SEO FAQs Round-Up: All of Your Burning Questions About SEO Answered

Knowledge is power. And this couldn’t be more true for SEO. The more you know about Search Engine Optimization – the better you’ll be able to optimize your website, which will have you ranking on the top of those search results, get you more organic traffic, and ultimately – more clients and more business!

Nonetheless, SEO can be a daunting topic to tackle, and chances are you have many burning questions weighing on your mind. With so much contradicting information on the web and Google constantly updating its algorithms – staying in the loop is more challenging than ever and will have you scratching your head. Fear not because we’re about to shed some light on the most frequently asked questions about SEO you’ve been dying to ask.

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No need to spend hours browsing the web – we listened, then did all the legwork. If you’ve got any burning SEO questions – we’ve got burning answers. Find all the right answers in one place and stay up-to-date with the latest SEO practices.

Ready? Let’s dive right in!

General Questions About SEO

SEO may have been around for a while, but it’s still a new and unexplored concept to many who are just beginning to dip their toe into digital marketing waters. The world of SEO is no one size fits all and is ever-changing, but generating as much knowledge as you can about the basics of SEO is the first step toward becoming a digital marketing wiz eventually.

So, we’ve answered some of the general FAQs about SEO to help you learn the ropes and get familiar with SEO 101’s.

Enter SEO for beginners!

What Is SEO?

If you work in digital marketing, you’re probably more or less familiar with SEO. However, hearing or seeing this acronym in the wild will have many people scratching their heads. SEO – the acronym for Search Engine Optimization – is the process of optimizing or improving your website to increase its visibility and organic visits.

Simply put, SEO is the practice of making a website rank better in search engines and thus, get found more easily and get more clicks (aka more organic traffc).

How Does SEO Work?

SEO is focused on bringing in website traffic through search result rankings organically (naturally). In other words, without paying for the traffic through ads. In its simplest terms – SEO is engaging in specific techniques to make users and search engines love your website and get rewarded for it.

SEO encompasses (but is not limited to): adding SEO titles and descriptions to your pages, adding alt text to your images, getting backlinks to your site, creating optimized blog posts, fixing intent issues, etc.

What Are SEO Ranking Factors?

There are over 200 factors that go into SEO, and Google and other major search engines are constantly making changes to their search algorithms to provide the best user experience to their end-users. You can learn more about keeping up with the Google algorithm updates here.

Some of the most important Google ranking factors include:

• Mobile Friendliness
• Website/Page Experience & Page Speed
• Domain Authority, Age, and URL
• High-quality, Optimized Content
• Link-building (Internal & External Links)
• Technical Factors (Sitemaps, Structured data markup, etc.)
• User Experience
• (Back Links & Internal Linking)
• Social Signals

What Are The Different Types of SEO?

The three main types of SEO are:

• On-page SEO – All the measures you take to make your web page rank higher on SERPs and include anything on your web pages, such as blogs, product copy, web copy
• Off-page SEO – Anything that happens away from your website and helps with your SEO strategies to improve search rankings, such as backlinks.
• Technical SEO – Anything technical undertaken to improve search rankings and help Google bots successfully crawl, interpret, and index all the pages of your site.

What Is Local SEO?

Local SEO is the practice of optimizing your website for specific areas. It helps businesses be more visible in local search results on Google, primarily those with brick-and-mortar locations. By boosting local SEO, businesses can improve organic traffic from searches performed by potential customers in nearby areas. What a great way of attracting prospective customers from your surroundings, right?

Why Is SEO Important?

In today’s digital era, everyone uses search engines. It’s estimated that Google processes approximately 63,000 search queries every second, which translates to a staggering 5.6 billion searches per day and around 2 trillion global searches per year! From checking the weather to finding restaurants near you, search engines play a crucial part in our daily lives.

It’s how prospective customers and clients are looking for you or businesses like yours, which means that SEO is not only important but crucial to survive and succeed in the online landscape. If your website is online and no one can find it, does it even exist? So, better make sure your website doesn’t go through an existential crisis by making the most out of your SEO efforts.

How Long Does It Take for SEO to Work and Show Results?

One of the most frequently asked questions about SEO is “How long does SEO take to show results?” or “How long does it take to rank on Google?” SEO isn’t an overnight strategy, unlike other popular marketing channels, and does not work instantly. The question of how long it will take to rank is difficult, as the amount of time varies for each site. However, it usually takes 6-12 months for your SEO efforts to have a noticeable impact.

However, it depends on numerous factors like your website’s history, the competition, etc. There’s no getting away from the fact that it takes time to improve your SEO and rank high. Patience is key. However, the more focus and effort you put into your SEO strategy, the sooner you’ll see the effects.

What Is the Difference Between SEO and SEM?

Both SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) involve increasing a site’s visibility on search results. The key difference is that SEM includes paid promotion tactics and SEO does not. In other words, unlike its marketing-oriented big brother, SEO won’t cost you a single penny.

What Is the Difference Between SEO and PPC?

SEO is a natural, organic, and free way to improve your rankings and overall visibility. On the other hand, PPC or pay-per-click is a digital marketing strategy that involves advertisers paying a fee each time one of their ads is clicked. Simply put, you pay for advertising if your ad is clicked on. So, the main difference between the two is that traffic from SEO is free and traffic from PPC needs to be paid for.

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Although SEO and PPC are very different approaches to digital marketing strategies, they can ultimately work together to achieve the best SEM and digital marketing results.

What Is Organic Traffic?

Organic traffic is the best source of traffic! Why? Because it’s free and yields long-term results!

Put simply, organic traffic is traffic that comes from Google and other search engines’ search engine results pages (SERPs). It’s the visitors that land on your website from unpaid sources. Organic traffic is any traffic that comes to your site from a search engine, but that isn’t paid for. Inorganic traffic is paid traffic, which drives instant results, but goes down as soon as one stops running ads.

What Are SEO Keywords?

Keywords and keyword phrases are the central elements of SEO. They are two to five-word phrases that a web user types into a search engine’s search box to find relevant content or information. Ideally, you want to target keywords with high search volume and low competition that match the search intent of your target audience.

Effective use of keywords throughout the content creation process is essential for ranking well, being discovered online, and getting targeted traffic to your website. It will also help Google’s bots understand your website better and identify you as a relevant result for a specific search query.

How Do I Rank Higher on Google?

Ah, there it is—the most common question about SEO out of all SEO FAQs. Even though Google has been such a big part of our lives for the last decade, ranking high on Google is still one of the biggest challenges and one of the most common SEO questions. Yet, it remains one of the best ways to boost traffic to your website.

There are over 200 factors that can make or break your digital presence, but all in all, to rank higher on Google, you need to stay up-to-date with SEO best practices and use them to your advantage.

What Are SEO Best Practices?

SEO best practices refer to a set of tasks designed to help improve a website’s search engine optimization and, consequently, its search engine rankings. SEO best practices should be followed by anyone trying to make it in the digital world – whether you’re running a blog, an eCommerce business, or a local brick-and-mortar store. Learn more about SEO best practices and how to use them to grow your business in our comprehensive guide.

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How Much Does SEO Cost?

On average, though, the cost of SEO in 2022 ranges from $750 to $2000 per month or $5000 to $30,000 per project for small businesses. While these numbers are general averages, the exact cost of SEO for your business needs can significantly differ.

How much SEO services costs depends on the service provider’s payment model. Other key factors that can impact how much you’ll need to invest in SEO include, but are not limited to, your specific niche/market, timeline goals, the SEO tools or resources required, and the level of competition within your industry.

If you’re looking for high-quality professional SEO services that will keep you afloat in the SERPs and the competitive digital landscape, request a free audit or get a quote to see what our SEO-savvy experts can do for you!

SEO FAQs About Technical SEO

Technical SEO is the starting point for developing your SEO strategy. Analyzing your website’s technical SEO will help you understand how well your content and keywords can be crawled, indexed, and explored by a search engine, and ultimately – ranked.

If you have all your basic questions about SEO answered, it’s time to dig deeper. Without further ado, here are the most sought answers to FAQs about the technical aspects of SEO.

What Is Technical SEO?

First things first – technical SEO refers to optimizing and improving the technical aspects of a website to increase the ranking of its pages in the search engines. Technical SEO best practices help search engine spiders crawl and index your site more effectively, thus improving your organic rankings.

What Is The Difference between On-Page and Off-Page SEO?

On-page SEO refers to all the changes you can make directly within your website or blog to rank higher on the SERP. Off-page SEO refers to actions that you can control to boost your ranking but are not on your website, such as backlink building, social media, and guest blogging.

What Is Link Building In SEO?

Link building is an SEO technique that increases your search engine ranking by acquiring hyperlinks (also known as “backlinks”) to your website from other websites. Links are one of the primary ways that search engine algorithms determine the relevance and authority of a page. Having a good number of links to a website indicates that the content is valuable and credible.

What Are Backlinks?

Backlinks, also known as “inbound links,” “incoming links,” or “one-way links,” are links that your website or blog receives from other websites. Search engines like Google use backlinks to help discover and rank relevant content, which is why they are a big part of SEO strategies.

Pages with a high number of backlinks tend to have high organic search engine rankings. There are different types of backlinks, such as Dofollow and Nofollow backlinks, but they all need to be clickable to be recognized as backlinks.

What Are Internal Links?

An internal link is any link from one page on your website to another page on your website. Internal linking for SEO is helpful because it allows users to navigate a website more easily, helps establish information hierarchy throughout the website, and helps spread link equity (ranking power) around the website.

What are Core Web Vitals?

Core Web Vitals are a set of speed metrics that are part of Google’s Page Experience signals used to measure overall user experience on a web page. Core Web Vitals metrics score how quickly content loads on a page, how quickly a browser loading a webpage can respond to a user’s input, and how unstable the content is as it loads in the browser.

The main goal of Core Web Vitals is to make sure websites are providing a great user experience and something we should always be doing as part of our SEO efforts, as the lack of it leads to bad user experience and thus bounce rates and lower rankings. Learn everything you need to know about Core Web Vitals in our comprehensive guide.

What Is E-A-T and Why Is It Important for SEO?

You might have noticed this buzzword being thrown around any SEO-related topics. E-A-T is an acronym that stands for “Expertise,” “Authoritativeness,” and “Trustworthiness”. The concept comes from Google’s Search Quality Rater guidelines, as E-A-T is one of the factors that Google uses to evaluate the overall quality of a web page.

E-A-T is important for SEO as it helps determine whether a website and its pages are credible sources of information about a specific subject that provide real value for users.

Any SEO FAQs We’ve Left Unanswered? Let Us Know!

Is there anything we’ve left unanswered? Are there any other questions about SEO you might have? If so, let us know in the comments, check out our all-in-one SEO Tutorial, and follow our blog to keep up with the latest SEO news and tips!

Our content is always served fresh, informative, and seasoned with valuable insider tips from our digital marketing veterans. Bon appétit!

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