The leading issue in trying to answer that question is that there are plenty of things that factor in – including but not limited to, the type of business, industry, marketing strategies, and web design. Simply put, figuring out how long it takes for SEO to work is relative to how it is done in the first place. 

We’ve dealt with several businesses in the past who already had impractical expectations before coming in; they ask head-on if we can help them produce results in a couple of months because that is the ideal time frame they hear from their peers.

How Long Does SEO Take to Work?

The Truth About SEO

Sadly, for them and any future client, we tell them that SEO doesn’t walk on a straight line. In other words, there’s no uniform system or set of rules that govern how strategies should work and what methods should be avoided. 

Key in the term “SEO tips” in Google, and you are bombarded with thousands of opinions from everyone claiming to be experts. While there is nothing wrong with the overabundance of information, we take issue on those who cash in on misinformation, particularly about SEO campaigns that produce results in no time. 

You’re here because you want to know the truth. Don’t get me wrong – We’re not dissuading you from investing in SEO. You’re here for a reality check, and that is what we’re giving you.

Don’t worry if you are confused or scared. Everyone feels the same way when they ponder how long it’ll take for SEO to work. But before we delve on to the factors that affect the timeline and results, let’s make sure you know the basics of SEO. 

What is SEO?

SEO deals with the optimization of the pages of a website in a way that achieves favorable rank in the search engine results pages (SERPS). It stands out from all other strategies with the same objective because it involves the use of free or “organic” methods. 

SERPs contain links to pages, listings, videos, and other stuff that are relevant to a specific keyword phrase or search term. The results are ranked using an algorithm designed based on the search intent of the user. 

SEO has the most impact on a website’s ranking, but it is a broad concept that is better understood by two attributes – on-page SEO and off-page SEO. 

On-Page SEO

The only way to understand on-page SEO is by learning how a search engine like Google operates. It was mentioned earlier that search engines embrace an algorithm to examine content and rank pages through them. Google gathers content by using spiders or crawlers.

Search engines use a database (indexes) to save pertinent website info, including URLs. So, when someone searches “signs of a roof replacement,” Google displays results based on its indexes. 

On-page SEO deals with optimizing a page on a website. The search engines take multiple factors into account when ranking pages. These factors include keyword use and stemming, internal links and anchor texts, mobile responsiveness, and distribution of page authority, to name a few. 

Off-Page SEO

This is often called “link building,” for a good reason. Off-page SEO describes the process of creating a reputable inbound link profile for a website by using:

• high-authority
• relevant
• trustworthy links from other websites.

The reason why it is called “off-page” is that the work done is outside of the website. An excellent example is when you ask an authority site in the roofing industry to link to your blog post about the signs that a roof needs replacement.

When Will You See Results from Your Campaign?

Irrespective of the chosen SEO strategy, it takes time to see the results after the implementation. If you’re desperate to know how long you should wait, then the most sensible projection is four to seven months.

This is the period when you begin to see results. In other words, we’re not saying you achieve utter success in less than a year. 

The reason why we’d always come up with this modest projection is that there is a bevy of factors that affect the development of your campaign. We discuss these factors below:

Age

Being a newbie is the biggest challenge for every website trying to climb up to the search engine results pages. It’s like when you’re vying a job straight out of college, and everyone looks at you as an inexperienced prospect with a lot of risks and a few upsides.

For the most part, it takes Google a couple of months to index a newly published site. In other words, age plays a crucial factor in figuring out how long you have to wait for your website to appear on the first page of SERPs.

There are ways to help speed up your progress, i.e., obtaining links from authority sites (off-page SEO). Doing so means convincing high-ranking and relevant sites to link to you. If you’re successful in getting these links to your pages, you’re telling Google to index your site quicker. 

History

Age and history are two different things SEO’s perspective. The former refers to the time that your site has been published on the web. While the latter talks about your site’s interaction history with the search engines.

Google hands out a score on every page of a website based on factors such as trustworthiness and reputability. This score or rating exemplifies your site’s propensity to climb in the search engine rankings. Hence, the higher score your page gets, the more likely faster the climb to the first page of Google will be.

Penalties

We said earlier that there is no set of strict guidelines or rules in SEO. But don’t think Google and other search engines won’t penalize black hat strategies.

Google hates websites that break its rules, although there’s no existing document that details these rules. Any decent individual with minimal background in SEO knows what it means to break the rules.

For example, procuring backlinks from shady and spammy sources, posting duplicate content, and keyword stuffing.

If you’ve engaged in any of those black hat techniques before, it means your site has a tainted reputation online. Google and other search engines won’t forget previous penalties when they rank pages. But like everything in life, there’s always a second chance to redeem yourself. 

Final Words

SEO is a lot more complicated than most people think, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Instead of probing into how long does SEO take to work, the best approach is to set realistic goals. And then establish an effective plan based on them. Instead of focusing on the time frame, you should weigh on the factors that affect your campaign. 

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Thankfully there are tons of free ways you can check different SEO attributes and rankings which can save you both time and money. Here are some of our favourites at Rad websites.

1) Small SEO Tools (Free)

This site is one of the best Free SEO Tools out there because it has all types of free tools you can use in order to do keyword research, site analysis and even check your competition. A part from Google’s own tools, this is probably the best you can get without entering in your credit card information. While you can’t go as deep as some of the paid tools, Small SEO Tools is great for people who want to be able to fix some of the more common SEO issues without spending a ton of time and effort.

How To Use This Tool

Enter your website into any of the offered tools but I would recommend start with the SEO website checker, especially if you’re looking for some quick SEO wins. This tool will give you an idea of how you score and how you stack up against your competition. You can then dive deeper using some of the other tools.

2) Google Analytics (Free)

This is the tool you must definitely use on a weekly basis, even if you don’t really care about SEO. Google Analytics tracks all your traffic to your website and you can analysis which marketing channels are working and which aren’t. You can see what pages your clients are most gravitating towards and which ones need improvements.

How to Use This Tool

You need to sign in to your Analytics account to start using this tool. Once you have added your website, navigate to the Tracking code under the property column and copy the code. Paste the tracking code in your SEO plugin. We recommend either Yoast or All In One SEO.

You should get verification that you’ve done this correctly. It will take a little time to get used to navigating Google Analytics as there are so many different options and customizable features but once you do, you’ll see the power of it.

3) Google PageSpeed Insights (Free)

Google PageSpeed Insights is a tool that checks the speed of your site and provides suggestions to how to improve it. Page loading speed is one of the most important elements of a website. Better site speed leads to increased user satisfaction and higher rankings.

How to Use This Tool

Enter your website URL, click the “analyze” button, and the tool will automatically check the speed and overall user experience of your site and provide a score – for both desktop and mobile. You need to opt for a score above 90 to offer your users a better site experience and to increase your chances of ranking higher in the search results.

4) Google Search Console (Free)

Formally Google Webmaster, this is yet another Google tool that allows you to search for errors on your website that could potentially harm your SEO score. Primarily it allows you to check and submit a sitemap which is the overall architecture that Google views your site in.

How To Use This Tool

You’ll have to sign into your Google Search Console or create a new account if you don’t have one already. Once you are in you’re account you’ll have to attach it to your website. You can do this in a variety of ways including through domain access, your website code or a website plugin. Once you have hooked your website up, you’ll able to navigate with the bar on the left-hand site which will give you a variety of options.

5) Mobile-Friendly Test (Free)

Mobile-Friendly Test is a free tool that lets you check the responsiveness of your website on a mobile device. With Google’s emphasis on mobile-first search queries on mobile devices are at least 50% in your industry — and in many cases more. Therefore it’s important to optimize your site for mobile devices.

How to Use This Tool

Enter the URL of the site that you wish to test and then click the “run test” button. In just a few seconds, you will know if your website is mobile-friendly or not.

6) Ahrefs Backlink Checker (Freemium)

Ahrefs offers a free back-link checker that allows you to check the top 100 links pointing to any website. Back-links are important because they are one of the ways Google checks to see how popular your website is and whether the website provides useful information.

How to Use This Tool

Enter the URL that you want to analyze and the tool will not only show you your domain rating score.

7) Keyword.io (Free)

Keyword research is undoubtedly one of the most fundamental tasks that every SEO specialist needs to perform, but researching is a time-consuming process without access to the best tools. Keyword.io is an easy and free alternative to Google’s Keyword Planner and it offers lots of relevant keyword suggestions for every type of research.

How to Use This Tool

Enter your main keyword in the search box, click on the desired search engine or platform, and then select the targeted country from the drop-down list. Once you press search, a variety of options will appear.

8) Moz Local (Free)

Moz has a free tool called Moz Local which is great for local businesses that want to be found within a particular neighborhood. Moz Local offers a comprehensive view of a website’s profile and web presence. By analyzing the most popular online directory’s, it gives a score on how well you rank and where you can improve. A great thing about this tool is that you don’t need a paid Moz account in order to use it.

How to Use This Tool

Enter the company’s name and street address and click search. It will take up to 30 seconds to analyze and will display where that company is indexed and where you could add it for improved search results. It is particularly useful to create links from sites like Yelp, Facebook, and Foursquare which will increase your domain authority.

So, these are the best free SEO Tools, that you can use and get better website ranking on Search Engines. If you need our SEO Experts Help, Feel free to Contact Us.

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Myth #1 Link Building.

When Penguin 2.0 was released in 2013, it changed a lot of how ranking was done. In the past, building as many links as possible without analyzing the linking domain was how SEO typically worked. This practice was known as link stuffing, and by doing this, your website would rank higher on Google. Building links is still a very important part of SEO, however you need relevant links that actually are important to your reader.

Nowadays, it is important to focus on the quality of links you are obtaining, rather than the quantity. Sometimes less can be more if you know how exactly to build links the proper way.

Too often, when businesses hire someone to do link building, they focus on the quantity of links rather than their quality. But linking is not a numbers game anymore. You should focus on having relevant and diverse sources that link to relevant pages. Remember Google wants your content and information to be useful. If the links are useless and don’t add any value then your page will be devalued.

Myth #2 Keywords and Meta Tags

Meta descriptions are coding attributes that concisely explain the contents of web pages. In other words, they are keywords. SEO experts use them to help categorize your website and different web pages. You’ve probably seen them before on Google’s search engine results pages where they’re commonly used as page previews.

In 2009, Google announced that meta descriptions and keywords didn’t have bearing on search engine ranking. That’s not to say that these descriptions aren’t important for SEO, though.

On the contrary, in fact: Meta descriptions present a major opportunity to separate yourself from your competition and convince searchers that your page is worth navigating to.

In fact, last year Google announced that it would be increasing the length of meta descriptions to allow for more descriptive snippets.

Myth #3 Home Page Content

Have you ever come across a homepage filled with paragraphs and paragraphs of writing? A lot of people believe that the more writing you have on your homepage the better.

However, your homepage content should be long enough to clarify who you are, what you do, where you’re located, your value proposition, and what visitors should do next. If you can do all that in less words the better. Visitors should leave satisfied, not overwhelmed or underwhelmed – and certainly not confused. So, this is also one of the important SEO Myths, that you have to know.

Myth #4 Local Content

If you’re a local business, optimizing for local search won’t only help you get found, but it will help you get found by people who are nearby and more likely to buy from you, aka your ideal customers.

Google believes, (correctly for the most part) people want to find answers, things, or people that are local. A hairdresser in New Jersey is no good to you if you live in San Francisco. And because SEO search ranking is becoming that much more cutthroat, local is that much more important. Looking forward, Google will continue to take steps to curate the best local content to the surface of search results.

So, these are the SEO Myths you have to follow while creating your website. If you need some help determining the best SEO strategy for your business, talk to one of our strategists at Rad Websites. We’ll guide you through the difficulty help you define the best course of action going forward and create a plan that is sustainable and effective.

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1. Keyword Stuffing

This one is the most obvious on the list of SEO Tactics. “Keyword stuffing” refers to the practice of loading a webpage with too many irrelevant keywords so your content doesn’t make any sense. These keywords appear in a list or group, out of context, or repeated an inadequate number of times in an attempt to appear relevant to search engines.

What To Do Instead:

While mindlessly stuffing your content with keywords won’t do you any good, you can still take search engines into account and optimize your content effectively When analyzing your content for the intent behind it.

2. Creating Low Quality Content

Getting low quality content written in India for five or ten dollars isn’t going to cut it anymore. Nobody wants to read useless content and as a result Google will downgrade it. Writing high-quality articles for your website takes loads of time, money and effort.

What To Do Instead:

Check your website for low-quality content straight away, as it might be affecting your rankings. It’s better if you write fewer articles but of higher quality. Also consider writing longer articles with plenty of amazing graphics and infographics.

3. Creating Irrelevant Guest Posts

Since the early days of SEO, there has been loads of buzz around guest posting. People used to guest blog no matter how relevant the blog was or not. Guest blogging is not okay if you’re doing it solely for link building and is irrelevant. Google will sniff out irrelevant guest blogs and degrade your site.

What To Do Instead:

If most of known link building techniques are harmful and dangerous, what is there left to do in terms of improving your rankings with links? First you might have to remove some links for your rankings to go up. Second build links that actually add value to the viewer and give him or her more information on what they are seeking.

4. Heavily Using Anchor Text On Internal Links

An internal link is a link that points to another page on the same website. An anchor text is the clickable text in a hyperlink that often appears in blue.
Using internal links is essentially good for both the user and the search engines. It’s helpful because it allows the user to navigate a website and easily find the information for which they came to this website.

What To Do Instead:

The critical thing about internal linking is that your site structure should be shallow and logical, so focus on that instead of keyword-stuffing your links. Ideally, you should keep all your important pages not more than 3 clicks away from the homepage.

5. Creating Pages For Each Keyword Variation

Creating pages for each keyword variation was a tactic used years ago, when keywords, not intent, dominated the Google’s indexing methods. You’d want to have the maximum capacity to target each possible keyword individually.

What To Do Instead:

Throw your effort into creating well-structured, informative, and visually appealing landing pages for your products and services. Fit your keywords in a natural way into your content, headline, title. Here’re you can find the guide on how to build perfectly optimized landing pages.

Conclusion

Are you guilty of any of these SEO tactics? If you are that’s okay, most of us are. But it’s important to get updated on the latest tactics and stay in tune with Google. Google doesn’t tell you exactly how to increase rankings but they do give you important clues in what to do and what not to do.

Please reach out, we are happy to guide you through the entire process. The entire team here at Rad Websites wants to help make you stand out and be RAD!

The post 5 Old School SEO Tactics That Don’t Work Anymore appeared first on Responsive. Award-Winning. Dynamic. RAD. Canada's Best.

If you are searching for a unique method that’s different than an ordinary blog to build backlinks from authoritative domains, infographics might be the solution for you.

What Makes Up A Good Infographic?

While there’s no secret formula to make a good infographic, there are some key aspects all share. These are three common elements good infographics all have:

1. If your infographic has an eye-catching and amazing design, you can get people to stop scrolling and pay attention.
2. A good infographic has to give useful and researched statistical data about an interesting topic.
3. Just like other content, simply by publishing your infograph, you won’t have much success unless you do your best to promote it on social media or through email.

Encourage Sharing of Your Infographics

Creating an infographic is just half the battle. Next you need to start promoting it. An easy way to do this if you make it easy to share your Infographics through social media platforms. You should provide social media sharing icons over your Infographics. So, if a reader holds the mouse over the Infographics, he or she is able is able to share it with one click.

Submit to Social Bookmarking Sites

The importance of Social Bookmarking Sites in the promotion of Infographics cannot be undermined. Sites such as Reddit, Quora, Stumbleupon, and Digg, and are popular visits with millions of daily users. Submission on such sites exposes your Infographics to a large audience and greaten the chance your infographic will go viral. They can like, vote, and share your Infographics.

Submit to Infographics Directories

You didn’t think these existed, did you? Submission on Infographics Directories can provide good backlinks for your website. A good example is Infographic Post which is a very authoritative Infographics directory site. It’s a very popular site, and you are likely to get a large number of views and shares for your Infographics once you submit on this site. While some of them require you to register, most of these sites are free to submit.

Email Popular Bloggers

You can promote your Infographics by emailing to bloggers who have active followers and publish on a regular schedule. If your Infographics is done brilliantly and interests other bloggers, they are likely to write about your Infographics and give backlink to your website.

Create an Embed Code for your Infographics

While this is somewhat technical, it’s a good technique to help spread the word. Once you have published your infographic on your website and shared it across your social media platforms, the next thing you need to do is to create an embed code for your Infographics.
It is a simple HTML code that boggers and others can use for easily sharing your Infographics. They simply need to put the embed code on their website which automatically posts your Infographics.

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Although this page isn’t designed as an aggressive marketing ploy, it helps in motivating a prospective consumer to buy a product or avail of service by answering his/her query. So, if the FAQ page is about delivering information in a “question and answer” format, why is there a need to customize it?

For starters, an SEO-friendly-FAQ page cuts the workload of your customer service/support team. They don’t have to answer as many questions as they should since the page provides everything. It saves your people some valuable time.

A well thought out Q&A page builds trust since it addresses the consumers’ need for information. A visitor to your website sees you as an authority when he/she is impressed, or at least satisfied with the information that your SEO-Friendly FAQ page provided.

You may not notice it, but an SEO-friendly FAQ page significantly improves user experience.

Put yourself in the shoes of a potential customer who needs his/her questions answered. You want your questions to be answered in the FAQ page instead of having to call or chat with customer support and wait for hours to get a response.

Creating an SEO-friendly-FAQ Page

Your FAQ page plays a critical role in drawing traffic to your site. There’s no way to get a higher ranking in Google when you’re not driving enough traffic to your pages.

More notably, the page provides visitors with a comprehensive understanding of your brand, product, or service that no other section of the website can. Simply put, it improves your conversion rates.

Below are the ways to come up with an SEO-friendly-FAQ page:

1 – Come up with a list of RELEVANT frequently asked questions

You just don’t make up all sorts of questions for the sake of having an FAQ page. The key is figuring out the right questions that will enlighten a potential customer about your brand.

You know those questions are effective when they generate demand. Creating this list takes a lot of effort, patience, and common sense.

If your company employs customer service representatives, then that’s a great place to get suggestions. Those guys are the recipients of hundreds of questions from customers, which means they are a valuable source of information once you start creating the SEO-friendly-FAQ page.

Do some digging on your competitor’s FAQ page. This helps you understand if they’re doing things right. You don’t necessarily have to copy their Q&As, but you at least an insight on how you can improve your own.

2 – Add structured data to the page

Incorporating structured data to the FAQs will improve your page’s reputation with regards to the search engine results pages. Structured data is a staple in obtaining a better click-through-rate.

If your competitors aren’t using structured data in their FAQs, you have your best chance of getting ahead of them. Just so you acknowledge the value of this strategy, Google now has integrated support for FAQ structured data both in Google Assistant and Search.

If you implement the structured data system, it transforms your content into an SEO-friendly material since the questions and answers appear on Google Assistant and Search.

3 – Don’t settle for text alone

We know that an FAQ page is about posting the right questions and their corresponding answers. But one issue that you need to face is its bland aesthetics.

You don’t want the page to contain anything but text. Preferably, use images, illustrations, graphics, or even videos to your answers to improve the aesthetic value of the page.

The information delivered through the combination of text and graphics is conveyed more effectively compared to text alone.

4 – Mind the navigation

An ideally written SEO-friendly FAQ page is useless when visitors to your website can’t even find it.

Apart from the information and inclusion of images and graphics, you should build a straightforward navigational structure. Since you expect a ton of text, breaking it down to categories and subcategories makes sense.

The structure avoids confusion and customers find the right questions in seconds instead of minutes. You want the experience of reading through the page to be instantaneous.

5 – Don’t forget about analytics

The purpose of checking analytics is to see if the pages on your website are getting traffic, and if they are ranking for the relevant keywords. Without it, you can’t know for sure if visitors are taking their time to read your FAQ page or if they are merely skimming through it.

Furthermore, analytics tells you the path that the visitors to your website are taking. Web analytics essentially give you the data and numbers that you can use to determine if what you’re doing actually works.

There is a handful of advanced web analytics out there, so it shouldn’t be challenging to get things started. Remember that analytics provide actionable insights, so you must embrace it.

Conclusion

Some say that FAQ pages are nothing but a waste of time. Why optimize it when you already have a well laid-out website with a superb navigational structure to guide your visitors to the information they need? The truth is an FAQ page plays an indispensable role and is never an afterthought.

The content inside it provides direct answers to highly specific questions. You don’t leave it at the corner and forget about it. If that is what you are doing right now, then you might as well delete the page.

The SEO value of an FAQ page is underrated, but it brings traffic and improves conversions. It’s just a matter of you acknowledging its worth.

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“Don’t worry about your word count; Worry about making your words count.”

You’ve more than likely heard the term SEO, and, like most people, can recite “search engine optimization”, but that’s where your knowledge ends, right? You’re still confused as to how to optimize the search engine, and which search engine are you optimising for that matter? Let’s find out below about Best Word Count for SEO.

These questions will naturally answer themselves during the course of this article as we try to fathom what is the best word count for SEO in Canada. But first, you need an actual definition for SEO. 

SEO and Word Count

According to New York Times bestselling author Neil Patel in his article SEO Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide For 2021, “SEO stands for search engine optimization. Which is the art of ranking high on a search engine in the unpaid section, also known as the organic listings”.

In other words, SEO is the process of getting your web page/ article / blog, etc, at the top of the search results of a search engine like Google, without purchasing Advertisements.

So for example, you entered your long tail keyword ‘What is the Best Word Count for SEO in Canada’ in the Google search engine and the results show THIS article on page one of the search results.

You would therefore conclude that this page has been successfully optimized for Google. Btw, a long-tail keyword is a keyphrase such as the title of this article, which is more specific than a short tail keyword, which is one or two words such as “SEO word count”. More on this later. 

SEO experts, and there are many, including Patel, will tell you that in order to rank on Google’s first page in the search results, you have to follow an SEO strategy involving backlinking, providing relevant content and writing long texts where you made sure to include the most important keywords at the right places. 

Where did this idea come from? 

Actually, indirectly  from Google–10 years ago! If you’re surprised that SEO has been around for so long and you are only now learning about it, be prepared to be shocked: SEO is actually over 20 years old.

To be more specific, the actual term ‘Search Engine Optimization’ was first used in 1997, though the practice of optimising web pages started from as early as the mid 90s. Back then, Yahoo was the Google of today. Interestingly, Google started in 1998 and has since become the go-to search engine not the least due to its simplicity and ease of use.

As such, website owners now optimize their sites to rank on Google’s search engine. 

While Google never discloses the algorithms used to rank pages, they have from time to time given clues and suggestions to enable website developers to produce high quality content to the end user.

The Evolution of Word Count for SEO

So ten years ago, in order for Google to retrieve the end users’ keywords, they relied on what is believed to be TF-IDF or term frequency inverse document frequency, along with the title tags and words in the heading.

It is believed that in order for Google to retrieve these keywords, they would somehow use this technique to find and extract the most relevant words in a series for the web page to rank them high.

Consequently, in order for Google to understand what your webpage was about, you would have to write long texts making sure to include the most important keywords, strategically place these keywords in the text, and have the right number of keywords in the texts.

Remember, Google never reveals their algorithms, so this was the outset for the emergence of SEO experts–men and women who would study Google to figure out their algorithms based on what they said, and mostly what was not said, and also experimenting on the websites’ optimization to see how they ranked. 

Due to the inevitable manipulation of the system by web developers to rank high on the search engine (keyword stuffing and cloaking are two common violations of Google’s algorithms), Google has had to over the years change its algorithms as these “experts” discovered their secrets.

Today, it employs related keyword techniques that are themed to interpret the intent of the content on a webpage. Enter BERT. 

What is BERT? 

According to Google Search, “BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), which is another attempt by Google to improve their natural language processing in order to better understand the search queries of their end users”.

Introduced in 2018, the BERT models can “consider the full context of a word by looking at the words that come before and after it—particularly useful for understanding the intent behind search queries”.

In other words, BERT is basically a machine-learning algorithm that, based on large amounts of text, is trained to read text in order to find the best matching answer. Can you say almost human? Indeed, BERT is Artificial Intelligence (AI). And this is the direction that Google has taken in the past few years. 

However, Google did not get here overnight. According to Google’s CEO Sundar Pichal in a 2017 keynote speech at its annual I/O event “the company was shifting from a “mobile-first world to an AI-first world.

BERT, SEO and Word Count

Then a series of announcements followed involving AI in various ways: from the development of specialised chips for optimising machine learning, to the use of deep learning in new applications including cancer research, to putting Google’s AI-driven assistant on as many devices as possible.

Pichai claimed the company was transitioning from “searching and organizing the world’s information to AI and machine learning.” The end result: BERT.

The idea of BERT is best explained by their research director, Peter Norvig, “With information retrieval, anything over 80% recall and precision is pretty good—not every suggestion has to be perfect, since the user can ignore the bad suggestions. With assistance, there is a much higher barrier.

You wouldn’t use a service that booked the wrong reservation 20% of the time, or even 2% of the time. So an assistant needs to be much more accurate, and thus more intelligent, more aware of the situation. That’s what we call ‘AI-first.’”

But what does this have to do with the best word count for SEO in Canada? 

A lot, actually. In fact, SEO experts are at the best position one could be in terms of optimising web pages for search engines now more than ever–due to AI-first technology.

While it will be more difficult to manipulate the search engine with keyword stuffing, exaggerated length of texts and word counts, it will be easier to rank higher in the search engine when SEO experts help their clients to produce content that is relevant to the search of the end user. 

Which brings us to the age-old question, “What is the best word count for SEO in Canada” when producing relevant content? After all, clients want to know how many words to write to have the best chance of appearing on Google’s first page.

Surely there has got to be some guideline somewhere? And, indeed, there are. But before we delve into this, let’s hear from Google’s Search Advocate, John Mueller, on the subject of word count in 2021. 

This topic came up on Twitter in response to a user who asked whether or not it would be beneficial to de-index shorter articles. This is what John Mueller had to say, “I agree with you & Mihai :).

Word count is not indicative of quality. Some pages have a lot of words that say nothing. Some pages have very few words that are very important & relevant to queries. You know your content best (hopefully) and can decide whether it needs the details.” 

Key takeaway:

1) “Word count is not indicative of quality”

2) Quality is what Google is looking for

3) By the same token, pages with few words may be highly relevant to a user’s query

4) Ultimately it’s up to the site owner to use their best judgement.

In other words, Google will not necessarily rank pages based on word count alone. When it sees the quality content, it will rank shorter content just as well as longer content.

And in case you’re wondering why Google; aren’t there other search engines? Yes, there are. But as of 2021, Google is still the number one search engine and the go-to site for all things Internet. 

What do the SEO experts have to say about this? 

Notwithstanding what Mueller has said, four major players in the SEO industry have found clear correlations between word count and Google rankings:

1. Hubspot: 

In a recent study the marketing automation platform, Hubspot, gathered data from the 50 most read blog posts in 2019. They found that the articles were, on average, 2,300 words long.

2. Yoast: 

Yoast is a search engine optimization plugin in WordPress–but it is so much more than that, and personally one of my favourites. If your website is hosted by WordPress, chances are you are using Yoast. According to Yoast, the ideal blog post length is 300 to 1,000 words.

That is a huge gap. However, Yoast takes into account the fact that some topics do not require any research, but may just be an answer to a question. Yoast concluded that 1000 word count is the ideal number for higher rankings.

3. Semrush: 

According to a 2018 SEMrush study, the ideal length for better ranking is 1137 words.

4. Backlinko: 

According to backlinko in the 11.8 million Google search results they analysed, overall, the average word count of a Google first page result is 1,447 words. 

From the above one can infer that a webpage with an average word count of 1,471 (the avg of the four numbers) ranks higher than other pages.

So, is 1471 the best word count for SEO in Canada? Not necessarily.

Correlation & Causation

One of the challenges SEO experts usually have is understanding the difference between correlation and causation.

If you looked at the top 4 or 5 ranking pages for your keyword search and saw that they all had approximately 1471 words, it is understandable that you would think that is what is required to rank well for that keyword. However, this could be a correlation, not a causation. 

Another study (2015) by HubSpot suggested that longer posts may be “link-worthy” and more shareable. In turn, it could be the link profile of the page that causes it to rank well. It could also be that longer posts allow for more thorough answers required for some search queries, which then triggers Google’s AI technique to rank it higher. 

What is important to note is, correlation does not equal causation.

Google’s own SEO starter guide states, “Content should be factually accurate, clearly written, and comprehensive.”

Comprehensive is not a synonym for long. Comprehensive means “complete and including everything that is necessary.”

If you’ve been following this article you should have concluded by now that there is no definitive answer to the question, what is the best word count for SEO in Canada.

However it is not our desire to leave our readers more confused than when they started, so let’s see if we can help you to actually arrive at a “magic number as to the best word count for SEO in Canada by looking at some other factors. 

The first factor we will look at is Relevance:

Arguably the most important factor to rank content is its relevance. We cannot over emphasise the point that content should be relevant to the search of the users.

Ahrefs advice on content length: “Don’t shoot for a particular word count- just make sure you cover a topic in full. Whether that takes 500 words or 10,000, the key is that you are creating the best resource available for your target keyword.” (Search Engine Journal)

Ultimately you are writing for the users’ keywords. When a topic asks for more information then you should write as Google suggests–comprehensively.  

The second factor is the length of the keyword:

According to some SEO experts, your word count should be dependent on your keyword length. So for short-tail keywords (one or two words), you should shoot for approximately 4,500 words or more; mid-tail keywords between 2,000 and 4,500 words and long-tail keywords such as the title of this article, between 1,000-2,000 words. 

Long-tail keywords are considered to be the best in Digital Marketing SEO. They are a great opportunity for small blogs to rank higher and do well. The ideal blog length for long-tail keywords is 1,000-3,000 words. Although the market is competitive, it is less competitive due to its specificity. This article is 2490 words long. You be the judge as to who’s right. 

A word of caution concerning keywords:

Short-tail keywords are very competitive. You will notice in the search results, millions of answers–that’s due to the non-specificity of the query. This makes it hard for Google to show specific results and you will be “punished” for this.

The results: a low ranking of your webpage –especially if you’re a small site with low domain authority. So, this is a very important factor. You should select your keywords properly.

Another factor we’ll look at is: User Intent

The most important aspect when deciding on how long content should be is user intent. I.e. What does a user want when he/she lands on your page. If you understand what a user is looking for on your page, it will help you to write comprehensively enough to meet that need.

Having said that,

Content should be as long as it is needed to help convey the message of the page and allow users to complete their desired actions on that page.

Conclusion

You’ve seen that many studies by SEO experts have shown varying lengths for the best word count for SEO.

With machine learning, such as Google’s BERT, search engines can now better understand your content without you having to type thousands of words. Notwithstanding the length, web owners are encouraged to provide good content for the end users, which may mean a short article, or a long epistle. 

Can more words allow you to expand on a topic and offer your reader a view of the bigger picture? Absolutely. Could a shorter read be just what they’re looking for during coffee break? Quite likely.

The real takeaway from here is that your web content should give contextual meaning and value to your user, which is a shared conclusion among all SEO experts. 

Because in the end, only Google knows the answer to how they process texts and whether the word count is something to strive for.

I advise people not to focus too heavily on SEO recommendations when crafting content. Focus first on what your content is meant to do and go from there.

Notwithstanding all of the above, 

The final answer to the question of what is the best word count for SEO in Canada is 2000 to 3000 words. 

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What is Google My Business?

Google My Business helps business owners manage their business and help them rank. It is an essential tool to find out and adjust how your site shows in Google Maps, the Knowledge Graph, Google+ and organic search results.

You can manage your business listing by adding details such as opening hours, photos and keywords. In addition to that, it is possible to manage the reviews your customers leave behind.

Starting Your Google My Business Listing

Getting started with My Business is easy. You have to make an account and claim your business. Keep in mind that My Business is not the catch-all tool for your local SEO. It has to work in tandem with other SEO efforts.

For example, you won’t climb in results if your profile is inaccurate. But you also won’t reach the top without a well-optimized site and localized content.
If your business has been around for more than three years, it’s likely it already has a Google Business listing and you just need to claim it.

Once successfully claimed, you can manage the information just as if you started the Google My Business listing yourself years previous.

Verifying Your Google My Business Listing

Once you have submitted your business information, hours, and other service area, you’ll need to verify your listing.

Verification typically takes less than a week, in which Google will send you a verification code postcard that, once you receive, you verify with the enclosed code and your business will officially be live.

It’s probably easiest to verify your listing by postcard. This helps Google prevent false listings that will only misdirect users and derail the usefulness of Google Search and Maps, among other tools.

It’s important to know that Google won’t display your business until the business is verified. You also can’t access any page insights/analytical information or business reviews so watch out for that postcard.

Publishing Your Google My Business Listing

It’s important to use all resources GMB offers within its listing details to get the most out of your business locations and increase your SEO results.

Local search results favour the most relevant results for searches, and business offering the most detailed and accurate information will be easier to serve in search.

Don’t leave anything to be guessed or assumed; make sure your listing communicates with potential customers what your business does, where it is, and how they can acquire the good and/or services your business is offering.

How Customers Find Your Listing

While Google Business doesn’t have the best analytics, there are a few things you can learn from their insights.

“Direct” searches are for your business name or address versus a “Discovery” search. They searched for a category, product, or service that you offer, and your listing appeared.

Beside “Listing on Search” and “Listing on Maps,” you’ll see the number of views your listing received from each product in the timeframe you’ve selected. According to Google, “Views” are like “impressions” on other analytics platforms.

To see how many people found you on a particular product on a particular day, place your cursor over the appropriate segment of the graph on the day you’re interested in.

This part of Insights uses a map to show where people are that are requesting directions to your business.

Your business location is identified on the map and some of the most common spots that people request directions to your business from are shown. It even breaks the total number of direction requests down by city or neighbourhood.

Conclusion

It’s critical to remember Google Business is not a set it and forget it tool. Things change, your business changes and your Google Business should always reflect that. Keep everything active, monitor reviews and stay on top of things. If you have any questions about

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1. Your website isn’t showing up on search engines

This is the most obvious one and probably the one that is costing you the most business. It goes without saying, you should be easily found by search engines and ultimately your customers.
The goal of SEO is to make you rank very high for what you offer within your field. This is what makes SEO a powerhouse for a business of any size – you can easily scale your business. With SEO, it’s possible to be found as relevant by clients who never met you or your brand before. Your business can expand quickly without spending a ton of money to reach new clients using other, more traditional marketing methods.

Another thing to be aware of is a drastic loss of ranking. If you’ve read about any of the high-profile companies tumbling in Google rankings, you’ve probably figured out it can happen to anyone. Still, the effects can be devastating, all the more so when you don’t know the cause. Drops in ranking are a common occurrence after algorithm updates). Many websites also suddenly lose their position or are banned completely after incurring a penalty from Google, sometimes with site admin not even realizing they did anything wrong. So, this is one of the Signs You Need To Invest In Your SEO.

2. Your website is slow

This is another obvious one and just as important. Make sure your web pages and images on your site are optimized for loading speed. Amazon did a study and found that when their website loaded even a second slower than usual, they saw a drop in sales of millions of dollars. People are impatience and don’t’ want to wait
If your website isn’t performing well and you are in need of someone who just optimizes your website in such a way that all visitors find your website in a better way to understand and can quite easily navigate at your website, SEO Services is at your doorsteps.
Potential customers need to be able to find what they are looking for, and find it quickly. If someone gets ‘lost’ on your website and can’t find the information they need, they will move onto your competitors. Internal website linking is important. Having an organized and well laid out site, and menu structure is also a big part of an overall SEO strategy.

Once you add a page or post to your website, make sure to add some internal linking so that your site flows well, and also make sure that all important pages are easy to access.

3. You haven’t updated your website’s content

If your website have a blog function or updates, you need to take services of SEO. Having high quality SEO services not only improves the quality of content, but also optimize the contents based in keywords and thus in return gives you a better chance to rank high on Google.
With quality content, you can deliver your insights to the customers in a better way and can fulfill your goals to a great extent. Adding some interesting blog updates to educate your customer is a great addition, not only adding value to your customers but establishes yourself as a leader in your field.

4. Nobody can find your business in Google Maps

Google Maps is an amazing tool for businesses to get found and noticed online. With a shift toward more localized search in Google, the giant search engine has dramatically increased the importance of localized SEO.
Also, since Google grabs location data from a variety of sources, it’s possible for your business to appear in the wrong place on Google Maps. If your business isn’t showing up in the right place on Google Maps, it’s likely due to a lack of consistency in your name, address and phone number.

5. Your competitors are doing it

If you’re not showing up on Google it means your competition is doing a better job than you are.
As you’re probably well aware, the first page in a search engine means everything. In fact, in studies, it has been found that 92% of searchers don’t’ go past the first page. If you’re competition is ranking better than you, it’s definitely time to invest in some serious SEO. And gain some advantage back from them.

Conclusion

So, these are the Signs You Need To Invest In Your SEO. If you need some help determining the best SEO strategy for your business, talk to one of our strategists at Rad Websites. We’ll guide you through the difficultly help you define the best course of action going forward. And create a plan that is sustainable and effective.

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An SEO audit may not ring a bell for someone who does not consider himself a web design expert, but it is a task that anyone with basic SEO knowledge can perform. Ask anyone who knows a thing or two about how business websites should perform to succeed, and you will realize how critical a regular audit is.

A business or brand that is trying to achieve relevance through digital marketing must learn to embrace the competition. The only way to keep up is to create and run a website that brings in traffic and conversions. This is where the concept of search engine optimization comes in.

You may be able to build a website and apply an SEO strategy for it, but you do not expect your site to run on autopilot. In other words, you must have a clear understanding of how your website is performing based on the SEO strategies you are using. Hence, the sole purpose of an SEO audit is to figure out how well is your business website performing.

The audit will check the health of your website with an emphasis on the presence of spam. Doing SEO audits regularly makes sense because Google has this habit of altering its algorithms in ranking websites. Simply put, you are doing it to keep up with what is new.

SEO Audit Coverage

An SEO audit is likened to that of multiple-point car inspection. It examines your website to see how it functions and performs compared to the rest of the market. The audit essentially covers the following:

1. Keyword Use – You must know if the way you are using your keywords is on point. The keywords must bee optimized for them to help in directing traffic to your site.
2. LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) – LSI defined as the context of a search. It still has something to do with keywords, specifically long tail and secondary keywords.
3. Competition – You also would want to know how you perform against the competition, especially in the aspects of links, meta tags, keywords, and overall SEO ranking.
4. Organic Search Rank – Companies that need to keep the costs down may have to reconsider their PPC strategy. If you decide to focus on your website’s organic search rankings, you need to perform an SEO audit to see your chances.

Enough of the introduction, here are the components of a comprehensive SEO audit:

1 – Site Crawl

A site crawl is the most efficient method of assessing the state of your website in its current form. It also gives you a preview of the issues that may need to be resolved sooner than later. Site crawling essentially creates an outline for the entire SEO audit.

The site crawl will cover areas like the structure of your URL, content, meta descriptions, images, links, and the structure of your website. You ask questions like how well your content is formatted and if it is fresh. Do you have a unique meta description per page? Does your website have enough links per page and do all of them work?

Furthermore, site crawling should also include the analysis of your landing page and its relationship with the inner pages. The landing page is where your site builds an initial impression, so it needs to be user-friendly and intuitive.

2 – Page Speed Analysis

Page load speed plays a critical role in keeping your site visitors motivated in browsing your site further. 60% of users will find their way out of a website when it takes more than three seconds to load. So, if your website takes too long to load pages, it will have a negative impact on conversions and will increase bounce rates. In performing an SEO audit with an emphasis on page speed, you can use a handful of free tools, including Google’s Page Speed Insights and YSlow. It is crucial to learn about your page load speed since that is the only way to figure out if there is a need to fix some elements in the design.

3 – Site Architecture Assessment

Your website needs a solid structure for it to rank high in Google. It is merely about using the right keywords and relevant content. One aspect that you should focus on is user experience, and for you to ensure that prospective clients end up liking your site, you must improve its architecture.

So, how do you improve site architecture? As you have guessed it already, you must perform an SEO audit. The audit examines things like the sitemap and URL structure. The result of the audit will also tell you if your main webpages are listed and positioned correctly and if site visitors will not have a hard time navigating through the inner pages and links.

4 – Content

Content plays an indispensable role in the effectiveness and success of your website. The failure to refresh or update content will hurt your site’s rank, so it is not merely about inserting unique and relevant information. Even if on-page content is unique and relevant, it still needs to be updated regularly since Google looks at it with a critical eye. Hence, your SEO audit should include an examination of your content.

See to it that you are using the keywords in your content naturally. It also must be consistent since the objective is to prevent being labeled as spam.

Part of examining your content is taking a closer look at the tags. Check if title tags have two salient qualities – concise and descriptive. Be reminded that extra-long titles are never a good thing for search engines.

5 – Checking the Backlinks

You probably know by now that backlinks are a crucial element of SEO. Google will grade the quality of your website based on the quality of the sites that link to it. It was prevalent back in the day to exchange reciprocal links with other websites to improve SEO. It is no longer an effective practice today, but backlinks are still relevant. This time, backlinks are more about quality instead of quantity. Therefore, you should verify in your SEO audit if the websites that links to your site come from reputable domains.

Tools for SEO Audit

Like I said at the beginning of this post, SEO audit does not have to be an overwhelming task. You can do it with the help of a tool that is readily available online. All you must do is pick the right one based on your budget and specific needs.

The first and most sensible option is Google Analytics. As someone tasked to market your brand and optimize a website, this tool is a must-have. It does not only help you by providing critical indicators of SEO metrics but will also hand out a user-friendly guide in performing SEO.

Another option is Google Webmaster Tools. It is a platform that offers a handful of reasonably priced tools needed for an SEO audit. Its most notable advantage is that you can check your website’s SEO performance based on how Google sees it. Since you are hoping to have your site ranked on top of Google, then it makes sense to use this tool.

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