Tips for SEO – FAQs, best practices & common mistakes

SEO marketing is a hot topic in 2024! As an SEO agency, we do get a lot of questions from our clients before we even start on the project. Some people play around with SEO themselves a little bit, others want to know how to get started, and then there’s also the group of people who don’t care about SEO at all.

This article will go over the most frequently asked questions we received from clients or bad-practices we see on the website we need to take care of. If you have a question yourself that is not answered on this page, feel free to leave a comment or ask us directly!

If you’re looking for an SEO company, please read our Tips & Tricks on finding the best SEO company for your business!

1. What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It optimizes your website for a better ranking in the search results of Google, Bing, Duckduckgo, … When people are looking for specific items regarding your business or services, you want to rank as high as possible. This increases your chances of customers finding you!

2. How much does SEO cost?

The cost of an SEO strategy depends on a few things. How intense do you want to invest in SEO? Do you need new copywriting or translations or are you looking for a technical upgrade?

As SEO never sleeps, it requires a monthly effort to keep track of your current rankings and the position changes of your competitors. Your SEO budget can go from $100 for position & keyword tracking to a few $1000 for upgrading in competitive markets.

3. What is the ideal article length for SEO?

You might have read somewhere that an article should be around 350 – 400 words. If you are writing a blog for fun, then this is totally fine. But it’s total nonsense when you want to write for SEO. The ‘ideal’ length of your article depends on the competition for your targetted keywords and the type of content you’re creating. Is it a service page? A blog post? A landing page for a specific keyword?

4. Can I do SEO myself?

Of course you can! But be aware that you can also do it badly and harm your site instead. If you want to do it professionally and need to compete for high-value keywords we don’t suggest diving in yourself. You will need ranking tools and technical experience to make sure the visibility of your website goes in the right direction.

SEO tools to track your keyword ranking, search volumes, competitors, keyword cost, … are expensive tools that offer a lot of SEO insights. When you want to do SEO, buying those tools isn’t really worth it most of the time. You’ll only be using a small % of what those tools can offer you.

Optimizing your website for SEO also takes a lot of time. If you can afford to dedicate a few hours/days a month for SEO then you can definitely give it a shot!

5. What are SEO landing pages?

When you want to target specific SEO keywords or locations you can create a dedicated landing page. This page will only focus on that keyword and service. Because this page goes deeper into that keyword, it will have a higher weight and rank easier in search engines.

A popular example is location. When you are into real estate and sell houses, you can create landings pages for each area you’re selling in. Apartments in Texas, Apartments in New York, Apartments in Brussels, … This will increase your chances of people finding you when they’re looking for an apartment in New York.

6. How to find good SEO keywords?

To find good SEO keywords I suggest you look up some keyword tracking tools. These tools will give you useful insights into search volume and how people are looking up certain things.

You can use tools like Semrush, Ubersuggest, Google Keyword Planner, AHrefs, … There are a lot of keyword tools out there, some are even free!

At Weichie we use the following tools for keyword analysis:

Semrush
Semrush has a fantastic ‘Keyword Magic Tool’ and offers the best project tracking for our clients & their needs.
UberSuggest
Great to find keyword alternatives. The tool spits out related keywords, keyword suggestions, questions regarding your keywords, and much more!
Google Keyword Planner
With the Google keyword planner, we can analyze search volumes on specific keywords based on language and location

7. What’s the difference between SEO and SEA (organic vs. paid)?

While SEO will keep your overall website healthy and up-to-date, SEA can simply buy you a spot at the top rankings for your keywords. The biggest difference is when you stop doing marketing, your website and business will lose all of their online visibility.

SEO is a slower process and takes time to get you the visibility you want. But when you decide not to continue with SEO anymore, your website’s visibility will remain. (depending on the competition on your keywords of course)

8. What are the meta descriptions and do they still matter?

Meta descriptions are still one of the most important tags in SEO! They help search engines learn what your page is about and for what keywords or search intent you want to rank.

The meta title & description is also the first preview of your website people will see in Google. Make sure you use catchy phrases or a strong introduction. The more people click on your snippet in the search result, the higher you will rank!

9. Should I buy more domains that include keywords?

This probably worked 10 years ago, but the modern search engines look for domain authority. Using multiple domains will lower your domain authority.

If your brand name or website does have branded keywords in them, then that’s not a problem at all. We just wouldn’t recommend buying keyword-stuffed domain names.

10. What’s the difference between internal and inbound links?

Internal links are links on your website to another page on your own website. Such as related articles or suggested products.

Inbound links are links from other websites to your website. In WordPress, those are called ‘pingbacks’. Depending on which site is linking to yours, those backlinks are very valuable.

11. Do outbound links help SEO?

Linking out to other websites is recommended for SEO. Same as for inbound links, it does matter to what site you’re linking to. The higher the domain rating of the outbound link the better.

Don’t create links just for the sake of linking. The outbound link also needs to be relevant to the content on your own page.

12. What are backlinks?

A backlink is another name for an inbound link. It’s a link created when one website links to another.

13. What is robots.txt? And where can I find it?

Robots.txt is a text file on your server/domain that tells search engines which pages on your website they can or cannot crawl. Pages that are not crawled won’t show up in the search results.

The robots.txt file can be found if you type yourdomain.com/robots.txt and can only be placed in the root of your domain. Not having this file present can result in your entire site ending up on Google.

It’s up to the search engines to honor this request.

14. What is a sitemap? And where can I find it?

A sitemap is a link-list of all the pages that are available on your website and that need to be crawled by search engines. If you don’t have a sitemap it will take search engines longer to crawl your entire website.

Depending on your used CMS, plugin, or sitemap format, most of the time your sitemap will also be found on the root of your domain.

For Weichie, it can be found here: weichie.com/sitemap_index.xml

15. How can I see what pages are indexed?

You can check your Google Index status through the Google Search Console. It will show you what pages are indexed and if Google found any errors on those index pages that need fixes.

If you’re unsure whether or not a page is indexed you can enter your domain name in the search bar at the top. Here you can see if the page has errors, or queue your page for a re-index when something changed.

16. I moved my website to a new domain. Does this affect SEO?

Yes! When you move your website, make sure all redirects are set up correctly. Put 301, 302, or 305 redirects on existing pages that were moved and put correct 404 errors on the pages that actually got deleted.

After moving your website you also need to let Google (or other search engines) know your site got moved. This will quicken up the process of Google picking up your website got moved.

Don’t redirect 404’s to your homepage!

17. I made a change to a webpage, how can I reindex?

You can reindex a webpage on your website through the Google Search Console (see FAQ #15). Entering your page in the search console bar gives you the option to add your page to the index queue of Google.

You can use this function when something changed on your webpage.

18. How long does it take to see my changes appear in Google?

This depends on your domain rating, traffic, and frequency of changes on your website. The time it takes for Google to pick up your new website or changes on your existing website can go from a week weeks to a few months.

19. Should I hire someone to do my SEO?

If you’re thinking about hiring an SEO, the earlier the better. A great time to hire is when you’re considering a site redesign or planning to launch a new site. That way, you and your SEO can ensure that your site is designed to be search engine-friendly from the bottom up. However, a good SEO can also help improve an existing site.

Whether you decided on hiring or not, be committed to implementing the recommended changes. Making the changes recommended by an SEO takes time and effort; if you aren’t going to take the time to make these changes, it’s not worthwhile hiring a professional

20. What are some good SEO goal examples?

Depending on your site or business, SEO goals can be pretty different. The most popular one is definitely ranking #1 in Google. But SEO goals can be a higher conversion rate, more online visibility, outranking specific competitors, or get your product listed as a product-snippet.

Make sure to set realistic SEO goals for your business and the field you’re competing in.

21. How to edit SEO in WordPress?

For WordPress, there’s a very good free SEO tool we install by default on all our projects: Yoast SEO. It helps you with the meta tags, internal/external linking, and even with copywriter suggestions. The plugin is free to use and has a premium version if you decide on going for an all-in-one SEO solution.

22. How to edit SEO in Shopify?

For Shopify, we use another SEO tool to do the heavy lifting on the content-side: AVADA SEO Suite. This helps you go through the SEO checklist with ease for every new project or page you add to your website.

23. What about SEO for other platforms?

While SEO strategies are the same for every website, they all have different methods of implementation. The content part remains the same as this is independent of the platform. The technical aspect of SEO might require someone with good knowledge of the platform you’re using.

Weichie can perform technical SEO updates for WordPress, WooCommerce, Shopify, BigCommerce, Drupal, Craft CMS, or headless frameworks.

24. What about marketing?

Weichie.com also offers Marketing & SEA solutions for Google and Social Media. We can align your marketing campaigns together with your SEO campaigns as they will mostly target the same keywords.

If you’re looking to find another marketing agency, you can have a look at the following list of Digital Marketing Agencies

Conclusion

Still, stuck with some questions about SEO? Feel free to leave a comment on this post and we will respond to you or add your question to this list!