Search Engine Optimization (SEO) FAQ – Top 55+ With Answers!

Scratching your head for these SEO terms –  Analytics, Keywords, SERPs? 

Or have some other SEO queries? 

Then, welcome to our SEO FAQ blog.

It is quite challenging to understand the concept of SEO. Not only beginners, even people with some knowledge on this topic  are also not familiar with many SEO things. 

Luckily, we can help. Being a digital marketing agency, we answer a lot of client questions about it. Among those questions, the top 50+  SEO FAQs are listed in this blog. 

** Worry not, we have explained everything as if the blog is written for a kid.**

Let’s Start With Basic SEO FAQ:

1. What is a Search Engine?

 

As the name indicates, a search engine is where you search for something online. Ever heard – Google this, Google that or Google it? Google is a search engine. It gives you results (websites/videos/blogs etc.) that match with your search term from the World Wide Web. 

But Google is not the only search engine available. There are others as well, like BING, YAHOO, MSN and more.

 

2.What is ‘Search Engine Optimization’?

When you search anything on search engines you get different results on your screen, and most of the time you only click on the top result. Right? 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of making a website appear on that top position without using ads.

** According to BrightEdge, SEO offers 1000% more traffic in comparison to social media. **

 

3.How does it work?

When a user initiates a search, crawlers of search engines immediately check out the database of the World Wide Web and look for websites that precisely match the search term. If your website has the relevant information of the search query and is well optimized for search engines, the crawlers will show it on the search results. The more well optimized your website, the higher it appears on the top of search results. 

4.How Does Optimization Occur?

There are a lot of techniques and strategies that come under optimization. Digital marketing agencies are aware of these strategies inside out. So, business owners hire them to get their website on the top. 

5.What are crawlers? 

A crawler is a bot also known as a spider which search engines use to crawl web pages. It reads the information on the web page and then chooses the relevant ones to display in the SERPs. 

Its other function is to index new websites on the search engine database. 

6.What are SERPs?

SERPs stands for Search Engine Result Pages. The page (with the results) that you see when you hit enter after typing your search query. 

7.What is the relationship between the web and search engine optimization?

 

People use search engines to find sites that provide information they are looking for.  So, search engines are essential tools that provide a web environment where users can quickly find the information they want. To make better use of these tools is ‘Search Engine Optimization. It helps search engines to know which website contains the information that the user is searching for and put that website in the SERPs. 

8.Where is my website stored on the web?

The servers of the World Wide Web store your website. It is indexed into search engines’ databases. 

9.What is the indexing of websites? 

Websites are indexed in search engines. Search engines add them to their database. 

10.How much does it cost to index your site in search engines?

Indexing your site requires no registration or fees. Websites are automatically discovered and indexed by search engines. Or, you can add them manually as well. 

11.Why is SEO important?

Without SEO, you won’t be able to reach your potential customers unless you opt for paid advertising – PPC or SEM. Search engine optimization of the websites ensures that the crawlers can clearly understand what the website is about. Consequently, they make them appear on the top results of relevant searches. Such top ranking sites in the list will generate more visits and therefore potentially more conversions. The benefits of SEO is a response to the needs of businesses. The tougher the competition, the more essential it is to use SEO.

12.What is PPC?

PPC is Pay Per Click advertising offered by search engines. It is similar to renting a billboard to display your ads but with a difference. When advertising on billboards, your ads reach all those that pass by no matter if they are looking for that particular ad or not. 

In PPC advertising, search engines will show your advertisement only to those who are looking for the services you provide. Suppose you own a bakery in XYZ city. If you advertise your bakery website using PPC, search engines will show it to people searching for “cakes in XYZ CITY” or whatever the search query you choose to advertise for. In return, you have to pay a fee 

whenever a user clicks on your website from the search results. So, it is a strategy to purchase visits to your website. 

13.What is a  landing page?

A landing webpage is the page of your website that the user visits when they click your ad.

14.What are keywords?

For you, whatever you search on the internet eventually becomes a keyword when more and more people search the same thing using the same phrase or words, like “Dominos near me” to “Wedding planner in LA”. In other words, the search queries people use to search on the internet become keywords if their search volume becomes high. 

Note: Keywords are not just exact search queries. It can also be a relative term to search queries. For example, if the search query is “ digital marketing”, it can relate to “online marketing”. So, we can also use online marketing as the keyword. 

For search engines, Keywords are those words that describe your content. 

15.What is the meaning of keyword search volume?

Keyword search volume is a metric that tells how many people have searched that particular query in a month. Like if the keyword volume of a keyword is 202/month, that means 202 people are searching for the particular keyword in a month on a regular basis. 

16.Does Keyword volume vary from place to place?

It varies for different countries. The search volume of a keyword in the US may not be the same as in the UK or Australia. 

17.What are different types of keywords?

Mainly there are three comprehensive types of keywords in SEO – Short Tail or Generic, Mid Tail and Long Tail. 

Note: Keywords in SEO can be categorized into many types based on different factors. You can read about this in detail here – types of keywords in SEO

NEED TO MENTION: The keywords in SEM are different from SEO. There you will find – Broad Keywords, Broad-Match Keywords, Phrase Keywords and Exact Keywords. Moreover, SEM prefers dynamic keyword insertion. 

18.What are Short Tail Keywords? 

These are also called Seed, Generic and Broad keywords. Broad search terms that have a very high search volume come under this category. These terms are very competitive and generally have one or two words in length. They are also known as Seed keywords. 

Example: Plumbing Company

19.What are Mid-Tail Keywords?

These search terms contain two or more words and are more explanatory than short-tail keywords. Since they are more explanatory, they have less competition than generic keywords.

** Around 70% of searches on search engines contain more than three words – Ahrefs. **

Example: Best Plumbing Repair Company

20.Can you please elaborate Long-Tail Keywords?

As their name indicates, these keywords usually have multiple words. These search terms aim at a certain topic or specific audience. These are very less competitive in nature and thus offer greater chances of ranking in search engines. 

Example: best plumbing companies with free estimates in NYC

21.What is keyword competition? 

It is a metric that describes the difficulty to rank a website for that particular keyword. There are many websites that may wish to rank for the same keyword. Depending on how many websites are in your competition and their position on SERP, determines the keyword competition. This metric helps marketers to evaluate how much time and effort it will take to rank a website at the top position on SERP for that particular keyword.

 

22.Is there any specific tool to search keyword volume?

There are many paid and free tools available on the internet for this purpose. But we suggest Google keyword planner. 

23.What is SEM?

SEM – Search Engine Marketing – is paid internet marketing. There are different ways to increase the visibility of your website on a search engine. All of these come under SEM. In other words, it is the act of using paid strategies to improve your website’s ranking in the SERPs.

24.Which is better – SEO or SEM?

Both are good on their own terms. The major difference is that SEM is paid and SEO is organic positioning, that is, free. The only thing that will cost you is the time you dedicate to it. This is the first difference but it is not the only one. 

With SEO you will not get instant results but they will be lasting over time. On the contrary, with SEM, the results are immediate but will last as soon as you stop paying.  

With SEM, high technical knowledge is not required so any website can use it. However, with SEO, certain technical knowledge is required. That’s where the hiring agency comes into play. 

25.Can Anyone guarantee top ranking in search results? 

No one can guarantee the ranking of search engine results. But for greater visibility, it’s important to understand that Google, Bing, and Naver search engines favour high-quality content that informs their audiences. This means that efforts must be made to understand the intent of the user and to engage in interactions that reflect the customer experience. 

26.Do search engines affiliate SEO?

Google and search engines do not have any affiliation with or authorize any particular SEO company or agency to rank. 

27.Isn’t there a tool that can help you easily do search engine optimization?

 

Depending on the nature of the site and the amount of information, there are many different forms of search engine optimization. Therefore, there is no tool that can help you optimize every site with simple tricks. 

There are some paid tools such as web analyzers, ranking analyzers, and link makers on the market, but these tools are not proven effective. Most search engines provide specialized tools such as ‘Webmaster Tools’ to help webmasters use search engines more effectively. These tools give you free basic information about your website, such as how your site is searched, which pages are getting the most traffic and what keywords users use to visit your site.

Here are 3 such tools:

Google Analytics: this tool is used to monitor website visits.

Google Search Console: useful to help monitor, maintain and improve the presence of a website in Google search results.

Google Keyword Planner Tool: This keyword tool helps users identify what their target audience is searching for.

We have used all of them ourselves and we know how good they are, we hope they will be useful for you so that you can start.

28.How can I improve the positioning of my website? 

There is much more behind a beautiful painting than just the colors. The same goes for optimizing a website for search engines. There are many things to take into account.

It needs to be visually attractive. The size of the font must be adequate. There should be a harmony of colors along with simple navigation. It must be adapted to both a computer and a smartphone and should be responsive to both platforms. The loading time is essential to be fast because nobody likes to wait. Finally, the content you want to show to your target audience must be original, relevant and of quality.

These are some aspects that you can put into practice right now, if you still see that your website does not upload positions, send us an email to see how we can help you.

29.Is SEO a one-time task?

Like creating and maintaining a site requires ongoing efforts, so does SEO. Search engines are constantly improving their search algorithms to get the best results for their users. To cope up with these algorithms, making the site helpful to the needs of real users should be a priority. Thus, SEO is not a one-time task. 

30.What Does Page and Domain Authority mean?

Domain Authority DA, also known as Website Authority represents the reputation of a website on the internet. The higher the domain authority, the higher the chances of the website to rank on particular terms with SEO efforts. It ranges from 1 to 100. Page Authority PA tells you the same thing about a single webpage. Remember, DA & PA are Moz’s metrics, not Google’s. 

31.What Do You Mean By  Alexa Ranking?

The Alexa rank of a website tells you about the popularity of that website in comparison to other sites. You can use it as a key performance indicator or parameter for competitive analysis. 

32.Do Alexa Ranking Affect Google Ranking Improvement?

Alexa ranking offers insights on popularity of a website. However, it is not true that the ranking information provided by Alexa relates to the ranking algorithm of search engines. Just understand Google’s announcement of core updates and try to improve the quality of your content.  

33.Does link building help improve SEO quality?

Participating in link building is a good SEO activity. However, it is necessary to determine the nature of the site included in the backlink. Increasing the number of links with sites of completely different nature will not help you. Moreover, the anchor text in the backlink should be a keyword that you wish your website to rank for.

 

34.Can you please define the term link building? 

Link building is simply building links with other websites on the internet. Either they link to you or you link to them. 

Like, have you ever been directed to a new website by clicking on something? For example: when you click on social media icons on a website, they take you to the relevant social media page.

Basically, you visit the new website because there was a link between that something you clicked on and the new website. This is called link building.

 

35.What Should I Need To Know About Outbound and Inbound Links?

 

Outbound links are those that you give to other websites. Inbound links are those that others give to you. Both types of links from/to high domain authority websites help to improve the website’s ranking.  

36. What can I do with Google Search Console and Analytics?

With Google Search Console, you can check site information and whether there are any crawling errors. Crawling informs you about which web pages are in the index of search engines and which are not. 

With its Search Analytics, you can examine how many times visitors visit your website – on which page – at what timings – for which search term. You can also view stats by specific options, such as page, country, device, search type, and date.

37. What is a sitemap?

A sitemap is a map of the structure of your website. It stores a list of all the pages and other elements present on your website and how they all are correlated. Having a sitemap on your website helps search engines to understand which pages are important. Moreover, when you submit your sitemap, it aids in indexing your website in search engines. 

38.Why always most refer to Google as a search engine in SEO?

 

Simply because Google is the world’s leading search engine.

** Among total traffic on the World Wide Web, 92.96% is from Google Searches, Maps and Images. SOURCE **

There are other search engines like Duckduckgo, Yahoo, Bing, etc but few people use them.

 

39.Do different search engines have different logic for SEO?

 

Each engine has its own  response logic but we often find the same priority principles (site structure, quality of content, links, keywords)

40.What is a Search Engine algorithm?

An SEO algorithm is a set of rules that search engines use to evaluate the significance of a website or webpage. It keeps on updating with time. The search engine places the site if it meets the algorithm’s rules. The more the conditions are met, the better the positioning in SERPs. The criteria changes regularly and no one really knows what they are.

You can read about the latest SEO algorithm updates here – [NEW BLOG]

41.What is the relation between site rank position and SEO?

SEO  is a set of techniques and know-how to get the best seat possible in the results pages of search engines. The positioning corresponds to that place.

 

42.What do you mean by organic search results?

Organic search results are those results that you get with the help of SEO not by paid advertising. Similarly, all the results that you get from paid advertisements are non-organic.

 

43.What is one tip for SEO content?

You have to detect the search intent (keywords, phrases, questions) and answer it in the best possible way. Engines more readily understand such content. 

44.What are the tasks of SEO?

 

SEO generally involves Research, SEO AUDIT, On and Off-site optimizations (keywords, site structure, content, links) etc. Further, these tasks are divided into many microtasks. 

45.Is SEO free?

 

SEO is free, in the sense that the site owner does not pay any fees to the search engine to get top position in SERPs. This is not the case in paid search. But you need to hire a digital marketing agency to get your site search engine optimized. 

46.How much does SEO cost?

 

Although SEO does not require investing in paid advertisements, it still requires a significant budget for work that will be done over time. Generally, the cost of SEO depends on the time spent working on the project. The cost may be different for different websites depending on the service provided – audit, optimization, backlinks, etc. The costs can also vary  depending on the website, and the issues. Only after analyzing the objectives to be achieved, it is possible to quantify the cost. 

47.How to check your SEO?

To know if your SEO campaign is successful, examine the objectives you set: increase in traffic, conversion etc. This will help you to know whether you have achieved the results or not.  In any case, keep in mind that SEO takes at least a month to show results.

48.Can we do SEO on a WordPress, Wix, etc. site?

Yes, you can.

49.What is local SEO?

 

Implementing SEO strategies to boost your site’s positioning in the local search results.

Simply put, it helps to rank a website on particular keywords related to a locality such as “AC repair in NYC” or “wedding planners in LA”.

50.How to improve SEO?

The priority is to find the most frequently typed queries in the search bar in order to answer them in the content of the site. It is also necessary to ensure that the sites do not have technical blocking points. Ideally, the page to be positioned should also obtain quality natural links from other websites to gain popularity.

51.Can we pay engines like Google to be well ranked in SEO?

No, but you can pay for Google ads that will appear on search engine results pages. It has no direct connection with SEO. Moreover, if you use paid advertisements, these results are indicated as “ads” in the search results. 

52.How to choose the right keywords?

 

A generic term is not very legitimate in terms of conversions. Very competitive terms require more budget, more manpower and more time to come first. The best is to associate a locality or a particular target audience with keywords. It increases the chances of conversions.

 

53.What is conversion?

A conversion is when a visitor visits your website and makes a purchase of your product/service or fulfils the desired goal like subscribing to your newsletter. 

54.What is the conversion rate?

 

Conversion rate is the number of conversions out of the total number of visitors on your website.

55.Do SEO results stay fixed? 

Fixed positioning of a website on top with SEO cannot be guaranteed although SEO results lasts longer. Algorithms change often, search results move with the birth and death of websites. The mode of operation of the engines is still unknown.

 

56.Is SEO only a thing of big companies?

Not at all. Any company of any size can invest in SEO. In fact, there are small companies that have come to beat large companies simply by doing better SEO or hiring the right agency for it.

 

57.Is SEO something fixed on Google?

Not at all. Google from time to time changes the rules of the game. Therefore, when it comes to SEO, you should always stay focused on the latest updates and keep on optimizing your website as per new rules.

 

58.How important is having a blog for SEO?

Not just important, it is crucial. With the blog and articles optimized for SEO, we will get search engines to identify new URLs and ultimately movement on said website. Moreover, you can direct different keywords on different blogs which will boost your traffic if those pages get ranked for the assigned keywords. 

59.Are images important for SEO?

Of course. Just ensure that these are not heavy and are uploaded to the web with a  keyword in the alt tag. You can choose any keyword related to that webpage. 

60.How can Google Adwords help me?

Google Adwords allows you to bid daily for certain keywords to increase your website positioning and visibility on the web. An investment is practically necessary in any digital marketing campaign.

61.What is the best content manager for my company’s SEO?

Without a doubt, WordPress is the best platform to make your website. It is easy to use and its Yoast SEO plugin greatly helps to position the content according to Google’s requirements.

62.What can I do to improve my local SEO?

Register your business on Google my Business and other local directories and hire an agency that offers local SEO service. 

63. How does Analytics help us in SEO? What configurations can be made?

It will help you understand which web pages of your websites visitors are observing, where they are interacting the most, what kind of information they are looking for etc. You can prepare your future strategy based on this information.

 

64. What is the difference between SEO on-page and SEO off-page?

 

The difference between the two is important. On the one hand, on-site/ on-page SEO is concerned with things that need to be done on a website to make it SEO friendly. Such things include keyword optimization, load time, user experience, code optimization and URL format. While off-page SEO is mainly about mentions on other websites, presence in social networks.
Hope we have been able to answer your SEO queries. If not, feel free to comment your queries below. We will keep on updating this list!