Digital Profits Podcast – Episode 18: SEO Frequently Asked Questions Answered
Do you feel overwhelmed trying to make sense of all the conflicting information out there about SEO? Well, never fear! You’ve come to the right place. This comprehensive guide is here to answer all your search engine optimization queries – from the basics all the way up to advanced tactics.
We’ll cover everything you need to know about improving your website’s visibility in organic search results easily and effectively, so that you can reach more people with your amazing business idea or product.
Read on for intuitively organized answers to some of the top SEO questions asked by entrepreneurs and business owners like yourself!
What is SEO and why is it important for businesses today
Nowadays, having a website is not enough for your business to thrive in the digital world. Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the key to ranking high on search engine results pages and driving traffic to your website. As the competition in the online space is getting fiercer, it has become increasingly important for businesses to have a strong online presence.
With SEO, you can optimize your website’s content and structure to ensure that search engines understand what your site is all about and rank you higher on the search results page. And when potential customers are searching for your products or services, high search rankings will increase your chances of getting noticed. Investing in SEO is investing in the long-term success of your business, so don’t overlook this critical aspect of digital marketing.
How can I optimize my website’s content for SEO
Are you looking to boost your website’s visibility on search engines and drive more traffic to your site? Look no further than optimizing your website’s content for SEO! By strategically using keywords, creating high-quality content, and implementing best practices for on-page optimization, you can increase your chances of ranking higher on search engine results pages.
Not only will this result in more organic traffic for your site, but it can also help establish your brand as a credible and authoritative source within your industry. So, what are you waiting for? Give your website’s content the SEO treatment it deserves and watch your rankings soar!
What are the best ways to increase website traffic through SEO
In today’s digital age, having a website is one thing, but making sure people find and visit it is a whole different game. Luckily, with the right SEO strategies, you can attract more organic traffic to your website. The first step is to understand your audience and what type of content they are searching for. Then, optimize your website by including high-quality content, relevant keywords, and meta descriptions.
Utilizing social media platforms to promote your website and creating backlinks to reputable sources are also effective ways to boost your SEO ranking. By implementing these best practices, you’ll be well on your way to increasing website traffic and reaching a larger audience. So, take the leap, and start optimizing today!
How do I know which keywords will be most effective in attracting visitors
Are you tired of feeling like your website is just collecting virtual dust? It’s time to take your SEO game to the next level by honing in on the most effective keywords. But how can you know which keywords will attract the most visitors? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. Use a combination of keyword research tools, such as Google Analytics and SEMrush, to identify high-ranking keywords relevant to your industry.
Don’t forget to also consider long-tail keywords that may have lower competition but higher conversion rates. By strategically incorporating these keywords into your content, you’ll not only attract more visitors, but also increase the likelihood of converting them into paying customers.
What are some of the common mistakes people make when trying to improve their search engine rankings
Every website owner wants their page to rank higher on search engines. However, improving your search engine rankings is not an easy task. There are plenty of mistakes that people make in their pursuit of rising to the top. One of the most common mistakes people make is stuffing their website with irrelevant keywords. Search engines are designed to look for content that is relevant to what users are searching for, not just a bunch of keywords strung together.
Another mistake people commonly make is not focusing on user experience. Your website should not only be easy to navigate but it should also contain valuable information that users are actually interested in. By avoiding these common mistakes and focusing on quality content and user experience, you will be on your way to improving your search engine rankings in no time!
How often should I update my website content for optimal SEO results
If you’re wondering how often you should update your website content for optimal SEO results, the answer is pretty straightforward – regularly! The digital landscape is constantly evolving, and search engines want to see fresh, valuable content regularly added to your site.
This not only keeps your audience engaged, but it also helps boost your search engine rankings. Aim to add new content at least once a month and make sure to optimize it with relevant keywords to really make an impact. Remember, a website that stays updated and relevant is more likely to gain traction in search engine results and attract new visitors. So, get cracking and start updating that content!
SEO can seem overwhelming and difficult to understand. Although it’s an important aspect of any business’s website visibility, the principles are not as complicated as they may appear.
With the right research, strategic planning, and execution of the basics of SEO, you can take a huge step toward increasing traffic to your website. Remember the best practices like regular content updates, utilizing keywords that your target audience is most likely to search for, and eliminating common mistakes like incorrect HTML tags or overcrowding your content with too many keywords. So, what are you waiting for? Put your newfound knowledge into action and start improving your search engine rankings today!
If you want to learn more, tune in to Ep 18 of the Digital Profits Podcast where the Profit Squad unravels the mysteries of SEO, emphasizing key success metrics like sessions, clicks, and revenue/leads. They reveal local businesses’ significant impact on Google rankings and clarify the true cost of SEO investment.
Misconceptions about Domain Authority are debunked, and the influence of exact match domains and backlinks is discussed. Learn the realistic timeline for organic results and how paid ads intersect with SEO. Discover if AI-generated content truly ranks and Google’s stance on duplicate content. Listen to an SEO conversation you won’t want to miss!
Ben Page: Hey Squad. We’ve got a special episode for you today. I’m here with Blake John.
Blake John: Hey Squad.
Ben Page: And I’m Ben Page. So today we’re going to answer common SEO questions and we’re going to test out a more rapid fire format to get you the answers that you’re looking for. And if you have any questions, let us know. Go to our website, sign up for the newsletter and hit reply and you can get in touch that way. So right away, Blake, let’s jump right into it. Is SEO dead?
Blake John: Is SEO dead? I think we were thinking about what’s the right question to lead off with. And this was the right question because if SEO is dead, the rest of this podcast wouldn’t be worth having. Yeah. So we’re talking about SEO today, and no, SEO is not dead. This is a common headline that you’ll see all the time in digital marketing forums and like search engine, Land.com and whatnot. But it’s absolutely not dead. We talk about it. I think in our last recording, there are billions of searches happening every single day. And you can optimize for those searches, for those users queries, answer their questions and get in front of them and drive business through it. It’s absolutely not dead. It’s a viable digital marketing strategy.
Ben Page: But isn’t it true that there are more ads than ever?
Blake John: Yeah, which irks me to my soul. There are lots and lots of ads, yes. But at the end of the day, I mean, we still see at Google Organic search is still driving tons of traffic. And for a lot of our clients, too, it’s oftentimes one of their leading. Generally speaking, it’s either their top business driving digital channel or it’s its second biggest, which is usually, if it is a second business, it’s behind paid. But it’s a huge driver of business regardless in almost all scenarios.
Ben Page: Yeah, it’s a necessary and important part, which we’ve talked about a bit in past episodes. Even with SGE generative experiences for search emerging, zero click search results emerging, more ads saturation emerging changing search results emerging. Despite all those factors, SEO is not dead. You still need to worry about it. You still need to invest in it is probably the best way to put it.
Blake John: I will add too, with AI and SGE and all those things coming up. To me, that doesn’t mean SEO is dying. It means SEO is just evolving. There’s going to be new things we need to optimize for, new tactics, new ways to sort of do SEO that we’ll just have to figure out and get good at and optimize for.
Ben Page: Agreed. Yeah. You need that strategist overseeing that evolution. You need the skills and the ability to implement within these new systems and frameworks. Next question. What metrics are most important in an SEO campaign?
Blake John: I would say there’s probably two. And by two, well, really three. Okay, so there’s sessions which you’ll get in Google analytics and specifically Google analytics for now, which is just a measure of how many users come to your site and actually have engage with your site and do things, navigate around, click around, et cetera. There’s also clicks, which is a metric you will get from Google Search Console, which will just measure really specifically how many times a user clicks on one of your organic listings in a Google Search engine result page. So those are two leading indicators of success in SEO, but then also kind of taking it down the pipeline. Of course, revenue and or leads are the kingpin of metrics. That’s something that every SEO should be monitoring and paying attention to because at the end of the day, our goal is to improve your business and we can’t really do that with just clicks and just sessions. There also has to be leads and revenue associated with that.
Ben Page: Right on. So from the bottom up, increase in qualified leads, increase in sales, how do you get those? By increasing traffic to your website. So clicks to your website, how do you get those? By appearing in the search results pages, aka impressions. Next question. Are reviews important for SEO?
Blake John: Yes, absolutely. Reviews are important for SEO. It’s kind of funny, we were talking about just reviews. And specifically, I think reviews are more important for local businesses, local SEOs, think about roofers and plumbers and, I don’t know, real estate agents or whatever, what have you. They’re important for the full gamut of businesses, I think. And really the reason why, the same way that a user would sort of evaluate reviews and read reviews to determine whether or not they want to do business with you, like if they want to buy your product or they want to move forward with your service, whatever it is, Google evaluates those reviews to help kind of inform their rankings because Google really trusts the user’s input and they have so much data. And the more information that they can get from users via reviews, the more confident they feel in serving you as the top result for a given query. So they’re absolutely important.
Ben Page: So reviews and SEO are akin to votes for your business. The more votes you have, the more confident people feel in choosing you. And search engines likewise, look at that as a signal of confidence in ranking you in the future. All right, what is domain authority, also known as DA for short? Does it even matter?
Blake John: This is an interesting one. So domain authority, we’ll just start there really quickly. Domain authority is actually a third party metric, specifically by Moz, who kind of coined the term. Other tools have sort of created their own variation of domain authority, like SeMrush, I forget what they call it, but is it like page authority? It’s the same thing, but it measures a pages or a website’s ability to rank. That’s the way that Moz kind of talks about it and what it is. And it’s on a scale of one to 100, or zero to 100 actually, where 100 is excellent, think like Wikipedia.com and then Zero is really poor. But the truth is, it’s a third party metric, so it doesn’t really matter.
Ben Page: It’s not something Google evaluates, like, objectively speaking.
Blake John: Exactly.
Ben Page: And it’s an estimate of things by a third party. It’s an estimate of things third parties think Google might use to look at perhaps the quality or authority of a given domain. Is that fair?
Blake John: That’s exactly it. So the tricky part about this is that authority is a thing in SEO, just generally authority. But domain authority, these third party metrics are just sort of an assumption based on what they think, how Google is evaluating and measuring how it all stacks up. But we don’t actually know and it’s incredibly nuanced. And obviously Google has more data than any other software company or just anybody really in the world. But yeah, that one’s tricky. I would say. Don’t get caught up in domain authority and being like, oh, we need to push our domain authority from 29 to 30. We need to get 30 if we want to rank. Like, it’s not really how it works.
Ben Page: It’S an outcome, not something to focus on as a result. Like in PPC quality score. It’s an outcome.
Blake John: Yeah, kind of going back to the metrics we talked about, the most important metrics, sessions, clicks and revenue or leads. Domain authority would be near the bottom of the list of important metrics like it might not even make the list. Just as an example.
Ben Page: Awesome. All right, how much does SEO cost?
Blake John: SEO and its price. This is something we actually talked about in one of our earlier episodes, like episode three or something like that. Generally speaking, you can expect to pay for an agency anywhere between 1000 and $5,000 per month. 1000 is definitely on the lower end. 5000 is probably on the higher end. It goes above that too. I’ve seen contracts go well over that, but it’s kind of like a general range. And I actually pulled up a metric from Ahrefs. They said 28% of north American SEO agencies charge between $2,500 and $5,000. So that kind of gives you a range, I think quarter fall there.
Ben Page: You might have some in the 1000 to 2500. Then you get the higher up, outlier. Seven thousand, five hundred, ten K, twenty K, whatever it might be. But just know too that the scope of those services may differ. Where some might include development, UX, CRO analytics, reporting, content development, technical SEO, local SEO, ecommerce SEO.
Blake John: Yeah, absolutely. There’s definitely a wide variance in what is actually offered in an SEO contract and what an agency is capable of doing, and that’s kind of why you get such a variable cost range. But I would say, generally speaking, 3000 is like a good 3000 is probably a good number where most agencies would land.
Ben Page: Yeah, that’s fair. And you’re going to pay in terms of time or services. So this is maybe a rule of thumb using that stat if you’re going to hire an agency and retain them. But if you want to do it yourself or build a team, you can expect to pay in terms of writers to write the content and edit the content, designers to build page templates and change elements on the page, developers to make technical SEO updates and analysis, and creative individuals to produce graphics or videos. And even with AI involved. Right. And then you’re going to pay for all the software and tools and subscriptions and raw assets that you need to really optimize and grow your site over time. So, Blake, do exact match domains work? Should I just go out and buy digitalmarketingagencies.com or how does this.
Blake John: So, yeah, this is a funny one. So just to be clear, an exact match domain is a domain in which your product or service is in your domain. So we’re a digital marketing agency. If we had digitalmarketingagency.com, that’s an exact match domain. Google has said many times that it doesn’t work. And I don’t think if you buy your exact match domain, you’re just going to start ranking immediately, right away. But honestly, in my personal experience, they’ve been surprisingly successful from what I’ve seen. I’ve seen websites that are compared to the competition, pretty poor. They don’t really stack up, but they have an exact match domain and they rank surprisingly well. So this one’s, I think it’s kind of up for debate truthfully on how they work. But I will say I would not go out and base your brand on getting an exact match domain because one of the biggest downfalls of an exact match domain is that you kind of lose a brand. You don’t have a brand. Like if we were digitalmarketingagency.com, it’s like, what are you, who are we now in the scope of all of this? Exactly. So it’s a tricky, say, I wouldn’t lean on exact match domain as sort of a core component of your strategy. Exactly.
Ben Page: Yeah. And if there is an advantage, it’s likely not an SEO ranking advantage aligned with Google Statement. Right. But it could be related to user behavior and just like from a branding element and then searching that and maybe there’s just a unique way that it could benefit someone. I’ve also, to your point about, from your speaking from experience, a lot of the exact match domains I’ve seen work well are old.
Blake John: True.
Ben Page: They were registered 10, 15, 20 years ago and they’ve just continued to kind of accumulate authority to kind of go back to that idea, that concept.
Blake John: Yeah. I think a lot of times early on when the.com bubble really started, they were bought up so quick because that’s where everyone was just sort of landed. And as a result, they’ve just sort of gotten just so much history associated with them, which is kind of a ranking factor and can compound interest. We talked about domain authority can impact your authority just like the total domain history. Yeah, exactly.
Ben Page: Are backlinks the most important thing in SEO?
Blake John: Another tricky one, and I wanted to include this one because truthfully I find it to be a hot topic in SEO. Always. There will be some people that will tell you that you cannot rank without doing backlink building. They will just tell you flat face it’s not possible. Others will tell you that you don’t need to do it at all. It doesn’t matter. It’s not worth your time to feel the dreams. Yeah. If you feel that they will come, I will land on the side leaning towards it’s generally not worth your time. And I say that with a caveat. Backlinks do have value, in my personal opinion, they’re not the most important ranking factor. I think five to ten years ago they were. But things have sort of shifted and there’s been a change in the way that Google evaluates content. It’s gotten better at evaluating things like reviews and getting a better idea of.
Ben Page: The real world impact or usefulness, perhaps.
Blake John: Exactly like the real world value of how you actually stand to customers and what you provide. That doesn’t need to rely on backlinks quite as much the algorithm I’m talking about. So backlinks are not the number one ranking factor in my opinion. It’s quality content. It’s doing sort of all the right things in the right way, user experience, et cetera. Those are the more important, and that’s what really you should be focusing on.
Ben Page: Yeah, agreed. I fall into the same camp. Backlinks almost the outcome. You should be producing quality, helpful, original content, you should be promoting that content. And if you do that well, Backlinks will result naturally, it seems.
Blake John: Yes, and those are absolutely the most beneficial backlinks, the one that’s just sort of natural happen organically. I will say too, though, Backlink building can be an effective strategy.
Ben Page: Oh, yes. Especially citation building.
Blake John: But you’ve got to be careful about it. Exactly. You’ve got to be careful about it, how you do it, because there’s definitely some spammy ways to go about it. And always think about your users, like the user perspective if they were to find you on another external website, does it make sense that you’re even there? If it does make sense, and it’s probably a worthwhile backlink and maybe you should pursue it, but more often, don’t.
Ben Page: Chase it just for the sake of having it. Exactly. And you start to appear on Spammy blog Farm sites or Whatever. Yeah, right on. All right, how long does SEO take?
Blake John: This is, I think, maybe the most common question that I’ve ever gotten in my career. SEO is a long term investment and I think just as a general guideline, like two to six months, is how long it really takes to sort of starting to start to see an impact from organic work. It can be depending on a whole host of different factors and whatnot, it can be even longer. Generally, though, I would say really somewhere in that two month to six month range is how long SEO takes before you start to see its impact. I also will mention too, it compounds, so it’s not like you’re going to hit a ceiling and that’s just where you are for the rest of time, generally speaking. You’re going to see more and more growth as you continue to invest and continue to move forward with a well performing strategy.
Ben Page: All right, let’s move into rapid fire SEO myths. So how about this one? Paid ads improve your SEO.
Blake John: This is a funny one. They don’t improve your SEO. If you buy ads, you won’t start ranking better because of it. I will say, though, there can be some indirect benefits. Specifically if you’re paying for the number one sponsored ad, right? It’s kind of a little bit of a brand play in addition to like an acquisition play, right? You’re getting your name out there. People are more familiar with you. They might click on an ad and then remember your name. They’re on the website, they come back a week later and they search for your brand. They might not go to the domain itself. That would be an organic click. Then if they completed a branded search and then clicked an organic link, at least it would be a branded, or, excuse me, be an organic click. So there can be some indirect benefits, but no, paid ads don’t impact rankings directly.
Ben Page: Next one. AI content can’t rank.
Blake John: It can, which is crazy to say. I think even maybe two years ago I would have said no, never. It can’t rank. It would be impossible. But it can. And Google has made some unique comments. It says basically, we don’t necessarily, and I’m paraphrasing what Google has said, but we don’t necessarily care how the content is created as long as it’s helpful and engaging and useful to the user. I will say, too, I wouldn’t just start going blasting AI content on your website. You used AI as sort of a beginning starting point and then curate that content to make it again useful and helpful for users.
Ben Page: Duplicate content will get you penalized.
Blake John: It won’t. There is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty, which is shocking to hear because I think people are scared of that. Very much so. But the truth is, Google has made their stance is that they advise against duplicate content, which is funny, but that’s truly their stance. There is no actual penalty associated with duplicate content. The thing is, if you have duplicate content on your website, it makes it really difficult for Google to basically pick a winner. And so when they have to sort of go between, say, two or three pages of very similar pieces of content and choose which is the best one, which should we be serving to users? I don’t know. That extra effort to make that decision is going to hurt you in the long run. Just make sure it’s super clear you can use redirects or canonical tags, which are kind of more technical terms, but you can use those to set a priority page that will give clear indication to Google. Okay, this is the page we want to rank, and now you’re setting that page up for success.
Ben Page: Got it. Last one. Blake, SEO is a one time project.
Blake John: It’s not. No, it’s really not. In last podcast, our last recording, SEO recording, at least we talked about SEO. We use an analogy, gardening and SEO, as they’re kind of similar, and I think it’s a really powerful analogy. If you think about gardening, there’s a lot of inputs, a lot of maintenance. You need to pull some weeds. You need to water your plants. You need to make sure they get sunlight, et cetera, et cetera. SEO is kind of the same way. There’s a lot of maintenance, a lot of inputs that need to happen. And then the next year rolls over, then you got to pull more weeds, and then you got to clean up the space. You got to prune your bushes, whatever it is. SEO is the same way. It’s an ongoing process, a long term commitment that can have big payoff in the end.
Ben Page: Awesome. Thanks for your insight, Blake, and I hope this was helpful. Squad, again, send us your questions and sign up for the newsletter at two one Hundreddigital.com.
Outro: Thank you so much for listening. Your support means the world to us and allows us to help more people and grow the community. Please take a minute right now to subscribe and share this wherever you listen to podcasts and sign up for the Prop Squad@Joinprofitsquad.com. This will get you insider access, additional tools and swipe files and help you elevate your marketing game to the next level.