SEO FAQ
SEO may have been around for a while, but it's still a new concept for many people starting out in digital marketing.
We have put together the most frequently asked questions about SEO.
In a practical and useful way, without so much jargon, to help answer the most common search queries.
What is SEO?
Simply put, SEO is a process that is part of a digital marketing strategy that focuses on optimizing a website to make it more visible on search engine result pages (Google search results), with the aim of driving organic traffic to the website.
Organic traffic is directed to a website from clicks on these search results.
Whereas previously the focus was mainly on getting to the top of a particular search result (by means of a keyword), even when paid results are excluded, search engines have become more varied in the type of results they offer, which has made it more difficult to get on this main page.
Why is SEO important?
Organic traffic is natural in the sense that it is earned rather than paid for, but to be successful, you still need to invest a lot of time and resources into SEO. Search engines are getting better at identifying the intent of search queries, which makes choosing the right keywords to drive traffic even more important.
Because organic traffic is not something you pay for, once an SEO strategy takes effect and visibility is increased, a website will see growth in this channel. More visibility = more traffic = more leads = more potential earnings.
But it's not just about getting ANY kind of traffic to a website. If it's not quality traffic, it's worthless.
So don't pay someone who tells you that they can bring thousands of visitors to your website overnight!
Does traffic affect classifications (rankings)?
The algorithms will determine what caused a spike in traffic before assessing whether this is a sign that your site has something that users find valuable.
Did a reputable site share a piece of content you created that resulted in increased referral traffic?
Or was it an army of bots or spammers that were paid to search for your site on Google over and over again and click on the results pages to artificially inflate traffic to your site?
Why does SEO take a while before you see its benefits?
SEO takes time because there is no longer an easy way to game the system. Search engine algorithms are becoming more advanced and place an emphasis on providing users with the highest quality and most relevant results based on their search query.
Although when SEO started, all it took was stuffing a web page with your chosen keyword and pointing as many links to it as possible to see fast results, today, things have changed drastically. Also, currently deploying tactics like this is likely to do much more harm than good in the long run.
What are the most important Google ranking factors?
People often ask themselves, ‘how can I rank better in Google?’ Or, ‘what affects SEO rankings?’
But only Google's algorithms know exactly which factors determine how well a page ranks (how visible it is and what determines its position) in search results – in fact, there are said to be over 200 ranking factors!
Because the way people search has changed, SEO has also changed. Search results are influenced by things like the user's device, location, and search history, so what one user sees ranked in the top position (the first search result), another may see in the top position. fifth position, and another may not see it on the first page of results! While rankings are a good barometer of how well a keyword is performing, it's important to keep these considerations in mind.
So with so many ranking factors, how can you prioritize what your SEO strategy should focus on? Fortunately, there are some tried and tested best practices that influence rankings.
What are the best SEO practices?
There are a few important best practices to follow in order to have a chance of ranking well for your chosen keywords.
You may have heard some people say that 'content is king' when it comes to SEO, and in some ways, they are right.
Quality content that contains your target keyword (and variations of it) and that satisfies user intent is strongly correlated with higher rankings. But content alone is not enough.
Backlinks (links pointing from third-party domains to your domain) are also an important ranking factor, but it's the quality and relevance of the link and the domain it's linking from that counts, not just the number of links. links.
What is on-page SEO?
OnPage SEO is related to any action taken on the website itself to improve its performance.
This includes:
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The use of optimized content containing target keywords (including meta, headers, images)
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Ensuring that the site is accessible (can be crawled and indexed by search engines) and that the user can easily navigate through it
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Use internal links (in menus, body text, and navigation with breadcrumbs to help the user)
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Ensuring the website loads fast
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Keep crawling errors to a minimum
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Have a site that is optimized for mobile devices
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Do not have duplicates (same content on more than one page), or sparse content (a low number of words), or ensure that those pages cannot be accessed or indexed by search engines
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Use clean, descriptive and static URLs with a structure that follows the same structure of the site.
Why are keywords important?
Without the right keywords, you will really suffer to drive traffic to a website!
However, choosing the right keywords can be difficult, especially if your business operates in a competitive niche. This is why keyword research is so important. Any SEO agency worth its salt will use multiple tools to identify target keywords, assess their competitiveness, and make suggestions on which pages they should appear on.
Not all keywords are created equal. While a high-volume generic term like 'books' might be a good keyword if you sell books, let's face it, it's going to be very difficult to rank for a keyword like that, especially when you're competing against e-commerce giants like Amazon. ‘Buy books online’ may have lower search volume, but it is far more relevant to your offering.
Now, 'buy books online' would be one of your 'money' terms (the user's search intent is to buy a book), but consider how many other searches users might do when researching what kind of book they want to buy.
This is where ‘compound’ keywords come in. Made up of several keywords, often in a phrase or question, these keywords can be useful for driving traffic to deeper pages of your website, even to an FAQ page, or a blog post. A good example of this would be ‘best selling horror books’ with all your recommended books in this genre on one landing page, or a ‘top 10 horror books’ blog post.
How can I write SEO optimized texts?
There are a few basic rules to follow when writing SEO-optimized copy, but optimization should never come at the expense of user experience.
Selling horror books? Sure, you could write a landing page that says:
If you love the horror genre, you are really going to fall in love with these horror books. You can buy horror books online today with overnight delivery at the best horror books. Horror fans will be delighted to read these horror novels. We stock a terrific selection of books from best-selling horror writers. Buy the latest horror books now!
Yes, mention what you sell, and yes, it contains variations of your keyword. But it is real garbage. Is this how you want visitors to see your brand?
Will it work for search engines? Probably, to a certain extent. But will it work better than a well-optimized and well-written text? Probably not.
Likewise, you can write a wonderfully creative landing page about horror books, but if you don't actually mention that you sell them (or worse, don't mention any keywords at all), how are they going to find you?
The rain beats on the window, and the wind howls through the trees. Draw the curtains, close the doors, turn off the lights. Now that the environment is set, are you ready to be transported to a place where your darkest fears come true? Which fear fest will you choose to get involved in tonight?
Can you see what you say?
Why is the speed of your website important?
How long can you wait for a website to load? 5 seconds? 3 seconds? Less?
When it comes to site speed expectations, did you know…?
47% of people expect your site to load in less than 2 seconds
40% will give it up completely if it takes more than 3 seconds to load
Most people have a short attention span when searching online, so it's important to quickly deliver the information they're looking for. It's not only important for users, but also for search engines, because they want to deliver high-quality search results, fast.
There is no point in ranking a website high if users are clicking on the result, waiting 5 seconds for the page to load, and when it doesn't, they click back to the results page. Low time spent on the website and high bounce rates (when a user visits a website and leaves without visiting another page) sends a signal that the user experience is poor.
Also, if the page load speed is very slow, search engines might not bother to crawl and index some pages.
According to Google:
"Google will reduce the number of crawlers it sends to your site if your server is slower than two seconds."
This means that search engines are less likely to discover your most recent landing pages, post entries, or other updates.
While reducing page load time by a few milliseconds isn't going to make much of a difference on an already fast-loading site, it's always a good thing to do what you can to get search engines to increase search activity. tracking.
Why is site structure important?
Websites should be designed in such a way that they have a clear hierarchy, both throughout the website and on individual landing pages. The most important page (usually the home page) is at the top, followed by subpages (usually category or service pages that can be navigated to from the main menu) which may have more subpages that are located more below (product pages or service subpages).
The URL for a product page on a well-structured website might look like this:
https://www.bookzaregreat.com/fiction/fantasy/hairy-plopper-does-magic-stuff/
The further away a page is in terms of clicks a user has to make to navigate to it from the main page, the weaker these pages will be in terms of authority. For this reason, important pages should be located at a higher level of the hierarchy and be easily navigable both through the menu and internal links.
By providing a clear path to navigate a website, you will please search engines and users alike.
Landing pages must also follow a structure. The header structure can be used to highlight the most important keywords on your landing page. These headers should be semantically nested (h1, h2, h3, etc.) with only one h1 on the landing page. Headers should be used for this purpose and not to style the fonts of a web page.
What is offPage SEO?
OffPage SEO focuses mainly on links.
Links are important for SEO, and probably always will be, as they act as a signal that people are finding content interesting enough to endorse it with a link.
Content expansion is also included in SEO OffPage. This means promoting your content through other channels to encourage influencers, peers, publishers, or clients to share your content, or write about your content, with a link to your site.
Not all links are created equal. And good links are not an easy thing to come by.
What is link building?
The link building, or creation of links, is the process of actively seeking opportunities in which a link to your website can be placed. This could be:
A website directory (for example, 192.com)
Local Business Directory (If you have a physical location)
An association in which you or members of your staff are members (CIMA, if you are an accountant, for example)
Companies you are associated with (as a supplier or reseller, for example)
A blog post or guest post on a site in your niche
Press coverage on an industry news site
Coverage of the research your company has done on publisher sites in your niche
Local press coverage
Forums and Q&A sites
blog comments
Link building used to be about quantity and not quality, but now it's the opposite. For link building to be done properly, it takes a lot of time and planning, and it has become a PR issue as more emphasis is now placed on creating high-quality content and sharing it with those who will find it helpful. is interesting or noteworthy enough to be linked to.
Why are backlinks important?
Backlinks, or retrolinks, effectively pass authority from one website to another.
Page rank is a long dead metric that was used to indicate how 'powerful' a page or domain was, and therefore how valuable a link would be. Since that was removed, many people now use the Domain Authority as a guide. Domain Authority is a 'search engine ranking score', which is a 'best guess' number out of 100 calculated by Moz and used to determine the quality of a website based on a large number of signals , including the number of links and the quality of the links pointing to the domain.
The BBC News website is well known. It is part of a well-known brand, uses trusted sources, is updated frequently, and has many visitors who engage and share its content on a daily basis.
With all this in mind, a backlink from the BBC News website would be considered a fantastic link. However, the chance of getting a link from the BBC News website is very small.
The good news is that it's not just about the authority of the sites that link to you. Relevance is also an incredibly important factor.
Using our totally made-up online bookstore, www.bookzaregreat.com as an example, let's imagine they create some really cool content that helps people figure out which Hairy Plopper squad they belong to. This coincides with the release of the full boxed game.
This content could be attractive to:
Media and entertainment publishers
Book Review Sites
Sites that cover fantasy fiction
Hairy Plopper Fan Sites
Blogging about books
Websites within these niches will vary in terms of authority, but they are all relevant.
These sites are more likely to cover the content that www.bookzaregreat.com has created as it will appeal to their audience, they are not interested in the fact that your site is catering the game (as are thousands of others). As your content is covered and then shared, it will start to get picked up by people you haven't even contacted generating natural links back to your website.
Although all this may seem easy, it is not. These types of links require an enormous amount of effort to acquire, which is why good backlinks are so valuable, and so important.
Will Google Ads (Pay Per Click) help my SEO?
Directly, no. Sadly, paying Google money doesn't do you any favors in terms of getting on their whitelist, or accessing any of their secrets.
However, one thing PPC can be useful for is searching for new keywords, and testing which keywords work best in terms of driving traffic and conversions. _cc781905-5cde-3194- bb3b-136bad5cf58d_
Which is better, SEO or PPC?
PPC is a great way to drive traffic to a website instantly, and it can be turned on and off. The downside is that it costs money. Sometimes a lot of money, making it difficult for small businesses to compete. That said, as long as ad spending continues to generate a return on investment (ROI), it can work well as a stopgap while you wait for long-term marketing strategies to take effect.
On the other hand, SEO takes a lot of time, but the rewards are greater the more visible a website is organically, the less they will have to spend on paid search activities.
Does social media affect SEO?
There is debate about how much social media influences search results.
But even if social media doesn't directly affect rankings, that doesn't mean they shouldn't be considered an important part of an SEO strategy.
Social media can be an effective way to promote content, engage with your audience and customers, strengthen your brand, while also providing users with more channels to find you online.
Think about social media platforms that suggest 'people you might know' or 'pages you might like'. Then think about how you could steal customers from one of your competitors by appearing as a suggested account to follow in a user's feed.
