What about our customer’s most frequent questions?
Search engine optimization (SEO) to assist you to rank in these organic search results page. As you research SEO, you’ll likely have various questions about this method and how it works.
The confidence of this post is to clarify some common SEO understanding by addressing the most frequently asked questions, not only about Web Design but also with a look at the search engine optimization.
Once and for all, Web Design and SEO are so strongly connected that we can’t miss noticing that when we are planning with our customers their websites, we always end up talking about the major impacts of both the activities of SEO and tailored Web Design.
We’ll move from the fundamentals into a few of the more intricate concerns. Ideally, by the end of this post, a better image of SEO will emerge!
We would not have don our job if we did not look at some of the most asked questions about SEO from our clients to put all those info into a handy FAQ to help address typical search inquiries.
Get in touch, and we’ll update the FAQ to include it if there is anything else you ‘d like to understand about SEO and Web Design.
Let’s dive into various SEO FAQs if you want to jump around.
Where should I place a lead magnet to make it discoverable on a website?
Few places can be prominent for this source. You’re going to want to do when we talk about a lead magnet no.
That’s a piece of a valuable part of the content to people can leave their email address in exchange to get access to it, so it’s great for building your email list, it’s brilliant to put this in a few places of prominence on your website.
Put it on its own, opt-in page, so have a page dedicated to that lead magnet, and that’s all it’s for.
That way, you can run Facebook ads to it, YouTube ads to it, whatever, so that it’s its landing page, so you don’t have to say,
The other thing to do is put it at the bottom of your homepage, like, a smaller version of, you know, so the opt-in page, the standalone page is going to be longer.
It’s going to have more information. But what I like to do is make a little opt-in block a reusable section that I put at the bottom of almost every page on the site.
Visitors arrive on your site, looking around at your various services, but they’re not ready to buy yet. We know that almost everybody coming to your site for the first time is just researching.
But while they are studying and they are looking they are also scrolling down to the bottom of the page.
They’re not ready to buy yet, but here there is your call to action, their opportunity for something free that you can opt-in for right.
Catchy!
I also guarantee you can positively put an ”exit intent pop up” on your site, acting when people are on your website and they are just ready to move on to check out the next webpage or next competitor.
So there, they’re mousing back up toward the back button, and then a pop up appears saying hey before you leave.
I’ve got this great piece of content, how about it.
You could say these are annoying, but is effective, and they were about to leave your site anyway.
Don’t do a pop up that appears right away.
Do the exit intent pop up!
What does SEO represent?
Okay, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.
You engage in SEO when you try to get a page to rank greater in an online search engine’s SERPs (online search engine results pages), with the supreme goal being to increase natural (unpaid) traffic to that page.
Which is much better, SEO or SEM?
SEO is just one methodology contained by SEM (Search Engine Marketing). So SEM consists of a combination of PPC and SEO.
You can imagine all the about a search engine brings you always to search engine marketing!
How about using a background video in the hero section?
I had a lot of talking in the past about the hero section, which is just that large, extensive section up at the top of any homepage that has an excellent big graphic behind it and usually pretty quickly has to tell people what you do.
Why it is important, and what to do about it. So that’s the hero. So he’s asking what about using a background video in that spot instead of an image, and I liked this idea with a few caveats right so any video won’t do. This won’t work:
- Anything that’s too distracting
- Has too many jump cuts in it
Because at the end of the day, your hero section needs to communicate those three major factors.
- Telling people what you do
- How you can help them
- Who you can help
So, I recommend that if you’re going to use a video there, it should just be what I would consider an ambient video, ideally with no cuts.
Just like a video of a beach, just like waves rolling in something that’s kind of ambient, and sets a mood and sets of tone, but isn’t going to be distracting.
If you were a wedding planner it might just be a single shot of a wedding location. And you could go back making a sliding section playing with different pictures of weddings and wedding scenarios, without being too much distracting.
There are a few other considerations here as well, accurately, load speed.
What you want to do is use one that’s embedded like on YouTube or Vimeo, probably YouTube.
They’re just built for quick buffering for these videos, so what would be wrong is if they come to your site. It’s a self-hosted video, meaning it’s on your server space. It just eats a lot of bandwidth.
It probably will take quite a bit of time, you know, perhaps five seconds or more for that video to even start loading.
So, use a YouTube embed, so it loads quick, make it very kind of ambient and gentle, and not too many jump cuts because that’s just going to be distracting.
Should I get a keyword-rich URL for my organization for SEO?
So what that implies is, when people are beginning a new service, plenty of times, they’re tempted to get a domain or a URL name that has their keywords in it.
The thinking is that it benefits SEO.
Having those keywords in a domain is practical for SEO. However, that is being marked down increasingly more every year. Google has stated that they’re taking a look at that less.
Is it going to look spammy in my URL to have those keywords in there?
Often it looks perfectly natural.
Not to mention, you’re adding a lot of extra characters to your domain, which makes it harder for people to enter when they’re merely attempting to look you up or research you.
So you have to balance the length of the domain and ease of use of it with the prospective benefits you’ll get from SEO.
You can still get your keywords into your URL page description, or develop landing pages with targeted keywords.
How is SEO changing?
As we discussed previously, SEO is constantly changing. The most significant modification continues to be the shift toward mobile.
People consume more and more time online. Mobile digital media time is now considerably greater than desktop time. This difference will continue to grow.
Google lately conceived mobile page speed as a vital ranking aspect. Moving forward, if you have not currently done so, you need to look into Accelerated Mobile Pages.
It’s ending up being a growing number of paramount to make sure you have no mobile functionality concerns on your site.
On-page SEO describes activities carried out on your site that aid you improve your ranking. These are modifications you can make to your site to help you rank much better in the search results.
How to do on-page SEO?
Your content is any details you release on your business’s site. Since you can control your material and optimize it, this content is part of on-page SEO. You can enhance content by incorporating keywords and matching user search intent.
Enhancing meta tags: Meta tags are pieces of text that describe your page of content. Users will not see these tags when they search. However, these tags do appear in your site’s coding.
Google will crawl the coding on your pages and check out the meta tags to understand the context of your website much better.
Optimizing your page speed!
Your website’s load time is an important part of SEO since users do not want to wait for slow-loading pages. By maximizing the backend of your website, you can improve your site’s load time and improve your SEO ranking.
And Off-page SEO?
Off-page SEO includes any action that you do not do on your website but influences your ranking. You can’t control these factors, even though they impact ranking.
Social media shares: While social networks engagement doesn’t straight affect your SEO, lots of online marketers think it adds to improving traffic on your site.
When you share pages on your social profiles from your website, you drive traffic to your page. This off-page SEO factor can help improve your SEO because you drive more reliable traffic to your site.
Earning backlinks: Backlinks are links to your website from other authority domains. If reliable domains are linking to your content, it builds Google’s trust in your website’s credibility and authority.
You can’t expect somebody to link to your web pages material, but when other industry professionals do, it assists improve your SEO ranking.
Is the About Us page that important?
Can we be so informative with our other pages, it makes this one redundant?
The About Us page on any site, especially on the service websites, is statistically the second most visited page. And this is true in many industries categories.
I think it’s good to have it. But I also think you need to go a little further with it than most people think of it.
What makes an About Us page important is that it must be, in reality, about your customers. Sounds very counterintuitive? Of course!
What I recommend you do with your About Us page is: take it as a special place to reiterate your overall philosophy, how you help your clients.
Use it to talk about how you help your customers!
The overall belief you have as a company!
I believe that your website should always increase your authority, distinctness, traffic & visibility…
What I’m not doing is talking all about how we got started.
Those are the things you should probably stay away from.
There are human beings behind a business, so it’s essential for that reason.
What am I always a little thrown off when I go to a website that feels like it’s for small business and, there’s no human presence there?
Keep it focused on how you help your customers, and you’ll do just fine.
About Us page is relevant, but do those things and do them right.
What are the most useful tabs to have on your website?
What are the essential pages that you want to have?
It’s a little different for a lot of different websites.
Mostly, I work on service-based business websites and I can speak more broadly about this, in which case you’ll need a link to the homepage.
Usually, that’s done in the logo in the top left corner.
Other than that you want, you want a pricing page I’ve talked about this before, a lot of service businesses kind of gloss over the pricing.
- You must have a FAQ page to bust through objections and answer all those questions that you get all the time, which allows you to, to kind of do a lot of selling on the website, without actually having to talk to people, which is just an excellent way to scale your business.
- A testimonials page.
- A reviews page, case studies, people you’ve helped before, success stories. Have a mixture of testimonials, both video and written, a few case studies.
- If you offer multiple services, up in the navigation, you’d want to have a drop-down of services, so we would say services.
You know you have that drop-down menu that would kind of call them all out so people can go and choose whatever service they’re interested in.
Some examples:
If you’re an interior designer if you’re a contractor:
- You want to show this before and after photos, a house before remodeling and after remodeling, with a gallery as well.
If you are a wedding planner:
- You want to show before and after photos, preparations before the wedding, venue modeling, coloring, and so on. Pics of the after wedding. A gallery as well.
Do you recommend testimonials that are quoted and typed out from other reviews?
So let’s say you quote a complete review or just the best part of a longer review left on Facebook or a Google business listing.
Does it have more relevance having a plugin that pulls reviews directly from my Google business listing, including their photo and how many stars the reviewer rated?
What we type out in our website pages is considered less authentic and may be regarded as fake or made up?
I recommend having these reviews pulled in from other sources like Yelp, Google reviews, Facebook, anything like that.
Here’s the thing, though you have to be careful of so when you’re talking about, like a plugin, it’s pulling these in dynamically, most of those give you very little control over the reviews coming in, just be aware of that.
So, let’s say someone leaves you a one-star review on Google, that’s going to be in there. I don’t think you can choose that.
Furthermore, I think most of these plugins that I found at least can only allow for like five of them at a time. So at any given time, it’s only going to show the most recent five, which can be excellent if those are all great reviews.
But let’s say even their five-star reviews, but they don’t tell a great story.
They just say, you know, two thumbs up excellent service! That’s not a useful review or testimonial.
Handpick the best reviews that tell that transformational story of how you found someone when they first came to you, all the way through how you help them, and what their life looks like at the end of it.
So I’ve found there is a pretty good workaround, and most people aren’t going to be bumped by it too much, so what you do is you just, you can take these reviews from these other sites like Yelp or whatever.
Retype them onto your website, style it very similarly to how it appears in the, you know, on that native app, and then, most people aren’t going to do too much homework to dig and figure out like this isn’t real this they just typed this out themselves.
A reminder here: most people don’t understand the difference between dynamically pulled-in versus you putting it there as the business owner.
Still, if they’re on Yelp or they’re on Google, they’re going to trust it to be real automatically.
So, It’s beautiful. I would just take a mixture of those reviews you find in other sites as well as some that maybe you just get yourself, including video testimonials, as those are works incredibly well.
And whenever you kind of retype out the testimonials from other third-party sites, you’re just going to want to add, you know, five stars, assuming it’s a five-star review.
And then, you know, five-star Yelp review five star Google review, you can use the logo there if you want to.
These are just lovely little indicators that most people will take you at your word for.
How do you understand if your SEO efforts are working?
How long should you expect to wait for your SEO efforts to work?
A lot of small companies, they wish to make a push for SEO.
They get extremely disappointed and give up method too early since they do not see the gains right away that they believed they would. And especially when you start speaking about paying an SEO business to do the work for you, you know, they’re investing a great deal of cash expense.
And if they do not see those returns right now, it gets hard to justify the cost.
To see if it’s working or not, initially of all, you require to have reasonable expectations about how long it’s going to take.
If you’re doing it yourself, and you’re just doing a couple of on-page changes, you’re changing title tags, including keywords, you can quite much expect to start seeing some sort of uplift within 30 days.
I recommend setting up the analytics widget on your WordPress. So on your dashboard, it types of shows up in a window.
If you’re paying a company to do your SEO work for you, it actually may take a little longer, which is counterproductive.
You believe, Oh, I’m, if I’m paying the professionals to do it for me, it needs to be quicker.
The important thing about that is the majority of the time, if you’re dealing with an SEO company, that first month is going to be doing a great deal of preparation.
They’re going to be doing a great deal of keyword research.
So they’re refraining from doing the majority of the work in that very first month.
It’s going to show up in your analytics, setting the stage for more substantial gains to come.
So you can anticipate that to happen in the month after.
The bigger question here is how long it will take if you’re employing an SEO business, or doing it yourself. Realistically, you’re going to desire to offer it about three months to about a year. It depends on your competition level.
How much work you’re putting into it or how much cash you’re paying the SEO company since time is cash.
So, usually speaking, the more you pay, the more output you obtain from your SEO supplier.
Do not give up. It’s not going to work right away. You are here to learn SOE and to aim for the long term and long-lasting results.
If you’re searching for faster outcomes, you’re probably going to wish to utilize paid traffic, you understand, Facebook ads and Google AdWords. SEO is a longer-term play that you’re not going to see results from right now.
Those results can last for a long time if you do the work and do it right.
Is it worth getting several backlinks from the same site?
There’s a great deal of common knowledge out there that says you should attempt to get as many links from as many different websites as possible.
It doesn’t help to get several links from the same website?
There’s a reality to this, and there’s kind of a false.
It’s much better to get links from a lot of different sites. However, we’re getting a second backlink, and the third backlink from the existing website assistance you? Yeah, just not as much.
And the reason this ends up being a question is that let’s state you’ve composed a post for a website, now you’ve got a relationship with that site owner.
It’s much easier to write a 2nd and a third article and get another link from that site than to go after a new blog.
So yeah, go all out. I would not opt for too many from the same website. But 2 or 3 or four is fine.
It’s reducing returns each time, however still important.
Is it ever okay to purchase links?
Hey, can I buy a link on your website?
I don’t like that.
You’re necessarily spending for links that way. You need to be cautious. Buying links like that because the quality can assist your site, or it can harm the site, depending on the kinds of relationships being constructed.
Let’s remind everybody that Google likes content-based links for EAT results!
How do I redesign a big website hundreds of pages on WordPress without hurting SEO and rankings?
If you’re redesigning, a big website you do have to redesign it page by page, there may be individual pages that are more templatized, that just kind of the old content will only go into the new templates, but what you’re asking about is it going to hurt search engine rankings.
So, not necessarily if you do it right so, there are a few ways you can redesign a site right.
The first way is just, it’s a static redesign the pages are going to look different, but it’s going to be the same content.
You are reshuffling everything and restructuring the content, which is a good thing to do because most of the clients come with less than optimal page structures.
What we wish to do is estimate what pages are necessary, what pages aren’t so appropriate, and then come up with a new structure.
So, the way you can get hit with Google rankings is, let’s say your ranking well, you’re at the top of the search engines, but you’re probably not there for every page, right.
So what you want to do first is identify your top pages, the pages where you get the most of your traffic, and you’re probably going to want to shield those pages URLs.
You can change the look and even the content on those pages, but if you’ve got a very popular page, you do not want to make a brand new page with broad changes.
What we can always recommend is do a 301 redirect. It sounds technical, but all it is, you can get a plugin for WordPress to do it.
The new page can be 95% as powerful as the original one with a redirect.
You have to think strategically about the pages when you’re redoing a website, and planning carefully if you’re already ranking well.
If a page is ranking well, you want to kind of preserve the text on that page as well.
You should never take a page a page with maybe 2000 words on it, and then condense it down to like 200 words, you’re probably going to lose a lot of that SEO power if you do it way.
WordPress design – Best web design solutions bespoke for your Business
You will use WordPress for my new website design.
Do you feel like WordPress sites get more recognition online, then say HTML s CSS sites, or is it all about how Google sees the site?
I’m guessing it’s because there are a lot of WordPress plugins that also make it easy for people.
But does it make it better than an HTML site?
If you do the same things necessary for Google to see it the same way?
I will tell you why you kind of don’t want to mess with an HTML CSS site anymore.
That’s not built on, you know, that kind of cut, you know, CMS.
So, WordPress is incredible because it allows you; it gives you control. If you’re not a techie, so you know Dom if you are someone if you’re a developer and you know HTML and CSS great that works for you.
But even if WordPress just makes it easy to kind of build in these templates and build it all out the way you want, and then really quickly duplicate a template, then add the content to it.
One of the main benefits of a WordPress site is that you have all this open-source material out there that you can get for free that other developers have come up with. These plugins can perform so many functions.
They can make your site faster. They can just hook up Google Analytics to it quickly.
They can optimize image sizes, in 2020, going into 2021, there are no reasons to be using a custom-coded HTML, CSS website anymore.
It just doesn’t make a lot of sense. And you’re creating a lot of extra work for yourself.
It really sounds to us very unfamiliar that you can manage to do it without making a big difference to Google (except for all those plugins that will help you because they’re just kind of optimizing for SEO in the background).
I guess in that way, it probably actually will help you rank in Google with WordPress, so no reason to go to the old school way.
What is your opinion on exact match domains?
Exact match domain: your domain name would be like the keyword phrase you’re trying to rank for.
So, let’s say, you’re a flower delivery shop in Auckland, for instance, an exact match domain would be flowerdeliveryAukland.com. So here’s the upside of an exact match domain. It still helps in Google searches.
Google claims that it doesn’t help anymore, but it does you know, Google, what Google says and what they reward, don’t always match up, so it will help you show up higher in a search.
The downside is it doesn’t look like a brand right, it does not sound like a real business.
We can say FlowerdeliveryAukland.com sounds kind of spammy, it doesn’t sound like a real business.
Not to mention the fact that if you’re a business you want a brand you can use for the long haul. And what you don’t want to do is have to switch your domain name later in the future because you’re building links to your site, building your website brand as an asset equity to your website.
The smarter thing is to use that descriptive local keywords flower, delivery, Auckland in your page description, and page title!
Is blogging still an essential part of the Google algorithm?
Is blogging still a critical thing to be able to rank in Google searches?
Yes, blogging actually can help you for a few reasons. So the first one is, it’s a simple one, Google just likes to see sites that are not stagnant.
They want to see websites that are adding content. Over time, and it only shows that you’re growing and that you’re actually like a real brand, so it helps for that reason, It also helps because think if you think of every blog post as another chance to be found in a search.
So think of questions that people might be typing into Google that you can answer in the form of a blog post.
That way, people don’t just have to find you. You know, through your homepage or your service pages, they can find you in all these different pages now, which is also a good thing.
Yeah, there might be specific industries where it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to have a blog like people aren’t looking for anything.
Naturally, there will evermore be people that have questions around just about any topic, even if it’s a boring topic.
There are still opportunities to write a blog post about that or make a video about it.
So, start planning that fantastic blog with me!
What speed optimization plugin do you recommend for WordPress?
Think about if you have a long homepage. If your web page takes 8, 9 seconds, or more, to load. Do you know who doesn’t like that?
People who come to your website and, consequently, the search engines.
What you want for them is a lovely experience when they get to your homepage. At least all the content loads very quickly.
Speed optimization plugins concentrate on loading only the things that are in view.
So, what are your asking which plugin I recommend?
A few.
There’s one called BJ lazy load.
There’s a plugin called smush SMU sh.
It compresses your images, which is great because if you have, you can have these lovely, beautiful images, but it compresses them in such a way that they still look good, but they take up a lot less space.
Does Google have a preferred between producing content and blog site format, versus developing pages with content?
What this means is, you know, any website has its sales pages, you understand, think about your homepage or your service pages. And after that, you’ve got a blog site, which is generally more helpful content.
Google does prefer certain types of material for certain types of searches. And you have to nail this down anywhere individuals are browsing. There’s generally one of 2 things that are going through their mind.
Google’s quite excellent at note matching up that buyer intent. Searches within sales pages or web pages for a company industry keyword.
When someone’s searching for some keyword that’ll get matched with an article.
When they’re searching for a keyword adding ”near me”, or a localization, that’s going to go to a different kind of search result. Most likely a mix of local business and website aggregators like Google my business, and Yelp.
I believe the more significant question you need to ask you need to address is you require to figure out what are individuals typing into Google. That’ll get you compared with them, and after that, create the ideal sort of material to match it.
If you believe you can get a bunch of individuals to your site by responding to concerns, then produce blog posts that assist them and enhance for those you know, near me, browses with your homepage. Google will inform you of the kind of content they like to push up for that particular search.
What do you think about buying legit evaluations from a site like a regional review?
Well, these kinds of evaluations assist with SEO.
What some companies do, once you put an order with them for reviews, they put a call out to regional freelancers in the location, who will compose these reviews, however, they have to be sort of around you because certainly, Google understands where individuals are.
If you’re getting reviews from India for your local shop, that’s going to seem fishy? They put a call out to all these customers in the area that does not rather sound legit to me.
That’s excellent if you’re paying for people to examine your company who have not used your company.
Prevent these situations. I believe that you must be pursuing legit reviews. It’s just ethical to do organization that way.
Reviews aren’t necessarily going to aid with SEO anyhow.
They can help rather with the Google Map listings. There is various Small factor in regards to actually where you show up in the listing exists.
But where they enter into play is if you are in there, and you have the most positive evaluations, your prominent people, individuals’ eyes will be drawn to your listing over the other ones, right?
So it’s not a lot about getting ranked there. It’s about getting individuals to select your listing, you know, real people selecting you over the other listings. That’s where reviews come into play.
72 Low-Budget Marketing Ideas – Perfect for Small Businesses
Do you have any recommendations for small businesses in specific niche markets that do not have much need for initial material?
I represent a nonprofit camp in Thailand. The majority of our clients are not thinking about material from us. They simply desire an outstanding location to go on a retreat.
Do these fancy blog site posts will just make sense in this case?
Do a little research to see what type of concerns people have that belong to what you offer.
In this case, there is a camp there like a retreat in Thailand. I would believe lots of people are most likely typing into Google browsing for perhaps the finest hiking tracks in Thailand.
So if you can compose an article like that, that can get some additional people to your website. You write that post with a bit of an advertorial angle there: perfect! It can be useful.
Another thing you can do with that kind of content is even if it’s tangentially related to what you do, you can end it with some sort of a content upgrade like a checklist, or something gets along the same lines, but a lot more important that they have to give you their email.
So it’s merely a matter of finding the overlap between your clients and the kind of material they’re looking for.
Give it to them.
And then, you can either get them on your email list, or you can retarget them with more direct advertisements. You know, Facebook retargeting advertisements or YouTube retargeting ads.
You can get backlinks by commenting on other websites’ blogs and adding a hyperlink to your website or landing page.
Does that work for backlinks?
Backlinks are among the most substantial signals for Google that a site that deserves to show up in search counts as a vote.
If adequate people connect to your website, Google says, Oh, this needs to be a reliable website.
But, going on blogs and entering into the remarks section, and merely commenting and leaving a link to your site? I would not advise that.
And here’s why. Of all, those links are what we call no-follow.
Now, do-follow links, really have that kind of power that I was discussing.
We call that link juice.
After that, there are no-follow links that do not offer any of those signals.
You’ve got a link, but Google doesn’t count it.
Those are no-follow links. And if you put a link in a comment, many people have what’s called an” Akismet Anti-Spam.” It’s a spam blocking widget for WordPress.
Most of these sites have that enabled now. So if you put a link in that comment, they’re going to filter it out as spam anyway, and here’s the other thing.
There are far better methods of getting a backlink visitor posting going on podcasts that example.
What will take place when we turn it to a safe HTTPS? Will they upgrade?
I have lots of backlinks to my HTTP site.
SO, now, if I alter, all those links are going to vanish. No, they’re not.
Google has gotten very savvy to it; they automatically reroute that nowadays.
Also, there are so many plugins. You can get on WordPress, that will take care of that for you.
So if anybody goes to any page on your old site, it reroutes to the brand-new safe and secure variation.
Google likes to press secure websites above other ones.
Go for it.
