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SEO Most Common Asked Questions After OpenAi - Bard and other AI Platforms

Before, we jump to SEO, let me ask you this 

Are you just starting in SEO?

Or are you a business owner wanting to improve your website?

If you are either of these we have put together some answers to questions you are surely asking.

Sometimes it is hard to keep track of how things work because algorithms change so quickly and even professionals have to work hard to stay up-to-date with changes.

There are some things that rarely change and we can help you understand these

 

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization or Optimisation in case you use british english.

This relates to the optimisation of your online presence to make your work more visible to search engines. It involves keywords and queries but also much more.

Keywords can help you increase the ranking of a site. They will help bring in new traffic through Google’s listings as opposed to paid ads.

We need to ensure search engines understand who you are, what you offer and can see your content easily. Also to convince them that you are trustworthy.

Google’s rank results, however, are based on the best solution for a person’s search.

Do you actually need SEO in 2023?

Yes you still do. It is an investment that needs investigation. Even with the rise of AI platforms that can assist with Search Engine Optimization, it still lacks the SEO strategy. Here is the reason why 

Search engine optimization increases your website traffic without costing you a thing.

When you tune your web content to attract the online customers that are already actively looking for your products or services etc. your website will begin to rank higher.

SEO creates an organic increase. Investment into the skills and resources is necessary of course but your are free to investigate these yourself or to hire a professional to audit your site for you.

The main goal is for your website to rank high on the search engine results page. (SERPs). A high ranking brings good traffic streams and constant visibility.

Organic searches are responsible for 59% of a total website traffic. Ignoring SEO sends your customers to the competitors that have embraced it.


What are the benefits of Search Engine Optimization?

There are several benefits of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for websites, including:

  • Increased visibility and traffic: By optimizing your website for search engines, you can increase its visibility and drive more traffic to your site. This can result in more leads, conversions, and revenue.
  • Cost-effective: SEO is a cost-effective marketing strategy compared to other forms of digital marketing like PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising. Once you have optimized your website, it can continue to attract organic traffic without the need for ongoing investment.
  • Builds trust and credibility: A website that appears at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) is seen as more trustworthy and credible by users. This can help build your brand’s reputation and make it easier for users to trust your business.
  • Better user experience: SEO involves optimizing your website’s structure, content, and navigation to make it more user-friendly. This can improve the user experience, resulting in increased time on site and lower bounce rates.
  • Competitive advantage: SEO can give your business a competitive advantage over other businesses in your industry. By appearing at the top of SERPs for relevant keywords, you can attract more traffic and customers than your competitors.

Overall, SEO is a crucial strategy for any website that wants to increase its online visibility, attract more traffic, and grow its business.

How Does SEO Work?

Google has set out over 200 or more factors that affect ranking and Google keeps adding more to the list. Search engine algorithms rank a website based on this set of criteria. Relevancy and authority of pages are just two of these.

Google wants users to receive the best possible answers for their searches. They want users to trust searches.

SEO makes sure that content is relevant for specific search enquiries.

Why Has My Organic Traffic Dropped?

You need to do a bit of research for this.

You need to establish what people are actually searching for before you can optimise your content to attract them.

There are a few ways of doing this.
Google’s Keyword Planner is one and another is the SEMrush Keyword Magic Tool.

Enter a tool or phrase that you think customers would use if they wanted the products or services you offer.

You will see a range of suggested keywords pop up.
These words inform your strategy. They help you understand what people want.

Why Isn't My Website Ranking on Google?

If your website is not ranking on google there are a number of things that might be causing this.

Head to Google and run a site:search for your website.

e.g. site:bbc.co.uk

If you see your page listed then you know that your site is indexed.

If your site is not ranking it could mean that it has not built up the authority needed for competitive enquiries.

Ranking must be deserved.

If your content is lacking in depth and quality then it will be hindered from ranking. Have a look at the pages that are ranking above yours and compare.

If your website does not show up in searches it has not been indexed. A number of factors could make this happen:

– It is a new site and you have not submitted it to Google or linked to it from anywhere else. (Set up Google Search Console and request indexing)

– It is received a penalty for violating Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. to be the case but you should be aware of these guidelines.

Why Has My Organic Traffic Dropped?

Has it dropped suddenly?

Or has it reduced gradually over a long period of time?

If suddenly:

Have a look to see if your website has had “no index” tags added

This is not likely

Sometimes after developers are moving a site or working on it they forget to remove these. These tags can remove you from the index.

Malware: The Google Search Console can also tell you if your site has been removed from the SERPs because of malware. You may not have realised this had happened. If this has happened then fix the site and request a review.

Manual actions. This is highly unlikely but worth checking through the Google Search Console. If you see that an issue has been listed then that would explain the decrease in traffic.

If traffic reduced gradually:

You may find that a new algorithm update has been issued, causing other sites to gain a high rank than you. 



Google actually says that “there is nothing wrong with pages affected by a core update. It doesn’t mean they violated guidelines. It can mean changes to their systems altered the overall assessment criteria.

It may be something simpler. For instance, your competition have launched an aggressive SEO strategy that has resulted in better results. It would be a good idea to assess your competition if this is the case and look for way you can improve yours.

The SEMrush Keyword Gap Tool and Backlink Gap Tool will be able to help you with this.

What Is A Google Penalty?

Google takes their Webmaster Guidelines seriously and technology continually makes them smarter and smarter. Things people are trying to use to trick the system may work today but be found out tomorrow. These will attract penalties.

Google gives penalties to those who violate their guidelines and there are two types of these:

Manual Actions: these are penalties given after a site assessment by an actual Google Employee has reviewed a case.

Algorithmic Adjustments: these are automated and a part of Google’s ranking algorithm. Google’s software and algorithms are able to detect and assess a number of abnormalities and manipulations. They can sift through a site. They will not inform you if you lose your position – it just happens.

Possible solution to recover your ranking

The name is E-A-T 

E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, which are important factors that Google uses to evaluate the quality of content on the web. Essentially, it means that the content should be created by someone who knows what they’re talking about, from a credible source, and the information provided should be accurate and trustworthy. By focusing on these factors, websites can improve their online reputation and search engine rankings.

How Long Does It Take To Rank on Google?

It would be unrealistic to think that you can launch a website and see a ranking within a few weeks. It takes time for a site, that operates organically, to be seen by Google.

Usually it would take between 6-12 months depending on the number of resources you use in your strategies, on the quality of your competitors’ sites and promotional strategies.

If you are a painter or lawyer in a specific location it would take less time. If your business fits into a world of competitors then you can expect it to take longer.

What Are Google's Most Important Ranking Factors?

Optimising the content of your website so that the customers that are actively looking for you can find you is key.

SEMrush is an online visibility management and content marketing platform. studied ranking factors and add the following to performance:

– Time on site
– Referring domains – Content length
– Followed backlinks

They have

You could also read Zyppy’s Google SEO Success Factors resource to better understand these ranking factors.

Should I Do SEO, Run PPC Ads, or Both?

This is a common question.

Your strategies should not be overly reliant on any one particular marketing area. Smaller businesses will especially agree with this.

A long term SEO strategy should also consider a PPC campaign.

Does Social Media Help To Increase My Website's Rank?

According to a number of sources social media does not directly contribute to ranking. It does however link you across a variety of platforms which can increase brand awareness.

Building your brand and attracting reviews is important for building relationships with customers and trust. This in turn can improve your search engine rankings.

Technical SEO Questions

Some common questions asked:

What Is The Difference Between On-Page SEO and Technical SEO?

These terms are not the same.

On-Page SEO relates to your pages content, the meta tags, the images etc. On-Page elements are visible to site visitors.

Technical SEO relates to the way Google crawls, evaluates and indexes your site. It looks at site speed, structured data and canonicalisation (preventing duplicate content etc), XML sitemaps, hreflang and more.

What PageSpeed Score Should I Aim For?

PageSpeed is Google’s measure of your website speed and they have a PageSpeed Insights Tool that you can use to assess your site and your competitors’ sites through.

Obviously you want the fastest speed possible. But realistically the time and resources you would use to achieve that may not be worthwhile.

Your site may be 85/100 and your competitors may be lower. You would need to assess whether or not you want to put a strain on your time and resources to increase speed.

How Can I Find Technical SEO Errors?

These can hold you back. Thankfully there are some great tools to help you identify any problems you may have.

The SEMrush Site Audit Tool is one. This can report on your performance, errors, warnings, crawl-ability etc

If you find errors, work through the list using the report’s guidance.

 

Content Marketing Questions

Content is very important. The days of dumping SEO content into a page are gone.

The most effective route to success is to create quality content. Here we unpack this:

How Long Should a Page of Content Be?

There is no right answer to this.

Content should be as long as it needs to be to cover a topic in depth.

Look at what is ranking.

Analyse the top pages to understand the length and intent.

Enter your page’s target keywords and Google will help you find and analyse the top ranked pages..

You shouldn’t be obsessed over content length. Focus on the creation of content that adds value is best.

How Do I Create SEO-Friendly Content?

Stuffing keywords into content does not make SEO friendly content. Keywords are important but so is the quality of the content.

Research your keywords and the phrases people are searching for. 


SEMrush have created a step by step How to Create SEO-Friendly Content guid to help you locate your keywords etc.

Does Duplicate Content Harm Your Website’s Rankings?

Duplicate content is where information is duplicated between a few websites or internal website pages. It can mean duplicate title tags, meta descriptions, heading tags etc.

Essentially you should avoid duplicating any type of content. Regardless of whether the content comes from a competitor or is your own, this is not looked on favourably. Each part of a page should be unique.

Don’t copy large chunks of other pages onto your website.

Link Building Questions

Backlinks are regularly debated. They are still an important part of SEO strategy though so we have added the following:

What Is Link Building?

This relates to getting another website to link to your website.

Links are among Google’s top ranking factors and lots of links indicate trustworthiness.

A link can be regarded as a recommendation.

Links are not all equal though and a link is not indicative of high quality either. Some appear manipulative and out of place.

When looking at link building the focus should really be on like-minded sites. Those will be seen as more trustworthy.

Should I Focus On Getting More Links?

Quality is always much more reliable than quantity. Whenever people overdo things like this it always comes across as a form of desperation.

Also examine the links your competition is using.

Is It True That I Can Buy Links?

The short answer is : Yes you can but that will most likely bring with it a swift penalty and have your site removed from website rankings.

DON’T DO IT!!

Buying and selling links violates Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

What Is Website Authority?

Used to be called Pagerank previously, now the new name is PA and DA 

Website Authority Score is a metric that measures the overall strength and credibility of a website. It is a score assigned to a website based on various factors, such as its age, content quality, backlinks, social signals, and overall popularity.

The most popular website authority scoring system is the Domain Authority (DA) score, developed by Moz. It ranges from 0 to 100, with higher scores indicating a more authoritative and credible website. The DA score is calculated using a complex algorithm that considers multiple factors, including the number and quality of inbound links, the relevance and quality of the content, the website’s age, and the social media engagement.

A high DA score can indicate that a website is likely to rank higher in search engine results, attract more organic traffic, and be seen as a more trustworthy source of information by users. However, it is important to note that the DA score is not a direct ranking factor used by search engines and is only one of many factors that can impact a website’s search engine ranking and overall online presence.

Other website authority scoring systems include Page Authority (PA), developed by Moz, and Trust Flow, developed by Majestic. These metrics use similar factors to calculate a website’s overall authority and credibility but may have different weightings or focus on different factors.

Analysing My Competitor's Link Profile

You can use the Backlink Analytics tool on the SEMrush website to do this. Run the domain of your competitor through it and you will be able to see how many backlinks they have. Also how many other domains refer to them and the topics they are under. This will also show you their authority score and hierarchy of pages.

Some of these might be interested in linking to you so it is a worthwhile exercise.

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