Everything About SEO – Frequently Asked Questions

If you are new to digital marketing or planning to improve your search engine rankings, you may be having many questions. I have collaborated some of the most common questions asked and categorized them to cover the entire SEO section (or at least have tried to). So, without any further ado, let’s start finding answers to the SEO FAQs.

General Basic SEO Questions

1. What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a process to increase the website’s visibility on the search engine results. In short, SEO helps with the better ranking of a website on SERPs. When you rank higher on a search engine, you receive more organic traffic to your website. As a result, you get more conversions and ROI.

2. Why is SEO Important?

SEO brings in the natural traffic to your website, which means it is earned and not paid for. As the visibility on the search engine is not paid for, when SEO strategy takes effect, you will find more traffic to your website.

Moreover, the search engine has become smarter these days to show only the relevant results. This means the traffic that comes to your website is a good quality one. And as you know,

More Traffic = More Potential Customers = More Revenue

3. How does SEO Work?

Google uses more than 200 factors to rank a website for every search term or keyword. But you can majorly divide them according to the relevance, distance, and prominence of a brand.

This means, to succeed at achieving a better ranking in the search engine results:

• You need to be relevant to the search query.
• You should be trustworthy and prominent in the industry.
• You get a boost if you are near the location of the search query.

4. Do I Need SEO?

That depends on the answer to ‘Are you interested in getting online traffic for your brand?’. SEO is important for any business interested in digital marketing as it gives you organic traffic without paying for each click. The traffic that you get through organic results is generally of high-quality that is more likely to convert.

Moreover, do not forget the stats that states that nearly 53% of site traffic comes from organic results . So, if you aren’t investing in SEO and ranking high on the SERPs, you are simply helping your competitors receive more business.

5. How Long does it take to Rank Higher on SERPs with SEO?

If you are looking for a quick result, SEO is definitely not the one. It is a long-time investment that works its magic slowly. SEO will be one of your biggest traffic channels if you invest properly and gives it enough time to establish.

SEO is an on-going process that requires planning, implementing, monitoring, and readjusting your strategies depending on the results. So, if someone is promising you overnight results, do not fall into the trap.

6. How to Find Target Keywords?

Knowing what people are searching for on the web is a part of SEO strategy. Having this information will help you with targeting keywords in the right places and help with better search engine results.

You can use keyword SEO tools for finding the keywords related to your industry. Some of the tools you can use are:

• Google’s Keyword Planner 
• Keyword Explorer  
• Google Trends  
• Keyworddit 

7. Why isn’t My Website on the Search Engine Rankings?

There are quite a few reasons for a website not being on Google. But before I get into the reasons, run a simple search on Google with the search query “site:yourwebsite”.

If you find pages of your website listed, it means your website is indexed. So, the reasons for not found on Google can be:

• A new website without much authority to rank for search queries.
• The content of your website doesn’t match the search query.

If you do not find your website, it means the website isn’t indexed. So, the reasons could be:

• The website blocking search engine crawlers.
• New website and haven’t submitted the site yet.
• The website has been penalised for violating Google’s Webmaster guidelines.

8. What is a Google Penalty?

Your website may receive a penalty if you violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. The two basic types of penalties are:

• Manual action – A person working for Google is reviewing your website and penalising it for the actions.
• Algorithm – The automatic algorithms detect manipulation in the website and can lose its search engine position.

9.  Does Social Media Help with SEO Ranking?

There is still a debate if social media helps with rankings. But there definitely is an indirect effect of social media on your rankings. You promote, engage, and spread awareness about your brand via social media channels. This can build you a trust score and brand value with time helping you with prominence in the industry.

10. What are the Four Pillars of SEO?

SEO is a complicated and vast subject to understand. But if you divide it into categories, you will find 4 major pillars of SEO.

• On-page SEO
• Off-page SEO
• Technical SEO
• Content

On-Page SEO Questions

1. What is On-page SEO?

Also generally known as an on-site SEO is a process of optimising your webpage to rank better on the search engine result pages. Some of the most important on-page practices include

• Webpage content
• Title tag
• Meta description
• Internal links
• Image optimisation
• Many more

In short, on-page SEO is all the tricks and techniques you use on your webpage to rank higher in the search engine.

2. Why is On-page SEO Important?

According to Google, the most basic signal it considers while checking if the website is relevant is the existence of the same keyword on the webpage. It has more importance when the keyword is present in title tags, heading, or page content.

3. Why are Keywords Important?

Keywords are important as it will drive valuable traffic to your website. And this is why choosing the right keywords is extremely necessary, and their placement in the webpage copy.

For example, if you are a bookstore owner, it would make sense to use ‘books’ in your copy. But that will hardly bring you any traffic especially with industry leaders like Amazon and Crossword in the market. So, ‘buy books online’ would fit you better. But even this keyword has marketing terms in the phrase. At such times, using long-tail keywords can help you like ‘best selling mystery books in 2020’. 

3. What is Optimising a Webpage?

Optimising your webpage for search engines means to help it with on-page strategies to rank better on the SERPs. Some of the most popular and important strategies are:

• Targeted keywords
• H1, H2 tags
• Internal and external links
• Keyword in link URL
• Title tags
• Meta descriptions

4. Why Use the Alt Tag on the Page?

Using the alt tag is ideally optimising all the images on your web copy. Google cannot see the images, and therefore, it helps the search engine understand what the images are showing.

Another reason is optimising images gives the search engine a clue regarding what the page is about helping you with the ranks. It also helps your users know about the image in case if their internet connection is too weak to download the pictures.

Off-Page SEO Questions

1. What is the Off-page SEO?

Also known as off-site SEO includes all the efforts and techniques used outside the website to rank better on the search engine. Some of the major role-players in off-page SEO strategies are:

• Attracting outside links
• Social media shares
• Web mentions

2. Why is Off-page SEO Important?

It is important as this is how Google understands if your website is valuable to others on the internet. Any external link you receive or mentions on the social media platform tells about your authority in the industry and trustworthiness.

Off-page SEO plays a major role in the prominence factor while displaying results on the search engine page.

3. What is Link Building?

It is a process of attracting outside links and getting out websites to link to your webpage. Backlinks are an important aspect of SEO as it acts as a vote of trust towards your website. It builds authority in the industry and acts as a ranking factor in Google’s algorithm.

You can get three types of links:

• Natural links: That comes naturally to you without you reaching out to them like when someone uses your brand as an example.
• Built links: That comes after you reach other websites like publishers, webmasters, journalists, etc.
• Created links: That comes from submissions on forums, press releases, directories, etc.

4. How do I Get Backlinks to My Website?

There are several ways to get a website link to yours. Some of the most common and useful ways are:

• Supplier links
• Broken link building
• Digital press releases
• Newsjacking
• Resource link building

5. What is PageRank?

It is a system to rank pages in Google. In short, it is a measure to know the importance of a webpage as per the quality and quantity of links pointing towards that page. So, if you have better authority links pointing to your page, the PageRank score will automatically increase.

Technical SEO Questions

1. What is a Technical Audit?

A technical audit is a process that identifies all the issues with your technical SEO from the search engine’s perspective. The audit will also help you with suggestions and recommendations to rectify the issues and improve your SERPs ranking.

2. Why is Site Speed Important?

Site speed or page speed is one of the important ranking factors for search engines. So, you should always aim for the highest page speed that you can achieve. You can check yours as well as your competitors’ page speed on Google’s PageSpeed SEO tool .

3. How is Site Structure Important?

Websites are designed in a way to offer hierarchy to the content as well as better navigation and user experience. When you talk about URLs, the hierarchy follows with the most important page followed by subpages and so on.

For example, a product URL for a company would be https://www.maindomain.com/category/subcategory/product/

4. What is the Crawling of the Website?

A web spider, also known as a web crawler or web bot, is a program that browses all the websites available on the internet in a methodical, automated way. It helps Google in keeping up-to-date information about all the websites available. This helps Google in showing relevant and better search results. Make sure that you do not have any website crawler blocks and Google has indexed all the pages of your site.

5. How to Find Technical Errors in SEO?

You can find technical SEO errors during a technical audit. You can also use other SEO tools like Site Audit tool  to identify any problems and opportunities. The audit report will include data regarding:

• HTTPS
• Crawlability
• Site performance
• And many more

Content Marketing Questions

1. How to Write SEO Friendly Webpage Copy?

The first step to write SEO-friendly content is by avoiding keyword stuffing in the copy. Start with keyword research to know exactly what people are searching for. Then determine the intent of your potential customer and write according to their need. Finally, get your on-page SEO right.

2. How Long the Page Content Should Be?

There is no ideal length of the content piece as a benchmark. You should write as long as it covers the topic in-depth and does not stench things out unnecessarily. For a reference of length, you can check the top 10 ranking pages and get an idea about it.

3. What is Organic Content?

There are two basic types of content:

• Content that puts readers into a sales funnel
• Broad content mere for information

Now, content like product pages, white papers, and long-form content normally is created with the motive of directing them towards sales. The other form can be considered as blogging helps with providing information to visitors and letting search engines give you a better ranking in search results.

4. Why do You Need to Educate the Customers?

The main reason behind blogging and informational pieces is to build a relationship between your visitors. The industry is oversaturated with businesses selling the same product and service. Therefore, you need to build a relationship with your customer, and educating through blogging is the best way to do that.

5. How does Content Marketing drive ROI?

Content helps in building a relationship with visitors and potential customers. It slowly builds a strong case of why you should buy rather than directly attacking their customers with marketing gimmicks. This way, in long run, it brings in ROI higher than any other marketing methods.

Conclusion:

Although I haven’t covered each and every part of SEO (as it is practically impossible in just one blog) but I have tried to cover the major doubts people have regarding SEO. If there’s something I have missed out, do not hesitate to mention it below, and I will be happy to answer them for you.