Have a question about SEO? Get your questions answered here:
So you’re thinking about doing SEO or are already doing it, but you have some burning SEO questions about the hows and whys of this digital strategy. Here are some of the most frequently asked SEO questions answered.
1. What is the cost of SEO?
SEO prices can vary greatly depending on who is providing the service, and there is a reason for this. Companies that offer SEO at extremely low prices are more likely to cut corners, use ‘black-hat’ techniques, or employ poor SEO strategy, resulting in penalties, traffic decreases, and spam for unsuspecting business owners. Prices for agencies are typically higher, but you are paying for their experience, ethics, and effectiveness.
Consider the cost of doing SEO yourself on a yearly basis:
SEO strategist: $100,000 +
Coder/Developer: $55,000 +
Technologist: $50,000 +
Coordinator/Reports: $40,000 +
Salaries/Fees: $245,000 +
For small or medium-sized businesses, the cost of a comprehensive in-house SEO strategy can easily exceed $245K per year! Agencies can provide their resources, expertise, and team at a lower cost than maintaining an in-house team and with less risk than outsourcing to a lower-cost company.
2. How long will it take for me to achieve rankings once I begin SEO?
SEO is not a quick-fix strategy. The first few months are spent updating your website and waiting for search engine spiders to crawl and index the changes. It typically takes 3-9 months to see new rankings, depending on your website, the amount of work required, and the crawl frequency of the search engine spiders.
3. How long will it take for SEO to increase traffic?
An increase in rankings usually results in an increase in traffic. When your rankings begin to rise, you will notice a gradual increase in traffic to your website. Keep in mind that new rankings and traffic are not instantaneous; it takes a few months to complete the necessary updates and have them indexed before you start seeing these increases.
4. Should I do PPC as well?
Pay Per Click is a great way to supplement your SEO efforts and can help increase relevant traffic. A good agency will recommend PPC on a case-by-case basis, based on your specific website, industry, and the competitiveness of the keywords you want to target.
5. Why should I keep doing SEO after I’ve achieved good rankings?
Getting to the top of the rankings is only half the battle. Because search engines’ algorithms are constantly evolving and updating, your rankings may fluctuate from one day to the next. Maintaining current rankings is just as difficult as obtaining new ones; it requires ongoing research, updates, and testing to keep your URL ranked at the top. Discontinuing SEO after you’ve achieved rankings will result in a rapid loss of rankings.
6. Isn’t it possible to buy links?
Although link building is an important aspect of SEO, purchased links and links from spammy or ‘bad neighborhood’ websites can actually harm rather than help your rankings. Search engines are always on the lookout for links like these. In fact, Google’s ‘Penguin’ algorithm updates are primarily aimed at penalizing sites that obtain links unnaturally through link exchange schemes, purchasing links, or having links from spam sites. Recovering from a link penalty is difficult and can result in significant traffic losses.
7. Can you guarantee my SEO rankings?
Ethical SEO agencies cannot guarantee something over which they have no control, and be wary of any company that claims to be able to. Because search engines are constantly evolving, there is no way to know how a site will rank 100 percent of the time, and guaranteeing rankings would be unethical. Be wary of companies that claim to have a special relationship with Google or that they can ‘priority submit’ to Google in order to guarantee ranking positions. This is completely false and untrue, and Google warns businesses against making such claims.
8. Can you help me rank for broad terms like “lawyer”?
General terms are extremely competitive and would be extremely expensive to rank for due to the time and resources required to achieve rankings for such a broad term. Another reason we advise against targeting broad terms is relevancy. If you are a lawyer in Wisconsin, traffic from Arizona is probably unimportant to your practice. It is more cost-effective and practical to target terms related to your company’s location.
9. Which search engines receive the most traffic?
Google receives the vast majority of search traffic, accounting for approximately 67 percent of total searches. Bing comes in second with approximately 17 percent, followed by Yahoo with approximately 12 percent, and the remaining Search Engines all total approximately 4 percent.
10. How frequently do search engines update their algorithms or search equations?
Only the search engine engineers know the exact answer, but Google’s head of Web Spam, Matt Cutts, has been quoted as saying that more than 500 updates are made each year. Because search engines are constantly evolving and changing, it is critical to stay on top of the changes, make constant updates on our end, and only use ethical and sustainable strategies.
Please contact us if you have any additional questions about SEO that we did not address in this article or if you would like a free SEO consultation for your website.
