SEO is the essential need of online businesses to earn organic traffic and have sustainable results. That’s the reason more and more business owners are heading towards SEO and digital marketing to nurture their business growth digitally.
However, most business owners don’t have significant knowledge about search engine optimization, and the internet is full of contradictory information. Sometimes, illegitimate agencies and people mislead the business owners, and they end up having nothing.
You must also have many questions regarding your business SEO. After collecting the common questions of business owners about SEO, presenting the answers. All these answers will not only satisfy your curiosity but give you a clear picture of SEO and how things work.
You must receive many emails daily regarding SEO services, saying they will move their magic wand and boom, top rankings. They don’t talk about SEO and their process; they only try to lure with absurd statements. SEO is no magic, and it takes a lot of effort.
Search engines show the best websites on the first page, having utmost relevance and authority. SEO is the process of attaining the best relevance and authority for your target keywords to get the top rankings. The optimization follows the search engine guidelines to improve and promote your website.
When you follow all the guidelines and continuously optimize your website, you’ll have top-ranking or maximum user exposure.
2. What is On-page SEO?
The on-page SEO focuses on your website, and all the optimizations go on your business webpages. On-page SEO improves your webpage experience, website navigation, page hierarchy, keyword optimization, content optimization, etc.
The on-page makes sure that both users and search engines can access your web pages seamlessly. Your optimized web pages encourage users to engage and convert. On the other hand, search scans your landing pages to rank you in the search results. So, it’s crucial to have the best landing pages for your website, and on-page SEO helps you with it.
3. What is Off-page SEO?
Where on-page works on your online representation, off-page focus on brand awareness and popularity. Off-page SEO helps you spread the word about your brand and expertise to drive traffic to your website and build authority.
Off-page SEO includes backlink generation, social media promotions, content promotions, directory listings, citations, etc.
Off-page SEO drives referral traffic from websites and other mediums and improves your brand authority.
4. Does My Business Need SEO?
When you search anything online, you see two types of search results. Few are marked as “Ad”; these are inorganic results you have to pay for these. The rest are the organic results, and you don’t have to pay for these. Google has some ranking factors, and when you meet all the standards according to these factors, you get the position on the first page.
The first page of the search result pages has the most traffic, and specifically, organic results on the first page attract the most traffic.
The below images shows the Click-Through-Rate of all 10 organic results on the first page. Even paid results don’t get clicks as much as organic results do.
So, if you want organic traffic on your website, then you must invest in SEO. SEO will help you gain more business opportunities and have steep growth.
5. How SEO Works?
Search engine optimization (SEO) obeys the webmaster guidelines and optimizes your website accordingly to fetch the quality and quantity traffic to your website. Google has some parameters called ranking factors to scale your quality and rank you in the search results. When you implement best SEO practices, you become worthy of getting the top positions in the search results.
Google wants you to serve the searchers best, and SEO helps you do so while considering the search engines.
SEO works on your website, content, authority, popularity, user-friendliness, relevance, etc., through various techniques to get you to the first page of the SERP (Search Engine Result Pages).
This is the standard process; if we talk about the strategies, it varies from business to business.
If someone tells you that they have some secret strategy or have some relationship with search engines, they are simply lying. No person intervenes in the search results, and various algorithms are responsible for that. So, everyone has to follow the standard process regardless of their identity.
6. What are My Business Keywords?
This one is the most common question. The problem is, when you search for keywords, then you see tons of content packed with jargon, which somewhere makes the whole concept of the keyword complex to understand.
Keywords are the terms or phrases people search to find anything they want. For example, when you want black shoes, and you type black shoes in the browser’s search bar and go. In this case, “blacks shoes” is the keyword.
So, you can easily find out what people would use to find businesses like yours. However, there are numerous variations people use, and there are tools to find all those possible keywords like Keyword Planner, keyword.io, Ahrefs, SEMrush, etc.
7. Why Isn’t My Website Ranking on Top?
There are many reasons that are limiting your ranking.
Crawling and Indexing Error: Search engines have algorithms that surf the web and store the websites in their data centers to show the users. Surfing is called crawling and saving your website in the data center in indexing. So, it might be possible crawlers can’t access your website, and without crawling, there is no indexing. Hence, your website won’t appear in the search results. The main reason behind this is the crawler directives (Robots.txt) that tell the crawlers not to crawl and index your confidential information on websites. So, it might be possible that you might have blocked your whole site from crawling and indexing. So, reach your technical team and check for it.
No Authority: When you have a new website, it doesn’t have any authority, which keeps you from top ranking. Moreover, if you have a website for a long time, then you still won’t get any authority till you work on it. You have to do SEO for your website to increase your authority and get the top rankings.
Not Fulfilling User Intent: Google analyzes user behavior on your site, and if people are not staying on your site, which means you aren’t reliable. Therefore, Google decreases your rankings, and you rank on some page of SERP where no searcher ever visits. So, make sure you bestow the best content than who is already ranking for your target keywords.
Indexing Pending: The Internet has tons of websites, and it takes little time to crawl your newly launched website. So, you need to be patient till your website gets crawled and indexed. However, you can request the crawling of your site with the Google Search Console tool. It is a free tool and has the functionality to request crawling.
Search Engine Penalty: Sometimes, search engines impose a sitewide penalty on the websites that violate the guidelines. So, if you get penalized, then you might suffer getting the top rankings. However, you can follow best practices to optimize your website and regain the authority to secure the top rankings.
8. What are the Reasons Behind My Dropped Organic Traffic?
Noindex: It’s possible that your developers might have added your site in the robots.txt file, directing crawlers not to index your website. If it happens, your site won’t appear in the search results, and your organic traffic will drop to zero.
Site Hacked: Search engines are concerned about users’ security, and if your site has some malware or hacked, then you’ll lose your rankings, resulting in a traffic drop.
Manual Penalty: Sometimes, Google imposes site wide penalty on some websites violating the search engine guidelines. So, if you are doing so, then you might have received a penalty, diminishing your site traffic.
Algorithm Update: Search engines keep updating their algorithms to refine the search results for searchers and limit the mischievous optimization activities. When search engines roll out the algorithm update, rankings of many businesses go down. You should optimize your site according to the update to restore your raking.
Competitor’s SEO: Your competitors are surely working on their business SEO, and their strategy might be working better than yours, pushing you down in the search results. You should refine your SEO strategy and work continuously to outrank your competitors.
9. What are the Ranking Factors?
Ranking factors are the parameters that search engines use to analyze your website and decide the rankings. The prominent ranking factors are Landing Page Experience, Content Quality, Relevance, Backlink Profile, User Engagement, Mobile Compatibility, etc. Google has more than 200 ranking factors to scale a website and rank it in the search results.
One has to optimize their website according to these ranking factors and search engine guidelines to get the top ranking in search results and drive significant traffic.
10. Does Social Media Contribute to the Search Engine Rankings?
It is the most asked SEO question by business owners because when they seek SEO services, everyone recommends them social media marketing.
If we see it literally, then there is no direct influence of social media platforms on the rankings.
However, you get some value in the indirect means. Like social media helps you drive traffic to your website, which is a positive signal and aids your rankings.
Moreover, social media helps you earn topical authority about your niche, which increases your authority for your niche keywords and increases the rankings.
People spend ample time on social media, and you must consider social media marketing for your business.
11. What Should I Do SEO or PPC?
SEO: SEO promotes organic traffic, which is sustainable and free. However, SEO takes time to deliver reliable results. You must do it to gain fruitful results in the long run.
PPC: Paid advertising delivers quick results, but you have to pay for those. You get the results as long as you’re spending. You can consider this to fetch some results till SEO is not delivering you profitable results.
You can choose the one according to your requirement and budget. Moreover, you may employ the integrated SEO and PPC strategy to overcome each other’s limitations and drive efficient business results.
12. How Long Does SEO Need to Deliver the Results?
You have heard this many times that SEO needs ample time to show you tangible results. The time for SEO success varies from business to business depending on some factors like competition, website history, SEO work, etc.
If we consider the general case, it usually takes 6-12 months to get the SEO results. So, be patient and work on your business because you’ll get amazing returns when you start receiving organic traffic.
13. What is A Google Penalty?
You receive any penalty when you have done something against the law. When it comes to Google penalty, then you get it when you outlaw the search engine guidelines or work on the black hat SEO techniques.
Depending on the situation, you might get a manual penalty, permanent de-indexing, permanent ban, etc. So, stay legit to avoid the penalties and grow your business online. Moreover, you should know the search engine guidelines to track whether your SEO service agency is not doing any illegitimate optimization on your website and risking your business.
Technical SEO Questions
Technical SEO is a vital part of SEO, as it works on the technical aspects of your website, which has significant value for getting you higher rankings. Some of the ranking factors analyze the technical part of your website while ranking you in the SERP. So, it’s become crucial to work on the technical SEO of your website.
14. What is the Difference between On-page and Technical SEO?
As both these techniques work on your website, sometimes people get confused with each other. However, on-page SEO and technical SEO have a different scope of focus.
On-page SEO
Website Content
Navigation
Meta Title and Description
Keyword Optimization
Hierarchy (Heading Tags)
Image Optimization
Interlinking
Technical SEO
Site Loading Speed
Schema Markup
Robots.txt
XML Sitemaps
Canonicalization
Hreflang
Mobile Responsiveness
15. What are Crawling and Indexing?
Crawling: Search engines have programs or algorithms that browse the web and read the information available online. These algorithms are called crawlers or spiders. When you make your website live, crawlers find your website and read it for indexing. Moreover, spiders keep crawling your website regularly to index the information you updated on your website. There are different names for the crawlers of different search engines like Googlebot of Google, Bingbot of Bing, Slurp Bot of Yahoo, DuckDuckbot of DuckDuckGo, etc.
Indexing: When crawlers crawl or read your website, they save this information in the data center of search engines named index. The process of saving the information in the index is indexing. When people search for a query, search engines show the relevant results from the index. Searchers only see the saved version of your website from the index. Hence, when you update something on your website, it doesn’t reflect immediately in the search results. First, search engines crawl and index your updates, and then only searchers can see the updated information.
Hence, crawling and indexing are the crucial part of SEO to make you appear in the search results.
16. Why are Page Loading Speed and Mobile-Friendliness Important?
These are the prominent ranking factors that improve the user experience and rankings consequently. When you have a quick loading site, it’ll give the users fast access and hold them to your site. Otherwise, they will return to the search results and visit one of your competitors. Hence, you should work on your site loading speed on both desktop and mobile to be available to your prospects in no time. You can use the PageSpeed tool to measure the speed of your site on desktop and mobile.
Next, mobile-friendliness is highly important for both sales and rankings. People use mobiles most of the time, and if your site doesn’t work well on mobiles, you are losing all the business. Furthermore, mobile-friendliness is a ranking factor, and you lose rankings if your site isn’t mobile compatible. You may use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool to know the performance of your website on mobiles.
These two things are the crucial part of technical SEO, and you must have an eye on these.
17. How Can I Find Technical SEO Errors?
Technical SEO errors limit your website’s performance in the search results. Hence, you should know and optimize the errors to ensure the best performance of your website. There are various online tools that can help you with the technical SEO audit like Ahrefs, SEMrush, SEOptimer, etc.
When you know your website’s errors, you’ll be able to track whether your SEO agency is working on those or just manipulating you.
Content Marketing Questions
Content is the fuel of SEO, and your business SEO will have the significant content generation to fetch the desired results. However, some agencies curate lousy content for businesses that affect their online results. Here are some questions that will help you understand how content marketing works.
18. How Long Content Should Be?
There is no fixed length for the content. The thumb rule is to serve the content that is better than the other information available on the internet. You should focus on the quality content and fulfilling the intent of the searchers.
When your content aligns with the user intent, you’ll have significant engagement and, of course, conversions, depending on the objective of the content.
So, there is no golden number, only prioritize the quality and curate the best content possible for your prospects.
19. What is SEO-friendly Content?
Many people think that SEO works on the gaps of search engine guidelines to earn rankings. However, search engine optimization focuses on giving what the search engine wants, i.e., the best user experience. SEO makes your website best for the users, and in return, you get the top rankings.
SEO-friendly content that meets the requirements of the users and follows the legit content guidelines.
So, always understand the user persona and follow the below tips to create SEO-friendly content.
20. What are the Bad Content Practices that Can Affect My Online Business?
Content has myriad value in SEO, and bad practices can harm your online results. So, it’s necessary to know about these nefarious activities so that you can restrict those on time.
Duplicate Content
Content Spinning
Content Rephrasing
Thin Content
Keyword Stuffed Content
Unnatural Interlinking
Hidden Texts
Clickbait Titles
Google has algorithms like Panda and EAT to scale your content’s quality and decide your rankings accordingly.
21. How Content Contributes to SEO?
There are various ways in which content benefits the SEO of your website, and that’s why content holds the central part of many businesses’ content strategy.
Initially, quality content increases your topical authority for your business keywords, which helps you rank on the relevant keywords. Moreover, when you create rich content, people share it with your link, driving traffic to your website.
Content also engages your prospects and nurtures their buyer persona to become customers. Content is the host of your online shop, which escorts your potential customers and encourages them to convert.
Often, your site’s detailed content works as customer support and provides the answers to common queries about your products or services.
Hence, content is beneficial for SEO. However, every business has unique requirements, and you may ask your SEO person the objective of their content strategy. If you find them beneficial for you, then you can invest in content marketing.
Link Building Questions
22. What are Backlinks and Their Importance?
Backlinks are links from other websites to your website. Backlinks have a huge significance in SEO. Backlinks help you get additional traffic from the sites that mentioned your link. Moreover, search engines see that backlink as a vote for your authority and improve your rankings.
Hence, it’s crucial to have a strong backlink profile to drive more traffic and rankings.
23. Is More the Backlinks the Better?
No! You should focus on the quality backlinks instead of the number of links. Search engines want you to have backlinks from high-authority sites.
Links from high authority sites pass more value to your authority than the multiple backlinks from low authority sites. It’s like the recommendation of the president holds more value than some mayors.
So, focus on quality over quantity.
24. How to Find Authority of a Site?
As mentioned above, you should focus on backlinks from high-authority websites. But, there are innumerable websites online, and how do you know about their authority? There is a metric called “Domain Authority” or “Domain Rating” that shows the authority of a website. You can use the Moz and Ahrefs tool to measure the DA or DR of any website, including yours.
Links from high DA websites increase your DA and help you achieve better rankings. However, there is a thing that you should know. A backlink only passes the value to your website as long as the link is marked as “do-follow.”
Dofollow means crawlers can visit this site and pass the link value to your website domain. If your link is marked as “nofollow,” then you’ll not get any link value as crawlers skip that link from crawling. However, users can still click and visit your nofollow link. Hence, you don’t get the link value, but traffic is always yours.
You can inspect your backlink in the HTML or install a browser extension like MozBar to check whether a link is dofollow or nofollow.
Alongside the high DA, consider the relevance. A backlink from a high DA irrelevant site won’t make any sense.
So, check your backlinks’ quality and ask your agency to work on high authority links if they are not.
25. What are the Right Link Building Techniques?
Google permits legit link-building techniques to promote your business and earn authority. Sometimes, people consider the prohibited link-building techniques to generate links, which is inappropriate, and you might receive a penalty from search engines. So, it’s crucial you are considering a white hat or legit link-building techniques. Here are some techniques you may consider.
Broken Link Building
Skyscraper Content
Resource Page Link Building
Link Reclamation
Content Repurposing
Unlinked Mentions
Guest Blogging
Newsjacking
26. What are Black Hat Link Building Techniques?
Black hat link-building techniques get you links but are prohibited by search engines. These bad link-building techniques violate the search engine guidelines and try to manipulate the search engine results. Google has advanced algorithms to detect such activities and penalize the websites accordingly. Hence, you and your SEO guy mustn’t be doing any of these because it risks your business website.
Here are black hat link-building techniques that you must avoid.
Forum Profile and Signature Links
Paid Links
Link Farms
PBN Links
Blog Comments
Social Bookmarks
Article Directory Links
Links from Irrelevant Sites
These are the most asked SEO questions by business owners. I hope you get the answers to all the queries that were making SEO confusing and uncertain for you. You must have a clear picture now and can better execute or supervise your business SEO. Moreover, you may hire a legit SEO agency to execute your business SEO in the right manner and deliver reliable results.
Read Also : How to develop an E-commerce website for growing your business 2021 and beyond?
