What Does an SEO Virtual Assistant Do for Businesses?

Suppose you’re a business owner who has only recently discovered the importance of search engine optimization. In that case, you’re likely already overwhelmed by the scope of SEO and have already thought of hiring an SEO virtual assistant.

But why would you need the services of an SEO virtual assistant?

You’ve probably gone through several articles (like this one), and the more you read about SEO, the longer your to-do list gets.

Some business owners minimize the amount of work required for search engine optimization.

They believe they can lock in significant results with just a handful of hours weekly.

Other business owners feel paralyzed by the technical terms and the industry jargon that is often necessary to report changes in the world of search.

To be 100% honest, SEO is complex.

SEO requires resources like any other digital marketing channel.

The most significant resource is not your marketing budget but time.

Someone must consistently perform SEO tasks on your website (and beyond) for your ranking to improve. SEO is not a leave-it-to-beaver kind of marketing channel. It is huge. It involves onsite work, offsite campaigns, and technical/under-the-hood work.

Unless you can multiply the number of hours a day with a superpower, you need help.

 What’s an SEO Virtual Assistant?

An SEO virtual assistant is an independent contractor that offers administrative services to clients while operating outside your office or place of business.

SEO virtual assistants are adept in the crucial tasks related to searching engine optimization.

Their knowledge and skills often span the following domains:

– Content management

– Social media management

– WordPress customization

– WordPress design

– Onsite SEO

– Offsite SEO

– Technical SEO

People engaged as SEO virtual assistants frequently have several years of experience working for different businesses, from SMBs to larger enterprises. In addition, many are upskilling to become more proficient in digital marketing, graphic design, blog posts, content management, and social media.

 What Do SEO Virtual Assistants Do?

Competitor Analysis

Competitor analysis is the backbone of SEO campaigns. Without analyzing existing strategies, you would have no clue what works (and what doesn’t).

A professional SEO virtual assistant will know how to do it (and do it well).

The process takes a while, especially if you have several competitors, but it will be worth the wait. Furthermore, knowledge of your competitors will impact your SEO strategy for years to come.

Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is one of the most convenient ways of building links to build a website’s reputation or authority. You create content for publication on another website related to your market or industry.

The guest blogs will contain 1-2 links to essential pages on your website. These pages will receive “link juice” or reputation bonuses after the citations. You will also gain new readers on top of receiving citations. Websites with a higher authority score or rank tend to be the most helpful in offsite SEO efforts.

An SEO virtual assistant can perform the following tasks:

– Searching new topics for guest blogs

– Drafting the offsite content

– Finding good websites

– Pitching topics to editors

– Submitting guest posts and monitoring when they might be posted

– Checking if published guest posts are healthy or complete

– Outlining essential pages in your websites that need a boost

Online Business Directories

Online business directories are another great place to build authoritative backlinks. These websites are essentially digital versions of yellow pages. They’re usually well-organized, easy to search, and super helpful to customers looking for local businesses.

Your SEO virtual assistant can locate the appropriate online business directories, sign up for you and add pertinent information to your official/claimed listing.

You can have multiple business listings spread across different websites.

These multiple listings can help build the authoritativeness of your website in the long term.

Unfortunately, locating the right online directories takes hours of hard work. Signing up and adding information also consumes a lot of time. Instead of working on these listings on your lonesome, it’s best to have an SEO virtual assistant complete the task.

Offsite SEO

Link building is the heart of offsite search engine optimization. To a certain degree, earning backlinks is out of a business owner’s control. However, a knowledgeable SEO virtual assistant knows different strategies to enhance the awareness of a business.

They will also know how to identify link-building opportunities through various tactics such as content collaborations, podcasting on podcasts, guest posting (as discussed previously), curated links, and more.

Your assistant will spell the difference between a fruitful year of SEO and one that disappoints because there’s no movement or progress. SEO already takes a lot of time, but you can expect good news in a shorter period when someone is actively working on different aspects of your website SEO. Having knowledgeable staff is non-negotiable because you can’t do it all – no one can do it all.

Onsite SEO

Onsite SEO is search engine optimization that takes place on your website. It involves a variety of tasks, including the following:

– Keyword research

– Adding metadata

– Tweaking UX and UI

– Testing site structure

– Checking schema markup

– Performing content optimizations

– Establishing canonical links

– Generating reports using Google Analytics 4

Did you know that your SEO virtual assistant can help you create canonical links? However, you must point search engines to the ideal page if you have a piece of content that exists across pages. Sometimes, this can’t be helped.

You can already imagine how much time you need to spend if you do it all instead of your staff.

GA4 is particularly important for websites that are being optimized for the first time. Google Analytics 4 is the heart of search data, providing not just an overview of search traffic and clicks but the trend of user behavior as people find your content and all the other pages on your website.

Your SEO virtual assistant will generate reports from GA4 to show you areas for improvement, any movement in search of newly found search terms, monthly clicks, and more.