Zahins SEO questions and answers
01. What is SEO?
SEO or Search Engine Optimization involves everything you can do in order to obtain a better position on search engines’ (like Google) results and thus get found more easily. SEO encompasses in particular (but not limited to): adding SEO titles and descriptions to your pages, adding alt text to your images, getting backlinks to your site, creating a free blog, fixing intent issues such as pogo sticking and more.
In general SEO as a marketing strategy is often divided into two main types - technical SEO and content SEO. One deals with the site health of your website and web pages, the other with your sites content, how well it ranks and generates traffic and how it could be better optimized to do that.
02. What’s the difference between SEO and SEM?
Both SEO and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) involve increasing a site’s visibility on search results. The main difference is that SEM includes paid promotion tactics and SEO does not.
Examples of SEM include Google Ads, the ones that appear on the top of each search page above the organic results are one kind of these. These are paid ads decided by a combination of intent and keyword bidding tactics.
03. Why is SEO important for my business?
Fact: everyone uses search engines. On any given day more than 8.5 billion searches occur on the internet. From checking the weather to finding the nearest pizza place, search engines play a key part in our daily lives. In most cases, it’s how your prospective customers are looking for you, or a business like yours.
Which means that search engine optimization is crucial to survive and succeed online. Think of the proverbial tree in the woods: If your website is online and no one can find it, does it even exist? Our advice: make sure your website doesn’t have an existential crisis, and work on your SEO.
From increased brand visibility, to appearing in the same search results as competitors, to generating organic traffic users, and new customers - SEO should be a key part of your marketing efforts.
04. How much should I pay for good SEO?
We believe that good SEO is achievable without breaking the bank. The good news is you don’t need to hire an expensive professional service to do your SEO. There is a lot of material online that can help you learn about DIY optimization techniques.
The other is creating a website, with a builder like Wix which integrates SEO features right into your site. This includes a dynamically generated sitemap, connection with Google Search Console for fast indexing, custom and auto generated meta tags as well as lots more.
Potential SEO interview questions
05. How do search engines work?
In short, search engines use an advanced set of algorithms in order to crawl, index and pull up web pages.
The first stage is called ‘crawling’, which is basically the process of scanning through or reading your website’s code.
In the second stage, the web pages that were crawled are saved in a huge database. This is called ‘indexing’.
The last part happens once someone enters a query in the search box. The search engine will consult that same database and will show the web pages it deems most relevant for that specific search.
It's important to know that google's search algorithm does go through updates, some minor and some major. These changes can have an impact on how it rates content in order to rank it. Staying abreast of google algorithm updates is an important part of any SEO strategy and likely to come up during an SEO interview.
06. Do I need to know how to code to do SEO?
Absolutely not. But then you also don’t even need to know how to code to create a website nowadays. Knowing the fundamentals of HTML can help in understanding web page structure, but you certainly don’t need to enroll in a Computer Science 101 course if you want to rank higher on Google.
Looking to expand into technical SEO? A knowledge of code and markup languages will be more useful as you grow in experiencing - just in terms of being able to interpret what's wrong technically with a website, is easier if you can read the language in which it was built. But still, not an absolute must.
07. What is local SEO?
Local SEO refers to specific actions taken in order to appear in search results when someone is looking for a business in your area, for example “shoe repair in Williamsburg.” Boosting your local SEO is a great way of attracting prospective customers from your surroundings as, ironically enough, most of them are looking for you online. One of the best practices includes signing up to online directories, such as Google Business Profile. This will allow your business to show up on Google Maps, and you’ll have a better chance of showing up in the so called ‘Local Pack’ (the three results you see below the map on search results).
SEO questions to help you scale
08. How do I get found on Google?
First things first, you’ve got to make sure your website is crawled and indexed if you want to climb the search engine echelons. Here are the steps you need to take to get your business found on Google:
Verify your site with Google Search Console Google Search Console (previously Google Webmaster Tools) is a free service provided by Google for website owners. Verifying your website with GSC is considered an SEO best practice and will make it possible for Google to understand you are the site owner. Plus, Google Search Consoles provides you with valuable information about your website, such as: amount of impressions on search results, amount of clicks and your position for certain keywords.If you’re a Wix user, we’ve outlined the process of verification in this step-by-step guide.
Submit your sitemap A sitemap is in simple terms a plan of your website. It shows how your different pages are connected to one another. It’s useful to send a sitemap to search engines so that they can crawl your website more easily and quickly, which will improve your overall SEO.
Test it out The easiest way to check if your site is indexed is to enter ‘site:yourwebsitemame.com’ in the searchbox of Google and see if anything comes up. If your pages come up in the result, it means that your website is indexed. Don’t freak out if you don’t see results immediately as the indexing process can take some time.
