SEO Services

Frequently Asked Questions

• What is SEO?

  SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the act of tweaking your website and other online assets in order to have it show higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).

  When you go to Google, you want to type something in (the words you type are called keywords/keyphrases) and find what you’re looking for as the first thing that shows up. Google knows this, so they want to make sure that anything they’re showing you is as close as possible to what you’re actually looking for.

  In order to do this, Google looks at three main things; Relevance, Trustworthiness and User Experience.

  So when working on SEO for your website, these are the areas we work on, to ensure Google sees things that let them know your website is relevant, trustworthy and leaves users satisfied. We do this both on your website, and outside of it for a fully rounded strategy.

• Do you need access to my website?

  Usually, yes, that’s ideal. In order to work on your on-page SEO, we need to change wording, as well as often the formatting of your website, to make sure everything is ok technically.

  However, if you have an existing web developer, we’re happy to work with them to make the necessary changes. As you’ll see on our team page though, we have an excellent team of web developers, and we can safely implement any changes necessary for SEO ourselves, without additional hassle for you.

• Why does my business need SEO?

  Think about what you do when looking for a product or service. Unless you know someone to refer you, or already know of a company, chances are you’re going to Google.

  People are searching for your business on Google. If you don’t work on SEO, and you aren’t paying for clicks from Google AdWords, those customers will be going to your competitors.

  SEO is a long term strategy, and if you haven’t been working on it, we can guarantee your competitors have, and there’ll be some catch up to do.

  That makes yesterday the best time to start an SEO campaign. The sooner you get started, the sooner you’ll start to capture a share of those people looking for your business.

• How does SEO work?

  SEO involves working inside and outside of your website to give Google the information it needs to show your business when people search for certain keywords.

  Google wants all of these factors to occur naturally, and organically. But, the simple truth is that your competitors are actively working on improving their search engine optimization, and if you want to compete with them, you need to as well.

  Typically our SEO campaigns last for 6 months, and we continue month-to-month after that. SEO needs to be implemented over time so that Google is able to see steady growth, as opposed to smashing everything in at once.

  SEO strategies also vary for industry to industry, location to location, so spreading our work out allows us to adapt if Google isn’t responding to our changes as well as we’d like them to.

• Why isn't my website showing up on Google?

  If you go to google and type “site:yourdomainname.com“, Google will show you all of the pages it has indexed, so you can quickly check what they’re showing, and what they aren’t.

  There are many, many reasons this could be the case, and we’d be happy to help identify the reason(s) for you. However, here are some quick examples:

  • Website marked as noindex. This is one of the most common, accidental issues. Noindex exists as a way to request that Google doesn’t show your website, or certain pages on it. Often it’s used in development before a site is launched, but sometimes developers forget to check the site is indexable. If your website isn’t being shown, check this first.
  • Content not relevant to the keywords. SEO needs to be balanced with marketing and copy writing to ensure that key phrases are used on the page, without taking away from the readability of it. Commonly, we see pages with great copy launched, without any phrasing to help Google understand the relevance of the page.
  • Slow loading pages. This is rarely the sole reason a page is excluded from search results, but it can be a factor. To improve page load speeds, start with your hosting and work your way up from there.
  • Technical/security issues. If Google thinks your site has a virus, or contains false information, for example, they’ll usually exclude it from results. This is usually pretty easy to spot and fix.

• Our traffic dropped after a new site launch, what do we do?

  If you’re building a new site, and you already have Google traffic coming in, make sure your web designer takes SEO into account.

  There are some really simple things you can do to make sure your website doesn’t lose traffic after relaunching. Here are some of them:

  • Keep URLs the same. Google looks at websites overall, but also individual pages. Google indexes your content based on its URL, so ideally when rebuilding you would keep your URLs the same to make it easy for them to understand.
  • Redirect any URLs that have changed. If you do change URLs, make sure you redirect the old ones to an appropriate place on the new website.
  • Keep some of the same content. Just like the tips above, keeping the same content helps Google to understand that it’s still your website, it just has a new design. Therefore it’s still relevant and they can probably trust it.

• How long does it take to rank on Google?

  Ranking on Google can take a long time, and SEO really is a long term strategy, with some patience required, but high reward when successful.

  Typically our clients see results in the first 3 months, but it can take 6-12 months to see the improvements we’re really looking for from our SEO campaigns.

  SEO is really good if your business already does marketing, already has a customer base, but you want to invest into bringing in more targeted traffic to your website.

• What are Google's most important ranking factors?

  There are over 200 ranking factors. This is an estimate though, as Google doesn’t make it’s algorithm, or the factors in it public.

  When working on our client campaigns, we take into account the most important factors first, and then ensure that we’re checking the boxes on as many of these as possible.

  The general opinion is that these are the 3 most important ranking factors for Google:

  1. Backlinks – still arguably the most important factor in SEO. Google sees links to your website as a trust signal from the site linking to you. Basically, if a site links to your site, they’re telling Google that they trust you enough to send their visitors to you – which if you had a poor site, wouldn’t look good on them – they’re risking their reputation, and that’s why they’re so valuable.
  2. Topical relevance – how relevant are your pages to what someone is searching for? This isn’t just to do with overall topics, but also needs to match user intent. If someone searches for “search engine optimization“, Google has to try and figure out if they’re looking for articles with information, videos, services or products.
  3. Overall user experience – this can be broken down into various other factors, but in general, a positive user experience is extremely important to have.

• Should I focus on SEO, PPC or both?

  In our opinion, a solid strategy includes both organic and paid traffic from Google.

  The simple fact of the matter is that some users just want to click the first thing that seems to meet their needs, and on Google that’s usually an ad. However, many users distrust ads, and prefer to scroll and click the organic results.

  So, to have the best chance of attracting the most potential customers to your website, a prudent strategy would be to utilize both.

• What's the difference between on-page and off-page SEO?

  On-page SEO involves everything to do with your website itself. That usually relates to content, page performance, and whether the pages address the needs of the user. It also involves anything technical with the website, like ensuring it’s using an SSL certificate, and is generally secure and working well. On-page SEO is simpler, because you have full control of your own website.

  Off-page SEO is everything outside of your website. That has to do with things like backlinks, social media activity, Google My Business, local listings, mentions of your business online and so on. Off-page SEO can be harder to do right, as you’re not necessarily always in control of what happens outside of your website.

• How does page speed affect SEO?

  In 2018, Google announced that PageSpeed was now a factor for how web pages would rank. Think about it, no one wants to click a link from Google and have it taking forever to load. Google realizes this, and so in recent years it has become a much larger factor in their algorithm.

  In May 2021, the Google Page Experience update adds even more to this, as Google has now done more to help developers know where to focus on when it comes to page speed, as it affects user experience.

  This includes the metrics from Google’s Core Web Vitals, which they say includes:

  1. Loading, in this context, measures perceived load speed. That’s the point in the page load timeline when the main content is likely to have loaded.
  2. Interactivity is the time from when a user first interacts with a page – a click or a tap, for example — to the time when the browser begins processing that interaction.
  3. Visual stability has to do with preventing annoying and unexpected movement of page content.

• How much content should my website have?

  It really depends. May SEOs proclaim that “content is king” or long form content always wins.

  In general, that can be misleading. On average, content that’s longer tends to rank better, but correlation is not causation. The general sentiment in the SEO community is that long form content simply allows the author to cover the topic in more depth, and allows more room to include keywords and other relevancy signals.

  One of the things we do when evaluating your competitors, is seeing how much content they have, and using that to generally determine how much we should be aiming for to include the right signals, as stated above.

• Does duplicate content harm rankings?

  Maybe. Think about it from Google’s point of view – if they want to show results that match your intent, they may need to show a variety to ensure they’re showing at least something that matches what you’re looking for.

  Therefore, if content appears in the results more than once, why would they show more than one of those pages?

  Duplicate content doesn’t kill rankings like it used to, but it’s still something to watch out for.

  Google is smart. They know where the original source of the content is, and they know where it’s been copied to.

• What is link building? How does it help?

  Link building involves doing certain activities to encourage other websites to link to your web pages.

  Backlinks from other sites tell Google that that site is willing to send someone from their page to yours. This means that the website must trust you enough to potentially risk their reputation with that user.

  Backlinks should exist for the purpose of providing extra information. So whenever links are being built, they need to be in relevant places that make sense for the user.

  Acquiring more links to your website in general is beneficial, as if many sites trust you with their users, Google believes they may also be able to trust you with their users.

  However, be careful! Google doesn’t like you building links that don’t occur naturally, or don’t serve the user. If you screw this up, it’s quite possible you’ll be punished in the rankings.