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SEO Toronto Specialists. What Is SEO? Your Top 50 Questions Answered By Our SEO Team
1) What Is Seo?
SEO stand for search engine optimization. It is the process of improving your site authority and value through content creation and PR to be worthy of the number 1 position on Google for a specific search phrase that your future ideal customer might type in. For example, if you are a renovations company, and your future customer goes on Google and types in “renovations company Toronto”, Google is going to scan all the websites and figure out which websites should rank from 1-10 in 1 millisecond. In order for your website to show up number 1 for a specific search query, you have to become an authoritative website for that topic. You can do this by creating high quality content on your website, and generally write a lot of content about all of your major niche topics.
Once you start creating content consistently, Google will start improving your rankings in the search results. Another thing Google looks at when determining your rankings is the quality and volume of reviews that your website has. Not the reviews that you copy and past onto your own website, but the ones on your Google Maps page. If your top competitor has 50, 5-star reviews, you want to have at least 60 5-star reviews. Basically, more than your top competitor. Next is you want to get press from other big websites that are related to your niche and have a large following. For example, if you are in renovations, consider getting your website mentioned in a renovations blog or any other industry specific blog that relates to your niche. Consider writing content for them in exchange for being featured in the blog. Think win-win.
2) How Long Does It Take To Rank #1
Keep in mind that doing SEO in Toronto is very competitive and most of your top competitors are actively working on improving their SEO. The good news is that most of them that reach the number 1 spot, start getting lazy or they fire their marketing team, thinking that they can just coast and keep their number 1 position. So, if you keep working on your site, you can at some point outrank them. Of course, this answer is very generalized as there are multiple factors that can change this answer but just to give you a range, it can take anywhere between 6 months to 1 year before you start showing up on the first page of Google. It really depends on how competitive your industry is and how fast you want to rank. More effort means faster results which = more financial investment.
3) How Many Keywords Should You Rank Number 1 For?
The best strategy when it comes to ranking for keywords is to first test and see if they are good keywords to rank for in the first place. By test we mean, use Google ads and test all your keywords and see what the quality of customers is for those keywords. After a few months of doing Google Ads, you will start to get a feel for the quality of leads you get from your test keywords, now is the time to start working on ranking those keywords that generated the best results. You want to test with Google AdWords first and then scale with SEO.
4) Which Keywords Can You Reasonably Rank For
The answer to this question depends on a lot of things, are you competing with local businesses in your area or are you competing with large directories like Yelp, Kijiji or Amazon, eBay etc. Depending on who your competition is will determine which keywords you can expect to rank for. But for most small businesses as long as you’re not competing with mega websites, you should be able to outrank them as longs as you are patient and constantly working on your SEO game. If you are a local business, Google always places local businesses in the “3-pack local results” section, that’s where you want to be.
5) How To Assess Your Competition
You can use very high-quality tools like SEMRUSH or MOZ to figure out how many backlinks some of your competing websites have, what landing pages they use, see the quality of links they have and that should give you an estimate as to how long it would take to outrank them. Do they have a YouTube channel with a huge following? If they have millions of followers (highly unlikely for small businesses) then It’s probably going to be tougher because YouTube videos also show up on the Google search results pages since Google owns YouTube. You basically want to match and outdo whatever your top 3 competitors are doing and you want to do it quick. It’s an uphill battle but once you rank number 1, your inbox is always going to be flooded with new high-quality leads & sales every single day.
6) What Is Black Hat Seo Vs White Hat Seo?
This refers to the techniques and strategies used to do any SEO work for your website. Black Hat means any technique or strategy that is considered highly risk and against the rules of Google, doing this could help your site get ranked #1 temporarily, but once your website gets caught by Google’s algorithms, your site could get removed from the index which is very very bad. White hat refers to any technique that is considered acceptable in the eyes of the search engines mainly Google.
7) How Often Does Google Update Which Websites Should Rank First?
Google could update the index of websites for any given keyword on a daily, weekly or monthly basis but regardless you should be working on your SEO, knowing that results take time. Ranking number #1 on Google is hugely important to any small business, either your internal team or external team (our Toronto SEO company) should be dedicating resources to make sure your website rankings are improving on a monthly basis.
8) Will Seo Work For My Business?
Once you submit an email to book a consultation with our Toronto SEO company, we will actually asses your niche and see if SEO is the right option for you. We do background research before meeting any of our future SEO clients, just to make sure the service we are going to discuss is actually the right fit for your particular business. If SEO is not the right fit for your business, then we usually recommend social media advertising like Facebook ads which is another great way to generate customers for businesses.
9) How Much Does Seo Cost?
SEO Toronto packages start at $1500/month but there is a specific type of client that we recommend for SEO. For example, when we take you on as a client, without exception we want to run paid Google ad campaigns for 1-3 months to test out all the keywords in your niche to see which ones actually generate revenue for your business. The last thing you want as a business owner is to rank #1 for a keyword and realize that it doesn’t generate good quality customers for your business. So, we essentially test with Google Ads first and then scale with Toronto SEO marketing.
10) How Do You Know If Seo Is Working For Your Business?
We install tracking tools to track the position of each keyword we are trying to rank your website for, so you can login at anytime and see the current position and see how much improvement each keyword has made in terms of ranking position. Once you start ranking within the top 3 links, you’ll start to notice more phone calls, emails and sales in your business.
11) If I Do Google Ads Does It Help With My Seo?
No, paying for Google ads is entirely separate and has no improvement on your rankings whatsoever. But it does let you know which keywords are worth doing SEO for. Ideally you want to do SEO and Google ads at the same time so you are getting the greatest number of customers possible to your business.
12) What Is Anchor Text?
Anchor text is any word or phrase in your content that is selected and linked to another page either on your website or another website. Usually the linked word or phrase will be in blue font color or underlined depending on what formatting the website owner used for the anchor text.
13) Does Social Media Help With Seo?
Yes, social media can help improve your SEO optimization in Toronto, for example when you create a new blog post, share it on your social media and start getting traffic and links to it immediately. Google does take your social media activity into consideration when it comes to ranking websites on the first page of Google. Having lots of followers and engagement on social media helps improve your odds of ranking number 1 for your desired keywords. Your online presence has to be well rounded.
14) What Are The Best Tools For People That Want To Try And Do Seo Themselves?
SEMRUSH
AHREFS
GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE
https://search.google.com/search-console/about
KWFINDER
MOZ
https://moz.com/products/pro/seo-toolbar
UBERSUGGEST
https://neilpatel.com/ubersuggest/
SPYFU
WOORANK
MAJESTICSEO
https://majestic.com/reports/majestic-million
GOOGLE TRENDS
https://trends.google.com/trends/?geo=US
SITELINER
15) Does My Domain Influence My Seo?
You want to make sure you have a unique domain name that is only used by your business. You don’t want to have competitors that have the .ca or .com version of your domain name as this will make it harder for both sites to compete for the same brand keyword. Make sure your domain is as unique as possible and not be a similar version of a domain that is already being used by another site as this will make it very hard for you to do SEO later on. Talk to our SEO Toronto team before purchasing a new domain for your business. We'll give you our best tips to help you get started.
16) What Is The Google Panda Update About?
The purpose of this update was for Google to improve the rankings of websites that posted lots of good quality content and to minimize the rankings of websites that had lots low quality or thin content.
17) What Was The SSL/HTTPS Update About?
Google wanted all websites to be secured so that consumers are better protected from hackers stealing their personal data. Websites that are “secured” and have the green lock icon beside the domain will get better ranking position than websites that do not have the lock icon. Make sure to get your website secured, its very inexpensive and most of the time its practically free or a couple bucks to add this feature to your website.
18) What Was The Google Penguin Update About?
The penguin update was designed to minimize the rankings of websites that Google deemed to be overly “spammy” and too much SEO optimization in Toronto. Basically, low quality sites trying to act like they were high quality sites. One of the main things this update accomplished was lowering the rankings of websites that had to much keyword stuffing within their content, essentially repeating their target SEO keyword to many times within the content to the point that it becomes annoying for the website visitors reading the content.
For example, our target keyword for this content is “SEO Toronto”, it would become very annoying to see this keyword inserted multiple times in every single sentence, that was the purpose of the update, to help discourage this type of behaviour among Toronto SEO experts.
19) What Is Mobilegeddon?
This term refers to the new update Google announced. They were going to make changes to their algorithm that basically stated that websites that were mobile optimized are going to be given better rankings than websites that did not have a mobile website. Anytime Google launches an update, it’s for the benefit of improving the user experience and to lower the rankings of websites that violate its policies and best practises. Google updates helps keep SEO Toronto specialists that follow the rules with better rankings and the ones that constantly break rules with lower rankings.
20) What Are Inbound Links?
Inbound links refers to links from other websites that link to your website home page or any specific page on your website that the previous website thought was relevant.
21) What Are Article Submissions?
As you do your SEO marketing you will find that in order to get featured on other “bigger” websites, you are going to need some form of content, getting links from other authoritative sites is a big part of improving your SEO marketing. Sometimes those websites that you reach out to will want you to write your own article and guest post or they will write one for you.
Before you submit your article to any site, check out the site in detail to get a feel for the quality of the website, if you feel like it’s a scammy looking website that is poorly done, don’t submit anything as this is a waste of your effort, however if the website or blog seems legit then go ahead and submit an article for them to feature you. Go after quality legit websites and not scammy looking websites.
22) What Are Guest Posts?
Guest posts generally refer to websites that allow outside writers to write and publish quality content on their site in exchange for a link back to the writers website. This is a popular tactic used by Toronto SEO consultants. As long as the website linking to you is a good quality website that is relevant to your niche they go ahead and get those guest posts uploaded.
23) What Are Image Alt Texts?
Any image that you upload on your website, you have the ability to add a short title and description of the image so that Google knows what the image is about. By doing this, you also improve the odds of your images showing up on Google Images for phrases that you’ve selected in your image.
24) What Are Internal Links?
Internal links are links between the pages of your website, for example if a page on your website talks about web design, within your content if you start talking about Toronto SEO marketing, you could have the word SEO in your content link to a page that talks about SEO in greater detail, these are called internal links. For best practises you always want to interlink your content with other relevant content on your website.
25) What Are Organic Results?
When you do a google search, the top 4 links that say the word “AD” are paid to be there, you as a business owner can pay to have your website show up in those spots. Any website below the “AD” section is called the organic results, meaning they are non-paid. To show up on the organic results you need to do more Toronto SEO marketing.
26) What Is A Directory Submission?
No matter what industry you are in chances are there is a directory that’s specifically designed to list a website like yours. For example, if you have a renovations company, go on Google and type in “renovation directories” and look for good directories to submit your website to. This can bring meaningful traffic to your business and let the search engines know that you are a real business, since you are linked from larger “trusted” websites.
27) What Are Long Tail Keywords?
Long tail keywords refer to keyword phrases that included 2 or more keywords in them. For example, the keyword “Top 10 restaurants in the Greater Toronto Area” would be considered a long tail keyword. Generally speaking long tail keywords are much easier to rank for then shorter keywords due to high competition. However shorter keyword do have more search volume so you want to keep your keyword diversity balanced.
28) What Is an Exact Match Domain?
Exact match domain is referred to domains that contain high traffic keywords. Google has made an update to make sure no exact match domain is given extra ranking consideration when it comes to SEO. So, if you were planning on buying one or someone is trying to sell it to you, I would suggest you to stay away. Also, for branding purposes its very limiting incase you want to expand your business to offer other services having an exact match domain is going to limit your branding.
29) What Is A “Do Follow” Or “No Follow” Link?
Let’s say a big blog from your niche decides to mention you in their blog post as a do follow link, Google will see this and might give you a boost in rankings depending on the quality of the site, basically the more trusted websites link to you the better. No, having millions of irrelevant fake, scammy websites linking to you will not help you. Keep quality in mind. Many Toronto SEO marketing companies believe that If a website gives you a no-follow link that Google will not count that link and won’t give you any boost. Lots of Toronto seo firms believe that no-follow links can still be of some benefit if the relevancy is there meaning the site that links to you is relevant to the topic that your website is about.
From our perspective it's perfectly fine to have both “do follow” links and “no-follow” links as long as they are from legitimate websites and not “bad” websites. Keep a good mixture of both, since having 100% do follow links looks unnatural in the eyes of the search engines.
30) How Often Should I Do SEO?
SEO is a never-ending task and you should be doing it consistently if you want to keep your number 1 position on Google or if you simply want to improve your rankings. Always keep doing as much SEO as possible because it’s getting more and more competitive as the number of competitors increases. Defend your position at all costs.
31) Should You Hire Someone To Do Your SEO?
The answer is depending on your current situation. If you want to build a big business very quickly then you probably don’t have the time to learn SEO and to actually do the work yourself. You have to figure out what your opportunity cost is. If you are running your business as a hobby then by all means go to the local bookstore and pick up any SEO book and get started, but if you run a full-time business and you need to get results, hire an agency like ours to do your SEO for you.
32) Does Having A Mobile Website Help With My Seo?
Yes, having a mobile website is a must-have, when people go on their phones and search, they want to see mobile-optimized websites, Google knows this and only shows relevant mobile-optimized websites on the first page of Google.
33) How Much Should I Write To Improve My SEO?
Anytime you talk to a local SEO Toronto specialist, they will all agree that the more the better, let’s say you have 10 keywords that you would like to rank for, consider writing 2000+ words of good quality content about each keyword, don’t plagiarize but feel free to look at other blogs for content inspiration, once you do that be sure to link to other relevant articles related to your topic that could be of value to your audience. Next, try and get other websites to link to your piece of content as long as their website is related to the topic that you are writing about.
34) Do You Need To Know How To Code In Order To Perform SEO?
This answer depends if your website is custom coded on WordPress or built with the help of a website builder. If your website is built using a website builder then you don’t have to worry about anything super technical but if your site is coded, you’ll want to ask your web developer or your Toronto SEO consultant to make basic updates for you on a regular basis.
35) If I Do SEO Am, I Guaranteed To Rank Number #1 On Google? Or Can A Digital Marketing Agency Guarantee A Number #1 Spot?
The answer to this question will vary depending on how competitive your industry is and who you are competing with. If you are in a local city and your competitors are barely doing any SEO optimization in Toronto, then as your seo agency, we can probably get your site ranked number #1 fairly quickly, however if your competitor has been aggressively working on their search engine optimization for the last 6 years then you are going to have to wait, you may get the number 2 spot or the number 3 spot, we don’t know the exact timeline of when your site will rank, no one knows, this is a very long-term strategy that has to be done for a very long period of time (depending on your industry).
That’s why it's good to leave this as a long-term strategy but in the short term you are working on your Google Ads campaigns, Facebook Ads campaigns generating weekly sales to keep your business going, while your Toronto SEO marketing is being worked on in the background. We never recommend doing SEO first, it's always good to do paid advertising online first and then allocating a certain budget towards SEO. If you commit to it, you will rank, no one knows the exact time that you will rank. Before our "SEO Toronto" consultation we’ll give you some data on your competitors and give you a rough estimate as to how long it could take to rank your site.
36) Which Search Engine Gets The Most Traffic?
As of now Google has about 80% market share, Bing is the second highest and Yahoo is the 3rd. We personally like to focus our efforts on Google first for any small business. Once we rank number 1 on Google for all major keywords another great search engine is YouTube which is also owned by Google.
37) Do You Need To Continue Doing SEO Once You Rank Number #1 For All Your Terms?
Absolutely, once you rank number #1 on Google, you have to work hard to protect your first-place rankings, this means keep pumping more content and keep upping your game. Your competitors are working hard to outrank you, make sure you outdo them each time and eventually they will give up.
38) Can You Do SEO For A Video On YouTube?
Videos are another great SEO marketing strategy for any business and in order to get your video ranked higher, you need to use good titles, good descriptions and a word for word transcript of your video. Use a tool like https://www.rev.com which will take the audio of your video and convert it into text. Also having your videos linked to is another great idea. Generally, with new channels your progress is going to be slow, but once you are consistent with your content your authority will improve.
39) What Is Duplicate Content?
Let’s say that you spend hours writing new content, after publishing your blog post, another website owner takes your content and posts it on their website. This is called duplicate content and Google will penalize their site for essentially stealing content from another site. You will get the SEO benefit and they wont. So, make sure you never steal content from another website. As a local Toronto SEO company, we always warn our customers to not use any duplicate content as this could hurt our efforts. We always use a tool called Grammarly to scan all content to make sure it is not plagiarized from any source. www.grammalry.com
40) Should You Do Google Ads Instead Of SEO?
We always recommend to do both as this gives you the opportunity to show up 2x on the first page of Google, as a local Toronto SEO company we specialise in both SEO and Google Ads. This gives you the best chance of getting the most customers to your business.
41) What Are Some Of The Worst SEO Tactics That You Should Avoid At All Costs?
As a local SEO company in Toronto, people often ask us if doing the following strategies, will help with their SEO marketing. Some strategies include keyword stuffing, 1) repeating the same word billion times in your content, 2) copying blogs or any writing from another site, 3) hiding text using the color of your background in your text, 4) getting links from shady and spammy websites.
As long as you don’t do any of these tactics, you should be fine. Just to be on the safe side, ask yourself this, would Google consider this tactic “bad” remember Google wants to give the number 1 spot to the website that deserves it, focus on becoming a website that deserves number the #1 ranking, rather than spending your energy trying to trick Google. Don’t fake quality, be quality.
42) What Is The Difference Between SEO & Google Ads?
Over 70% of people click on websites in the organic section of the first page, meaning SEO and 30% click on the top links also known as the “paid results” or PPC or Google ads. Essentially, it’s the same page but with SEO you don’t pay per click, with Google ads you pay per click.
43) What Is Domain Authority?
This is basically a score that is assigned to your website (developed by MOZ) that rates your site importance in the eyes of the search engines. Basically, the more quality Toronto SEO marketing work you do, the higher your domain authority becomes overtime. You want to be in a position where other websites with higher domain authority are linking to your site who also happen to be relevant to your niche.
44) What Is The Most Important Ranking Factor Google Looks At When Ranking Websites?
The truth is there are lots of important factors that need to be take into consideration and done correctly for example, you need great content, great reviews, great backlinks, good domain history, good social signals, good website in order to rank well on search engines. All elements play their respective role and you need to excel in all of them to rank well, you can’t do 1 and forget the rest.
45) Should I Only Go After “Do Follow” Links And Ignore Websites That Give Me “No Follow” Links?
Absolutely not, if you have the opportunity to get a quality link from a major website or blog that only gives “no follow” links, go for it. Just because it’s no follow does not mean you can’t get quality traffic from it that could result in revenue. Also, it’s unnatural for a website to only have “do follow” links and no “no follow” links. Have both as this will make your link profile look more natural.
Here Are The Best Blogs To Follow If You Would Like To Learn More About SEO
Search engine land
Search engine journal
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/
Search engine watch
https://searchenginewatch.com/
Neil Patel’s Blog
Content marketing institute
https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/
HubSpot
Other Great Websites That Talk About SEO
https://mytasker.com/blog/seo-interview-questions-and-answers/
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/seo-faqs-list-ht
https://www.wordstream.com/articles/seo-faq
https://career.guru99.com/top-35-seo-interview-questions/
https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-top-SEO-questions
https://seopressor.com/blog/common-seo-questions-you-should-know/
https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2013/07/24/follow-nofollow-links