6 questions every SEO is tired of hearing

If you work with SEO, you’ve heard it all before. Whoever you work with and whatever site you’re optimizing, these questions are almost guaranteed to come up. 

1. How Long Should a Text Be?

This is a tough question to answer – and to be honest – it’s impossible. Everything depends on the purpose of the page. Say that you’re creating a contact us page for your business, then you don’t need that much content: a telephone number, email address, physical address and then you’re pretty much done. Perhaps you throw in a chat option and that old fax number just for fun.

If your page is supposed to go through the 100 Years’ War, on the other hand, then you won’t get away with a couple of paragraphs to rank well in the search engines. In essence, recommended text length all depends on the topic and your competitors.  

2. I Saw That We Rank #5 for Keyword X, Why?

Pin pointing exact rankings is quite difficult nowadays and sometimes it’s even not that interesting. When someone types a search query in Google the result will depend – not only on the overall strength of the page in regards to the keyword – but also on the location of the searcher, previous activities, device being used etc.

So when someone says “we rank #5 for keyword X, why?”, the more interesting question would be “The site ranks #5 for keyword X under my particular circumstances, what can we say about that?”

3. I See That Our Search Visibility Has Increased/Decreased - Hooray!/Noooo!

Sometimes we pay a little too much attention to overall search visibility. Naturally it’s nice to see an upwards trend when it comes to visibility, but it doesn’t necessarily have to say anything about your business. 

Say that you sell clothes and introduce a jacket called Berlin. You then start getting impressions in search for the keyword “Berlin”.

Although your Google visibility may skyrocket, it doesn’t mean that everybody that searches for Berlin suddenly is interested in your jacket. In reality, only a fraction will be. Chances are that visibility trend will have little to no effect when it comes to sales performance.

4. Why Can't We Just Optimise the Start Page?

When we build websites, especially in the eCommerce segment, we often assume that the user will navigate from the start page, down through product categories, to actual products and the checkout page – a simple, smooth journey to conversion.

In reality people will often land all over the website, particularly if your brand isn’t that well known. The first impression a user gets of your website might be the start page, but it could also be a category page, product, article, video, blog post or any other page you have.

Therefore, we need to optimise different pages for different search intents and provide different customer journeys for different people.

5. What Keyword Density Should We Have?

Keyword density – i.e. the number of times you crowbar a keyword into the content in relation to the total number of words – is a long-lived topic for discussion. And the answer is, well, “don’t care too much about that.”

If you’re writing about a certain topic, looking at it from different angles trying to make the page as comprehensive as possible, you have to put a lot of effort into NOT getting the right keywords in. And then there’s no reason in repeating them in an unnatural way throughout the content.

6. How Long Does It Take Before I Will See Increased Rankings?

“Sorry, I’m a sensitive SEO and I can’t give you any clear answers. I can’t see into the future. Speak next week.”

Now getting back to your day-by-day SEO work, check out how to use site-search date yo improve your SEO strategy.