local seo
Over 90% of online experiences begin with a search engine. An SEO specialist’s job is to make sure your business shows up when your potential customers are doing that searching — and turns those clicks into leads and revenue.
Here’s what they actually do.
Everything that happens on your actual website: keyword targeting within content, title tags, meta descriptions, header structure, internal linking, image optimization. This makes your pages relevant and readable to both humans and search engine crawlers.
Building your website’s authority through external signals — primarily backlinks from other sites. When a reputable site links to yours, it’s a signal to Google that your content is worth ranking. Quality matters far more than quantity here.
The infrastructure layer: site speed, mobile responsiveness, secure connections (HTTPS), proper crawl configuration, XML sitemaps, structured data markup. If Google can’t efficiently access and understand your site, everything else you do is limited.
Keyword research — Finding the specific terms your potential customers are actually searching for, assessing difficulty and commercial intent, and building a targeting strategy around those findings.
Website audits — Systematically identifying what’s broken, what’s missing, and what’s underperforming. A good audit is the foundation of any serious SEO engagement.
Content development — Creating or guiding the creation of content that matches search intent, earns rankings, and converts visitors into customers. Writing for algorithms alone doesn’t work anymore; the best-ranking content is genuinely useful.
Link building — Developing relationships with other websites, creating content worth linking to, and doing the outreach necessary to earn quality backlinks. This is one of the more time-intensive parts of the work.
Analytics and reporting — Turning data into decisions. Which pages are gaining ground? Which are losing it? What’s converting and what’s not? Good specialists track KPIs that connect to business outcomes.
A couple of real examples from this type of work:
An e-commerce client achieved a 50% increase in website traffic within three months by targeting specific product-category keywords that were getting search volume but had relatively low competition. The work included optimizing product pages, building a content strategy around buyer questions, and earning a handful of quality links from industry publications.
A local service business doubled its website traffic and improved local pack rankings by fully optimizing its Google Business Profile, building consistent citations across local directories, and publishing location-specific content. The investment was modest; the results were not.
Ask for case studies — Not testimonials, case studies. Specific numbers, specific strategies, specific results.
Check their methodology — Can they explain what they’ll do and why it should work for your specific situation? Vague answers are a red flag.
Assess communication — You’ll be working with this person regularly. They should be able to explain technical concepts in plain language and be proactive about reporting progress.
Avoid guaranteed results — No one controls Google’s algorithm. Specialists who guarantee specific rankings are either misinformed or dishonest.
The field keeps evolving. AI content has flooded the internet with mediocre material, making genuinely expertise-driven content more valuable than ever. Voice search requires understanding conversational intent. Mobile-first indexing means mobile experience is a ranking factor, not just a user experience nice-to-have.
Good SEO specialists stay current with these shifts and adapt their strategies accordingly. When interviewing candidates, ask how their approach has changed in the past 12 months. The answer tells you a lot.
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