Slide 04 of 39
What Strategies Does an SEO Company Use to Improve Search Rankings?
An SEO company works four categories at once: technical fixes that let Google crawl and index the site, content matched to what people search for, authority from links and mentions on other sites, and on-page signals such as titles and headings. Your site’s audit sets the order. Whichever category is holding the site back gets the first share of the budget.
The Default Order, and What Changes It
Before an audit, the starting order is:
- Technical foundation: crawling, indexing, rendering and page experience.
- Content matched to search intent: pages built against a documented keyword and intent map.
- Authority: links and mentions earned through the channel that fits the business.
- On-page signals: titles, meta descriptions, headings, internal links and structured data.
Measurement runs underneath all four and decides where the next round of effort goes. Your audit then reorders the list. These are the signals that move a category to the front:
| Signal in the audit | What goes first |
|---|---|
| A manual action in Search Console | Resolving the manual action |
| Important pages not indexed, blocked or failing to render | Technical fixes |
| Pages indexed, but none targets your main queries | Content |
| Content matches the query, but competitors have far more referring domains | Authority |
| Page-one rankings with a low click-through rate | Titles and descriptions |
A site with sound technical health and a thin content library moves straight to content. A site with strong content and almost no links from other sites puts more of its early budget into authority. To turn that order into a phased plan with milestones, follow how an SEO company builds an SEO roadmap for a client.
Technical Fixes Come First When They Block Indexing
A page that is not indexed does not appear in Google’s results, so new content on it earns nothing until the blocker is fixed. The audit looks for pages Google cannot reach or chooses not to index, broken canonical tags, crawl traps and pages that fail to render, plus page experience problems such as slow loading. What you should receive is a prioritized list that separates blockers from minor cleanup. For the crawl and indexing work, read how an SEO company improves crawlability and indexing; for speed and usability, how an SEO company improves user experience for SEO.
Content Built From a Keyword and Intent Map
Once Google can index the site, content is the next lever for capturing search demand. The strategic decisions are which intents to target first, how related pages should support each other instead of competing for the same query, and which topics your business has the expertise to cover in depth. Each target keyword should also be checked for AI Overview exposure before it enters the plan, for the reasons in the AI Overviews section below. How a page is written and structured to match intent is explained in how an SEO company optimizes content for search engines.
Authority From Links and Mentions
Links from relevant, trusted sites and mentions of your brand elsewhere on the web are the external validation the other categories cannot supply. The strategic choice is the channel: digital PR for a business with a news hook, outreach and contributed articles for a B2B service firm, local citations and community links for a business that competes on geography. Compare the tactics, and the link schemes to avoid, in what link building strategies an SEO company uses.
On-Page Signals: Early Basics, Later Refinement
Titles, meta descriptions, headings, internal links and structured data tell Google what a page is about and how it can be displayed. Basic fixes (a missing title, a duplicate description, a page with no internal links) are quick, so they can run early, alongside technical work. Heavier re-optimization should wait until a page’s content and target query are right, because polishing the signals on a page that answers the wrong question does not fix it.
Structured data should target rich results Google still shows. Google’s Search Central changelog records that the FAQ rich result stopped appearing in Google Search on May 7, 2026, so a plan that still promises FAQ snippets is out of date. Title, heading and schema work gets its own walkthrough in how an SEO company improves a website’s on-page SEO.
How AI Overviews Change Keyword Choice
AI Overviews affect the content step, because they change how many clicks a ranking can deliver. The figures below are dated, and they move:
- How often they appear. Conductor’s analysis of about 21.9 million U.S. Google searches between September 15 and October 12, 2025 found an AI Overview on 25.11% of them. Semrush’s tracking of more than 10 million keywords found the rate peaked at 24.61% in July 2025 and fell to 15.69% in November 2025. A newer measurement is far higher: First Page Sage’s 2026 CTR report (last updated September 22, 2026), built from its own client data and a weekly results crawl, puts an AI answer (an AI Overview or an AI Mode response) on 81.6% of U.S. queries, up from 23.4% in September 2025. The studies differ in method and date, so check your own target queries.
- Which queries trigger them. In the same Semrush study, 91.3% of keywords that triggered an AI Overview in January 2025 were informational; by October 2025 that share was 57.1%, with commercial keywords at 18.57%, transactional at 13.94% and navigational at 10.33%.
- What happens to clicks. Pew Research Center’s analysis of 68,879 Google searches by a panel of 900 U.S. adults in March 2025, 12,593 of which produced an AI summary, found users clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits with a summary against 15% without one, and ended their browsing session on 26% of pages with a summary against 16% without.
- Searches with no click at all. SparkToro’s analysis of Similarweb clickstream data found 68.01% of U.S. Google searches ended without a click in January to April 2026. SparkToro compares this with 60.45% in 2024, while noting that the 2024 figure came from a different panel (Datos), so the comparison is “a bit of apples and oranges” with different users and devices behind each number.
Shifting toward commercial and comparison queries because AI Overviews skip them rests on a gap that Semrush’s intent data shows narrowing. Check AI Overview presence for your own target keywords before re-weighting toward any group, and judge the opportunity on the clicks a ranking can still earn as well as on its position.
Measurement Decides the Next Round
Rankings, traffic and leads are tracked against the original plan to see which category is producing results and which needs more or less effort. Algorithm updates, competitor activity and changes in the results page shift that balance, so the mix is reviewed on a schedule written into the plan. Visibility inside Google’s AI features now has its own measure: Search Console’s Generative AI performance report counts impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode by page. Google’s AI features documentation says “There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode,” so the report measures the same four categories of work from another angle rather than calling for a fifth. Define what success means for your campaign, and how to read it, with how an SEO company measures campaign success.
How to Test an Agency’s Strategy
Ask three questions of any proposal: which category the audit found most constraining on your site, what evidence shows it, and what the agency will deliberately leave unfunded in the first quarter because of that finding. If the proposal spreads effort evenly across every category from month one, the prioritization has not been done.