What Are the Top 15 SEO Questions?

When learning search engine optimization (SEO), many questions arise to better understand all the ins and outs of it.

At times, it’s a complicated, frequently changing discipline, so it helps to get the basics down first.

Here are the top 15 SEO questions and some clarity with the answers to them. 

What Does SEO Refer To?

SEO is the art of optimizing a website for search engines. This is done in various ways to gradually improve ranking over time and includes technical SEO, on-page and off-page SEO, etc.

One agency that does this is linked here: https://vududigital.co.uk/seo-belfast-northern-ireland.

What are On-page and Off-page SEO?

On-page SEO ensures the website is well represented so that search engines can readily understand it.

This means the site structure makes logical sense, and the site can be successfully crawled by the search engine web spiders. 

Off-page SEO refers to actions taken away from the website that can potentially help it, including additional backlinks pointing at the site. 

Differences Between Paid Traffic vs. Organic Traffic

Organic traffic is often referred to as “free” traffic. This is where the home page, inner page, or perhaps an article ranks well enough that it receives user clicks from a search engine.

These clicks provide visitors to the site and are referred to as organic traffic. 

Paid traffic primarily is paying for online display advertising where ad viewers are enticed to click the advert and visit the advertiser’s site. 

What are Crawling and Indexing

A web spider or robot will visit the website pages to see what’s there. Google’s crawler is called the Googlebot.

Other search engines have their own bots that visit. There are also malicious bots that aim to scrape content using a programmed script. 

Once a search engine has crawled the site, it will set about indexing this content. This includes deciding what a page or post should be ranked for and in what position. 

What is the Timeframe for SEO to Work?

Older sites where content is ranked quickly can drive new traffic to the site for relevant terms. For new sites, the process requires far more time. 

Similarly, when a backlink is built, it can require different amounts of time until the new link pointing to the client’s site gets noticed.

The relative ranking position is subsequently updated. This process can require months to complete. 

The Google Sandbox. What is it and Is it Real?

The idea with a Google Sandbox is that newer sites won’t initially rank for many search terms.

Google is unclear what the site is about because it’s so new and is feeling its way toward where and how the site should rank. 

The sandbox effect can last 7-8 months or a full year. Also, there are believed to be several ones in succession.

For instance, sites in their second year often do far better than in their first year.

Exiting the sandbox means when the site has taken off in the rankings and doesn’t seem to be being held back due to its newness. 

What’s an SEO Campaign?

An SEO campaign is where an SEO agency works progressively to improve the rankings for a website. 

Can An Agency Guarantee Ranking Positions?

No. When an agency has a ranking promise, it’s time to be highly skeptical.

While they may well have a track record of success for clients, knowing where a page or site will rank for a given keyword phrase isn’t possible. 

Does Excellent Content Help with Rankings?

Google continues to better understand content quality and its relevance. It also appreciates that wordcount isn’t the be-all and end-all.

Many users want quick answers rather than fluff. Increasingly, content quality matters as Google gets smarter. 

Does the Click Thru Rate Matter?

Google monitors both the click-thru rate on search results and whether searchers returned and opened other results.

This indicates whether a page ranking in Google is providing the right answer or not. 

Are Backlinks Risky?

Quality backlinks must originate from good linking neighborhoods.

When too many backlinks are coming from the same website or it’s linking out far more than it’s receiving links, it is seen as bad. 

What is Local SEO?

Local SEO is a separate branch of SEO where search queries are handled differently. Google shows local results, presents businesses on a local map, and so on.

As a result, sites for local retailers need to be produced in a way to provide information for search engines that they can use to provide local results appropriately. 

Is Hiring an SEO Agency a Good Idea?

An SEO agency with a strong reputation can do more for your site than you can do alone. 

A bad SEO agency may build low-quality backlinks leading to a manual linking penalty from Google that impacts future rankings and traffic. 

Does Domain Authority Matter?

Domain Authority (DA) is a metric from Moz.com. It is roughly calculated based on the number of backlinks pointing to the site.

DA is seen as one way to measure how powerful a website is from an SEO standpoint and how difficult it will be to outrank them. 

Do Mobile-Friendly Sites Do Better?

Google is now mobile-oriented. They index mobile initially now and desktop after.

Therefore, your website is the mobile version, not the desktop version, as far as Google is concerned. Mobile-friendly sites do better than ones that aren’t. 

We hope that these answers provided what was needed to remove any confusion over SEO and SEO jargon.