From keyword research to understanding your competition, from producing regular ongoing content to boosting link quality, a good SEO strategy has many activities that need to be done in sync with each other. If you are a business owner looking to improve the performance of your website, then you bound to have many questions. To help you, we’ve answered 15 frequently asked questions on SEO:
- Why does my business need SEO? Yes, in today’s digital world all businesses that are online need SEO. By investing in SEO, you can increase traffic to your website and moreover, SEO is more cost-effective than paid advertising. If your website ranks organically on search engines, the cost per click would be low.
- How to find the right keywords for my website? A well-optimised website has all the keywords that its customer base are searching for. There are several tools like Google keyword planner that can help you learn about keywords that are relevant to your business. However, you must remember that keyword research is an on-going and ever-evolving process. Old keyword phrases need to be reviewed and replaced with high volume and competitive keywords.
- Why isn’t my website ranking on Google? The reasons behind your website not being ranked on Google could be: you are blocking search engines from indexing and crawling your pages, your website doesn’t have domain authority — relevant keywords and high-quality backlinks — to rank for competitive search queries, you have duplicate content on your website, or you have a Google penalty.
- What is the difference between on-page SEO and technical SEO? On-page SEO tells search engines how to match pages to relevant queries. Technical SEO involves the technical aspects of the website that make it easier to crawl and understandable for search engines.
- What is on-page and off-page SEO? On-page SEO concerns all the activities that you can do on your website such as site content, title tag and meta tag optimisation, H tag and internal linking. On the other hand, off-page SEO refers to all the activities that do not happen on your website such as link building, content marketing, social media and reviews.
- What is page speed and how does it affect my website’s ranking? Page speed is a measurement of how fast your website loads and Google recognises it as a ranking factor. Enabling compression, optimising the code, reducing redirects and improving server response time are some of the ways to improve the page speed.
- What is link-building? It is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your website — this acts as a vote of confidence or trust from one website to another. Links are one of the top 3 ranking factors of Google.
- How can I get other sites to link to my website? Infographic, white papers, how-to guides, videos and image galleries can help you earn links from websites that may find the content to be interesting or informative. Broken link building, unlinked brand mentions and digital PR are some of the link-building strategies.
- What are the basic components of a good SEO strategy? User-friendly site architecture, relevant keywords, mobile-friendly site, content marketing, and quality backlinks are some of the basic components of a good SEO strategy.
- Which SEO techniques are popular? Improving user experience across the website, upgrading existing content, finding and fixing keyword cannibalisation issues and using FAQs schema are some of the popular SEO techniques.
- What is Google penalty? Google penalises websites that violate its guidelines. There are algorithm penalties and manual penalties. Buying links, excessive reciprocal links, duplicate content, internal 404s, and overusing H1 tags can land a website with Google penalty.
- How lengthy a page content should be? There is no right answer to this. There are several content analysis tools that can help your website pages stay effective and relevant.
- How do I create SEO-friendly content? Creating SEO-friendly content requires proper planning and strategy in place rather than just stuffing keywords. Write what your users are looking for, use SEO-friendly URLs, optimise meta descriptions, optimise your content for mobile, update your content regularly and use Schema markup.
- Will HTTPS affect SEO? Yes, Google has confirmed HTTPS as a ranking signal. The search engine also indexes HTTPS pages first. HTTPS is essentially a more secure form of HTTP. HTTPS is faster than HTTP which ensure a better user experience.
- Why is mobile-first indexing important? The lack of a mobile-friendly user experience can negatively impact your website’s ranking. When determining your website’s ranking, Google prioritises mobile page load speed as a key metric. It means that the mobile version of your website becomes the starting point for what Google includes in its index. The biggest benefit of mobile-first indexing is that you will reach your audience faster.
While you are busy with the day-to-day concerns of running your business, SEO often gets ignored. As a full-service digital marketing agency, we can help you to exploit the best tools, resources and strategies to keep up with an ever-evolving landscape of SEO.
