Top 10 SEO Client Questions
- February 10, 2023
- Posted by: Advansite
- Categories: Search Engine Optimization, Top 10 SEO Questions
Top 10 SEO Client Questions
Most clients are new to SEO and have multiple questions to ask regarding this marketing practice. SEO is a crucial part of digital marketing. You need to get your business growing and that is not possible if you are not targeting the most essential location of your online audience, the search engines.
Here we have composed a list of the top 10 most frequently asked SEO client questions. We hope these answers provide some initial SEO insight into what SEO actually is, and how SEO works.
1. What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization aka SEO is an effective systematic process to improve your website rankings in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages), just like Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and other search engines to obtain more organic traffic.
Each search engine ranks and shows media including videos, images, news, blogs, etc based on what search engines consider as most relevant to the visitors search terms and search intent. Theoretically, the higher you rank on SERPs the more traffic you can drive to your website. Ultimately, this will help lead you to more leads and sales.
2. Why is SEO important?
In most cases the majority of your site traffic is driven by search engines. The difference of being ranked on page one of the search results compared to page two regarding how much traffic you obtain is drastic. It is vitally important to have an SEO optimized website in order to maximize organic search results and cover more digital real estate.
SEO is the best marketing approach to obtain a higher rank in the SERPs and to benefit from increased organic traffic. Consistent SEO implementation will pay dividends over time. With an SEO optimized website, organic traffic will begin to produce increased results.
Even though search engines are getting smarter, they still require our help. Therefore, optimizing your website will deliver vital information to the search engines so that your website and content can be indexed and appear in the search results properly.
3. How long will SEO take before seeing benefits?
If SEO is done correctly, you can sometimes see a slight improvement even immediately after you request Google to reindex or recrawl your webpage. However, keep in mind the fact that Google rankings depend on multiple factors including quantity and quality of backlinks, quality of content, website authority, freshness score, keywords competition and many more.
In most cases SEO is a process that will initially take around 4-12 months to propagate before starting to show any kind of tangible results. Continued SEO optimization is then required in order to obtain further exciting results. SEO consistency is key. Well-optimized websites get more and more traffic over time.
4. How much does SEO cost?
The cost of SEO mainly depends on who is offering SEO services and what’s included in the service. Therefore, there is a large disparity between agencies. Some SEO agencies who are offering cheap services cut corners and use improper SEO strategies that will actually result in SEO penalties which harm your websites reputation. The term ‘you get what you pay for’ rings true even with SEO.
Ethical SEO agencies prices tend to be higher, but these can benefit you through the use of correct SEO strategies, expertise and experience. Consensus average SEO projects can cost between $1,000-$5,000 monthly, based on project scope.
A one-time project can cost between $1,000-$25,000. An hourly consultants’ rates may fall between $75-$200. However, here at Advansite Web Agency we offer SEO Services simply at the monthly pricing option.
5. What is the 1/1/1 SEO rule?
This SEO rule is actually a courtesy that most SEO agencies choose to stand by. It means that an SEO agency will only actively work on SEO for one company per sector per locality at once. For example, an SEO agency will refuse to work for 2 construction companies at the same time in the same locality. This would lead to a conflict of interest as the SEO agency would be forced to compete with themselves by pitting clients against each other fighting for higher rankings on the SERPs.
However, this still means that the SEO agency can work with construction companies from other localities. Also, once the SEO contract of a construction company of a certain locality has been completed with the agency, then the SEO agency is once again open to work with a different construction company of the same locality.
Overall, the preference of our SEO agency is to develop ongoing exclusive partnerships. Our SEO agency prefers to utilize its entire SEO efforts on one business per sector per locality at a time.
6. What are the most important SEO ranking factors?
Search engines consider more than 200 factors while running algorithms to rank a website. However, some of the most important SEO ranking factors that you should consider include:
- Website security (HTTPS)
- Crawlability
- Content optimization, quality, depth and accuracy
- Mobile friendliness
- Site speed
- User experience
- Quality and quantity of backlinks
- Social signals and more.
7. Can you be penalized for bad SEO?
Bad SEO or Blackhat SEO practices such as stuffing your web pages with keywords in an unnatural abusive fashion or obtaining faulty backlinks, can get your website penalized or even banned by search engines. At present, Google is fairly quick to identify Blackhat SEO practices using algorithms to identify and detect these tactics.
So, it is always important to play by the SEO rules and avoid bad or Blackhat SEO in order to keep your website from being penalized. This is one of the many reasons you should always consider getting help solely from experienced SEO individuals or firms.
8. Can you guarantee SEO rankings?
No, this fact needs to be pointed out straight away. Ethical SEO agencies cannot guarantee something they can’t fully control. We’ve been given a list of SEO practices by the search engines that make many of the SEO rules clear and all we can do is implement what is known. But there is also SEO factors that are unknown and have not been disclosed by search engines in order to keep individuals from cheating the system.
Depending on chosen keywords there might also be an incredible amount of competition to overcome.
Generally, if the provided known SEO rules are implemented it’s more then likely there will always be improvement in your SEO results but we can never outright guarantee them. Therefore, be aware of anyone who guarantees you the best results. Due to the continuously evolving nature of search engines, there is no complete way to understand where a website will end up in the placement rankings.
Claiming guaranteed results for SEO optimization is misleading, Google themselves warn about agencies offering these kinds of guarantees.
9. Why should I continue SEO once I’ve obtained good rankings?
Achieving good search engine rankings is just half of the battle. As the search engines are changing and updating their algorithms constantly, your site rankings can fluctuate even day to day. Maintaining your present ranking position is as involved as having got there in the first place.
Continually tweaking and optimizing your website includes keeping the website fresh with quality content, continued build out of landing pages, identifying and targeting new or trending keywords in your field, short-tail and long-tail as well as continuing to improve your citation and backlink catalogue etc. Growing your website into an authoritative figure in your field sends signals to the search engines that your worthy to continue rising in the rankings.
Discontinuing your SEO implementation once you have obtained good rankings can lead you to the loss of your rankings fairly quickly. If SEO is a race then you don’t want to abruptly stop running, as competition will pass you. To ensure continued rankings, keep dedicated and consistent SEO habits.
10. How often does Google update their algorithms?
The exact answer to this question is only fully known by the techs behind the search engines. However, in 2012 Matt Cutts the head of Google Web Spam quoted that over 500+ algorithm updates were being made yearly, that’s an average of almost 1.5 changes per day.
More recently, in 2018 Google reported over 3000 changes which would average out to around 8-9 changes per day. 6 times the increase from 2012. As you can see SEO continues to evolve at an incredible and ever increasing rate.
“The only constant in the world of SEO is change.”
Final thoughts
The same way in which the search engines are evolving constantly, website owners that are invested in SEO must also keep pace and remain consistent by staying on top of these SEO changes. Use SEO strategies that are sustainable and ethical to maintain effective SEO rankings.
We hope this article has provided some general answers to a few of your initial SEO questions surrounding the practice of SEO and the implementation of practical SEO. If you are interested in our SEO services please see the quote button below.
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