Do SEO agencies also help with content creation and technical changes, or just give recommendations?

Most full-service SEO agencies will actively help implement their recommendations, which includes content creation and technical optimizations. While some consultancies strictly audit and advise, the trend is that clients want execution too. Here’s how it breaks down:

• Content Creation: Because content is king in SEO, agencies often have copywriters or content strategists on staff. They can produce SEO-optimized blog posts, articles, landing page copy, infographics, even video content (or work with partners for that). They’ll do keyword research to find topics, then create high-quality content around those topics. Many agencies will manage a content calendar for you, ensuring you publish consistently. If you already have an in-house content team, an SEO agency can provide detailed content briefs for your writers, outlining keywords to target, topics to cover, and best practices (this ensures content is SEO-friendly). But if you need them to, they’ll gladly take the content creation off your plate. For example, SVZ often writes long-form thought leadership pieces for our clients targeting strategic keywords – blending our SEO knowledge with their subject matter expertise.
• On-site Technical Changes: SEO agencies usually have web developers or technical SEO specialists who can implement changes directly (especially if they built your site originally, but even if not). This might include editing site code or CMS settings to, say, add meta tags, improve site speed, fix broken links, create proper header hierarchies, generate structured data markup, etc. If the changes are major (like site restructuring), they might coordinate with your development team or a web agency. But simpler fixes (updating robots.txt, adding alt text to images, etc.) they often just handle.
• Off-site Implementation: For link-building, agencies do the outreach, find guest post opportunities, get articles published – all actions, not just advice.
• Tools and Setup: They’ll set up Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and any other monitoring tools, and configure goals, filters, dashboards as needed.

Essentially, a good SEO agency is pretty hands-on. The days of just handing a client a 50-page audit document and saying “good luck” are past – clients expect the agency to roll up their sleeves. That said, the exact role can be flexible: some clients want to approve every piece of content or have their devs make changes (perhaps for security reasons), whereas others want the agency to manage everything turnkey.

When you engage an agency, clarify this: e.g., will they be writing content? Do they have access to your CMS to make updates? If you have a retainer, usually it covers a mix of strategy and implementation hours. One potential issue is if your site is built on a proprietary system or something very specialized – then the agency might provide instructions for your devs rather than risk breaking something. But generally, yes, they will implement 90% of what they suggest, with your approval.

SVZ’s approach, for instance, is integrated: since we do web design/dev and SEO, we often find and fix technical issues on the fly during an SEO engagement, and we produce new pages or blogs as needed. Then from launch, we usually will move to an SEO retainer to upkeep SEO and improve things long-term - implementing any findings with our design and dev team. This platform-agnostic, all-hands approach ensures recommendations aren’t just theoretical but actually carried out effectively. In short, a competent SEO agency is both your consultant and implementation team – they identify opportunities and then make them happen. That’s why it’s important not to just hire an SEO agency but a team like SVZ that can handle SEO, Design, and Development - this create a ecosystem that’s sustainable.

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