building
- Linkable asset creation
- Guest blogging
- Content marketing
- Barnacle SEO
Link audit
A link-building audit diagnoses the health of your link profile (quality and quantity of referring domains), uncovering opportunities in the process.
Though most link-building services include a link audit as just part of the deliverables, it’s common to sign up for just a link-building audit, too.
During a link audit, you can expect the following:
- Organized sheet of your backlink profile (referring root domains, DA/PA of links, anchor text, etc.)
- A thorough analysis of links, good and bad
- Link cleanup recommendations
- Link opportunity recommendations
- List of links to disavow with Google (i.e., spam links that could be hurting you)
- Backlink report
Good news: Performing a backlink audit is fairly easy with a tool like Ahrefs or SEMRush. In fact, both of these tools have a backlink audit feature.
Link building
The darling of SEO: Link building.
Link building as a service is any tactic designed to increase the quality and quantity of backlinks pointing to your website.
Link building comes in three flavors:
- White hat link building: Acquiring backlinks organically by creating high-quality content and waiting for them to come to you.
- Black hat link building: Buying links from link farms or link schemes with the intention of manipulating rankings, despite Google’s guidelines and policies.
- Grey hat link building: Toeing the line between white hat and black hat, gray hat linking usually includes guest blogging, outreach, broken link building, content marketing, or any other non-manipulative link-building tactic.
According to Google, any active pursuit of backlinks violates their policies, so scratch white hat link building off the list (it doesn’t really exist).
As for grey hat link building, a typical service includes the following:
- Guest blogging on vetted publishers
- Creating linkable assets and promoting them
- Manual outreach
- Broken link building
- Competitor link building
- Unlinked mentions
- Link reclamation
As for black hat backlink services (i.e., paying for links), just don’t do it. It never works long-term.
Linkable asset creation
This is our favorite type of white hat link-building service. With linkable asset creation, you produce a piece of content so over-the-top valuable that when you promote it to the right people, they can’t help but share it and link back.
Why is it our favorite? Because it works the best. Period.
In fact, creating linkable assets is how we grew our blog to over 30K monthly organic visitors.
The process is simple in theory but difficult in practice. An agency partner works with you to create a linkable asset, they promote it to the right audiences, distribute it across various channels, and reach out to potential suitors for a backlink. Voilà.
For example, some years ago, we partnered with brands like HubSpot, Marketo, Ahrefs, UberFlip, SEMRush and CXL to publish a series of linkable assets in the form of gifographics (infographics made of gifs). And boy, did they get linked to.
Guest blogging
Guest blogging is the OG of link-building services.
As it sounds, guest blogging is when you write an article for a reputable, high-domain authority publisher and hopefully receive an editorial backlink in the process.
For example, this is an example of a guest post we published on Unbounce.com:
Most guest blogging services have a network of writers and publishers, and they strategize, write, and publish guest posts on your company’s behalf.
In other cases, a guest blogging service might require that you write the article first and they’ll do the publishing second (either to their platform or someone else’s).
Guest blogging reigned supreme in the early 2010s. But like everything else, marketers ruin everything. It’s still a viable strategy today, but Google has cracked down on backlinks from guest posts. For a guest post backlink to carry any weight, it needs to come from a credible website, show up in the body of the article (not the author’s bio), and ideally send targeted referral traffic back to your website.
Content marketing
Content marketing is the process of creating, promoting, and distributing high-quality content for a target audience across all available digital channels (website, social media, email, etc.).
Think of content marketing as the process of creating and promoting a linkable asset, but instead of a one-and-done project, content marketing doesn’t stop.
This is why it’s the #1 link-building strategy today.
After all, without a consistent stream of high-quality content, what will influencers, thought leaders, publishers, and businesses link back to?
Case in point: There’s a reason why our blog generates 30K organic visitors and has acquired well over 30K backlinks. We produce one quality article (sometimes more) every day, all year long. We’re constantly publishing link-worthy content.
Content marketing services can include the following:
- Content marketing audit
- Persona development
- Content creation (e-books, white papers, articles, etc.)
- Series development (podcast, video series, subscriber-only series)
- Content promotion (paid)
- Content distribution (organic)
- Social media marketing
- Email marketing
- Reporting (KPIs and metrics)
6. Barnacle SEO (or “vertical search optimization”)
Have you ever wanted to rank for a high-volume keyword only to discover that the top three spots on Google are occupied by a review site or vertical search engine?
For example, say you wanted to rank for the keyword “live chat software.” Two of the top four spots on Google are G2 and Capterra, both review aggregators.
You can try to outrank them. Or, if you don’t think you can beat them, you can join them.
How? By optimizing your business listing within their platform.
We call it barnacle SEO: attaching yourself to a bigger website that ranks for a valuable keyword that your website doesn’t have the domain authority to rank for on its own.
In fact, we did just that at KlientBoost.
We wanted to rank for the keyword “best PPC agency,” only to discover that Clutch.io (review platform) dominated page one, along with other review sites. So instead of trying to rank our domain, we increased our rankings within Clutch.io.
When it comes to barnacle SEO (or vertical search optimization) as a service, tactics usually center around review acquisition for specific review platforms (since they’re usually the bigger websites occupying those top spots):
- Review acquisition strategy
- Customer feedback strategy
- Email marketing (for customer outreach)
- Review gates (i.e. direct negative feedback to email, not a review platform)
- Link building (if necessary)
Types of local SEO services
Local businesses have it way harder when it comes to SEO. Not only do they need to consider every tactic we’ve already mentioned if they want to rank organically, but they also need to consider the SEO tactics below if they want to rank in the Local Pack results.
- Citation building
- Review acquisition
- Google My Business optimization
Citation building
Though citations have declined in popularity and importance, ensuring your data is consistent across the web helps both customers and search engines find you.
Like backlinks, citations are votes of confidence for Google. The more accurate and consistent your information appears across the web, the more Google trusts you.
Citation-building services include the literal creation of business profiles consisting of your business name, address, phone number, and website link.
Citation services come in two sizes:
- Automated citations: Services like Yext partner with hundreds of major business directories, then let you update your NAP across all of them at once using the Yext dashboard. Cost: Roughly $500/year.
- Manual citation: Companies like WhiteSpark or BrightLocal manually create hundreds of citations across relevant business directories for a price per citation.
Review acquisition
Not too long ago, review acquisition services consisted mostly of agencies providing businesses with review cards that asked customers to write a review on Google, Yelp, or Facebook.
Thankfully, the review industry has evolved at lightspeed over the last decade.
Today, most review acquisition services are managed by software you can pay for at a low monthly cost.
For example, some of our favorite review software include:
Google My Business
The last, and certainly not least, local search service is Google My Business (GMB) creation, verification, and optimization.
You can’t rank in Local Pack results without a GMB page.
GMB optimization services include the following:
- GMB listing audit
- GMB verification
- Profile creation and optimization
- Category selection
- Photo uploads
- Posts to your GMB profile
- Local citations
- GMB reviews