For a business to succeed, a pool of highly qualified employees is required, regardless of the size and nature of a business. Gone are the days when the highly qualified individuals were not available for small businesses because of the small businesses’ inability to pay top-class salaries. In those days, the best talent always went to big companies. Not anymore.

I am not saying that the best employees in your industry have stopped charging astronomical price for their services, so you can hire them from the available talent pool in your community or country. Well this is not possible as individuals in your community are still charging the same money.

But still you can hire a highly talented person, probably among the best in the industry, is no longer impossible for a small business. Thanks to the digital revolution led by the Internet, and doors it has opened for us. The Internet has given us an opportunity to hire someone from across the border, or across the continent from a developing country like India at much cheaper price to do the work which was earlier done by expensive fulltime regular employee.

In terms of quality, the output produced by these virtual assistants, as they are called, is of comparable to the output produced by regular employees. By this, they help a small business keep the cost low.

Among many things, a virtual assistant can also help you perform several SEO tasks, and as the title suggests this is what this article is about —about the SEO tasks a virtual assistant can perform for you.

Keyword research

A set of keywords (primary, secondary, and Long Tail) lays the foundation on which the solid structure of a website is erected. It is on the quality of the keyword that the strength of a website depends. We need to undertake keyword research to find high-quality “Gold nugget” keywords for a website, which is a time consuming, never wrecking undertaking. Because of which, we sometime tend to leave this exercise in the middle, or do not undertake it altogether. Both of which could be disastrous for our websites.

A VA with sound understanding of SEO industry can do this work effectively. And, of course, you can verify the quality of keywords, anytime you want. So why to invest time in the work that could be delegate and output of which could easily be verified?

Domain registration

Domain name plays a pivotal role in the search engine optimization effort of your website. A domain name with high keyword density is destined to go on the top of SERP (search engine result page) for that particular keyword.

It may sounds good, but as you must have experienced it, finding a high-quality domain name is not a kid’s play. It takes a lot of time, and one has to go through bouts of frustration before one finds a good domain name because most of the good names are already taken.

You have two choices. Either you can do the domain research yourself and kill yourself of frustration and anxiety, or you can hire a virtual assistant to do this work for you. As far as quality of the domain name is concerned, you can tell it when you see it. The quality is transparent.

A VA (Virtual Assistant) will save a lot of your time, which you can invest in creating value for your customers. After all, domain name registration is not why you are in the business. It is a necessary evil, which should be tackled by a specialized virtual assistant.

On-page optimization

Charity begins at home, and so does SEO. SEO too begins at home (read on page). Though there is nothing so dramatic about on-page optimization, it is very critical to the overall ranking of your website. On-page optimization could take anything from an hour to a month or even more. How much time it will take depends upon quite many things, one of which is the number of pages in your website.

A virtual assistant with SEO experience could help you do this work as well. He will save your time, and will provide a solid ground to the search spiders to scour your web pages and index each one of them in appropriate categories for each keyword, providing them adequate place in SERP.

Competition analysis

You competitors along with your customers create the ecosystem of your industry in which your business will breathe. Analyzing competition, therefore, becomes critical for a success of any business. You not only need to focus on the kind of products, offers, discounts, message, communication channel, distribution, etc., your competitors are using to stay in the business — may be ahead of you, but you also need to analyze the competition data to understand the elements that come together to give them better ranking in the search engine.

As far as the former type of competition analysis is concerned, I will suggest you to undertake that adventure yourself because it will help you find weak spot in competitors’ forte, but for the latter type of competition analysis (website ranking one), I would recommend hiring a virtual assistant. A VA can be of great help in this, and he or she will also save your time which you can devote to dig into your competition.

Active forum participation

On the Internet, forums are living organism full of live interactions on all different topics. A forum is not only a place where people ask questions and give answers, but it is also a source of high-quality backlinks. A forum can also send traffic to your website and establish yourself as an authority in your niche. And to get all this manifold, you need to actively participate in more than one forum, which in itself could be a hell lot of work.

No matter at what stage your business is, you would be time starved, and adding this additional burden of on-going forum participation will lead to chaos (well, from the personal experience I prefer calling it catastrophe, not chaos). A virtual assistant can help you in this as well. He can wear your mask and pretend to be you in his ceaseless wandering through various forums. Just for some dollars, it will save your time and fetch all the benefits that we described above.

Participation in blogosphere

A blog is another live creature on the Internet. Quite often you will find blogs that are bustling with life (posts and comments), and it is no secret that to get a higher ranking in search engines, one need to constantly participate in blogosphere through publishing content and commenting on other’s blog posts in your niche as well as replying to the comment posted on your blog posts.

For many, blogging is a fulltime work, so you cannot expect to reap all the rewards of blogging by doing it sporadically. You will have to be regular to reap this tool’s benefit, one of which is constant free content on your domain, which search engine devours on. You need to hire, therefore, a virtual assistant with blogging experience to look after this work. It will be worth.

Submission service

People often proclaim that directories are dead, and they are of no value for today’s world. People cannot be more wrong in saying so, as directory submission play an important role in SEO. That is the reason behind proliferation of so many all sorts of directories (blog directories, RSS directories, website directories, article directories, press release directories, software directories, etc.).

Submitting each of your RSS feeds (yes there are ways to get more than one RSS feed for a blog), and blog-post URLs or blog URLS is a time consuming affair. It should be delegated to a virtual assistant, for this work does not add any value to your customer — for whom you have created your online business.

Link building

Backlinks are the currency search engines trade in on the Internet. The more backlinks you get the higher your website will rank in Google. And it is the quality of the backlinks that matter, not the quantity. Getting high-quality do-follow backlinks is not easy, as such sources are scarce. One need to spend a lot of time searching fo
r sources that could allow one to have high-quality backlinks using the anchor text of your choice. As it sounds, it takes some effort.

Instead of trying your hand at it, I would suggest hiring a VA to get this done. A virtual assistant who knows the art of effective link building can get this work done in no time. You may have to hire a VA for longer time, as link building is an ongoing exercise.

Internal link building

Links matter, period. When I said links matter I meant internal links as well. Though it may not matter as much as does external backlink, internal link gets its due weightage when search engine decides ranking of your web page. You should be generous in creating both kinds of links for your website using the keywords you want to rank for as anchor text.

A virtual assistant could be of help in this as well. He can help you profusely interlink your web pages. It will boost your search engine ranking.

Content marketing

Content marketing involves writing articles for article directories, writing press releases and submitting it PR wires, writing guest posts on blogs in your niche, creating Squidoo lenses, writing articles and posting it in forums, creating and releasing videos in YouTube and other video sharing sites, creating presentations and sharing it on websites like SlideShare, creating and distributing podcasts, etc.

As you can guess each one of the content marketing tools require a lot of time to master. Putting each one of them for maximum use could be a fulltime activity. You should, therefore, hire a virtual assistant to either do this or to monitor the team or individuals that do this for you. What you want a VA to do for you really depend on you, as a virtual assistant can do both types of work.

A parting thought

I hope I have succeeded in putting the point across. I am advocating the use of a virtual assistant for these works because your time is far more important than spending on these activities, which can be done effectively by your subordinate. You should rather focus your energy on infusing as much value in the solution you are offering as you can, for that is the reason why your customers enjoy opening their wallets for you.

They do not part with their money because you are better at doing SEO. They do so because you are better at understanding and solving their problems. Why no stick to that and leave the SEO work to a specialist virtual assistant, and it is because of your budget that I am suggesting a virtual assistant instead of a fulltime regular employee.

On the second thought, why to bother having a regular employee coming to your office every day, if you can get the same work done from a virtual assistant at more than half the cost. It makes business sense, doesn’t it?

Get a SEO Virtual Assistant

Want to hire a SEO VA, or  virtual assistants for submission work, for yourself?  Then find some great ones, at great prices over our Hire a SEO VA page or read more about SEO Services our Virtual Assistants can do for you or simply contact us with all your requirements.

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