Introduction: The Illusion of Control in SEO

Dr. Ian Malcolm said it best in Jurassic Park:

“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

That’s exactly what happens with bad SEO strategy. Businesses fixate on hitting page one of Google, assuming high rankings = success. But rankings don’t guarantee clicks, engagement, or conversions. If you’re ranking for the wrong keywords, have a slow website, or ignore user experience, your SEO strategy is about as stable as Jurassic Park’s security system.

Let’s explore why rankings alone won’t save your business—and what actually matters in SEO.

High Rankings Won’t Save a Bad Website

Imagine you’ve spent months (or years) climbing to page one of Google. You’re sitting at the top of the search results, expecting massive traffic and skyrocketing sales. But there’s a problem:

Your website is slow—users leave before it even loads.
Your content is thin—Google ranks you, but customers don’t trust you.
Your call-to-action sucks—people visit your site but don’t buy.
SEO isn’t just getting to page one—it’s about keeping visitors engaged, delivering value, and driving conversions.

The Jurassic Park Parallel:

Hammond thought that because he had dinosaurs, he had control. But he ignored the park’s weak security, the unpredictability of nature, and the consequences of bringing extinct creatures back to life. The same happens with businesses that chase rankings without thinking about the bigger SEO ecosystem.

Google Updates Are the Velociraptors of SEO—They Will Hunt You If You’re Not Ready

SEO rankings aren’t permanent. Google updates its algorithm thousands of times a year, meaning one shift can knock you off page one overnight. Bad SEO strategy is like Jurassic Park’s electrified fences—everything seems fine until a power outage (Google update) proves you never had real control.
Survival Tips, Diversify your strategy—don’t rely on just rankings. Focus on content quality, user experience, and technical SEO. Watch your backlink profile—Google penalizes spammy, irrelevant links.
Make your site algorithm-proof—Google loves fast, mobile-friendly, valuable sites with great UX.
SEO isn’t just about climbing the rankings—it’s about staying at the top once you get there.

What Should You Focus on Instead?

Stop chasing rankings and start building a future-proof SEO strategy. User Experience First – Fast load times, mobile responsiveness, and intuitive navigation. Long-Tail Keywords – Optimize for search intent, not just volume.
Technical SEO – Schema markup, structured data, and Core Web Vitals. Content That Converts – Don’t just rank; turn traffic into paying customers.

Conclusion: Control the Chaos Before It Controls You

If your SEO strategy is ranking-obsessed but conversion-blind, your business is walking into a Google update ambush. Rad Websites builds SEO ecosystems—not just rankings—ensuring your business survives algorithm shifts and stays at the top.

Want an SEO survival guide? Grab Canadian SEO Made Simple and learn how to dominate search the right way.

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Jurassic Park’s Attention to Detail vs. Rad Websites’ SEO Strategy

The magic of Jurassic Park wasn’t just the dinosaurs—it was the attention to detail that made them feel real. Every movement, roar, and interaction was meticulously planned, creating an immersive and believable world. This same attention to detail is what separates successful SEO strategies from failed ones. Many agencies focus on building beautiful websites but ignore SEO essentials. A visually stunning website won’t matter if it loads too slowly, causing visitors to leave. Google can’t properly crawl the site or if it lacks content depth, making it impossible to rank.
At Rad Websites, we take the Jurassic Park approach—no detail is too small, no optimization is overlooked. Just like John Hammond built an entire ecosystem for his dinosaurs, we build SEO-first websites that are technically flawless, user-friendly, and built to rank.

The SEO Details That Most Agencies Ignore

Most web developers only focus on aesthetics. They create sites that look good but completely fail at ranking and converting visitors. This happens because SEO isn’t an afterthought—it’s the foundation of a high-performing website.
Technical SEO is the Backbone of a High-Performing Website. A website without technical SEO is like Jurassic Park without electric fences—it might look great at first, but sooner or later, things are going to fall apart.
Without proper site structure and optimization, Google won’t crawl or index your content properly, leaving your site invisible to potential customers.
Key technical SEO details include
– Fast Load Speeds – If a site takes longer than three seconds to load, most visitors leave.
– Schema Markup – This helps Google understand your content, boosting visibility.
– Structured Data – Organized metadata improves how your site appears in search results.
Most agencies skip these details, assuming that a beautiful design is enough. It’s not. Speed, structure, and security are critical for rankings.

Mobile Optimization: Where Most Websites Fail

Google prioritizes mobile-first indexing. That means if your site doesn’t work perfectly on mobile, it will lose rankings. Some common mistakes developers make are not optimizing for different screen sizes. Slow-loading mobile pages due to uncompressed images and bloated code. Buttons and menus that are hard to use on small screens.
Think of it like this: If Jurassic Park only worked for scientists and not for visitors, it would have failed. Your website should work seamlessly on every device, giving users the best possible experience.

Content Depth: Why Thin Pages Won’t Rank

Many agencies cut corners on content, creating pages that look good but have no real substance.
But Google prioritizes deep, engaging content. Pages with valuable information, detailed insights, and strong formatting outperform sites with thin, surface-level content every time. A high-ranking page should answer real user questions better than competitors and be at least 1500+ words when targeting competitive keywords. 2500 is Googles new benchmark. We charge $350 bucks for a 2500 word SEO optimized article and we charge $250 for a 1500 word SEO optimized article. Remember to include multimedia elements (images, videos, interactive elements).
Skipping content depth is like Jurassic Park skipping security measures—eventually, things will break down, and you’ll lose rankings. The Jurassic Park Comparison: Why Attention to Detail Matters, Jurassic Park wasn’t just dinosaurs—it was the entire ecosystem that made them believable and immersive. Your website isn’t just design—it’s a combination of structure, SEO, and UX that makes it effective.

What Happens When You Ignore SEO Details?

A slow website causes high bounce rates → Google drops your rankings.
Poor site structure confuses Google’s crawlers → Your content gets ignored.
Lack of mobile optimization → Half of your traffic can’t even use your site properly.
In Jurassic Park, the tiniest flaw (an unlocked door, a broken fence, or a simple programming mistake) led to complete disaster. SEO works the same way—one overlooked detail can cost you rankings, traffic, and sales.

Rad Websites: Where SEO Meets Stunning Design

Most agencies ignore the details. Rad Websites lives for them. First we asked the right questions even if they’re hard. Second you’ve been doing this since the day Google started crawling and SEO was born. And last but not least we’ve won awards for our designs. We don’t just build Rad websites—we create SEO-first, conversion-focused platforms that dominate rankings and turn visitors into customers. And we were the pioneer agency in Canada to do this.

What We Do Differently:
Fast, Optimized Performance – No slow-loading pages, just SEO-driven speed.
Deep, Value-Packed Content – No fluff or thin pages—only high-quality, rankable content.
Built for Search – Schema, structured data, and technical SEO are baked into every site.
Designed for Conversions – We make sure your site doesn’t just attract traffic—it turns it into revenue.
Other agencies build websites that look good. We build websites that work.

Conclusion: Build SEO That Lasts

Your website is more than just a pretty homepage—it’s the foundation of your entire digital presence.
SEO isn’t something you add later—it’s something that must be built into the core of your website from day one.
Here’s What to Do Next! Stop settling for web design agencies that ignore SEO. Work with experts who understand how design and SEO work together. Invest in a website that isn’t just beautiful, but actually ranks and converts.
That’s what Rad Websites does best.

Want to understand how to optimize your site like a pro? Grab Canadian SEO Made Simple—the ultimate guide to ranking the right way.

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The Hammond Syndrome in SEO

John Hammond had a vision—a grand idea to build something extraordinary. He spared no expense, built an entire ecosystem, and brought dinosaurs back to life. It was supposed to be the greatest attraction ever created. But there was one critical problem.
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
This quote isn’t just about dinosaurs running loose on Isla Nublar—it’s a perfect analogy for how businesses approach SEO. They chase rankings, push for page one, and obsess over traffic… without stopping to ask if it actually benefits their business. SEO isn’t a trophy. Getting to the top of Google isn’t the finish line—it’s the starting point. If you aren’t focused on delivering value, engaging visitors, and turning that traffic into customers, your SEO efforts could be just as doomed as Jurassic Park’s electric fences. Let’s talk about why blindly chasing rankings is not just reckless—it’s dangerous for your long-term success.

Why Blindly Chasing Rankings Is Reckless

The belief that “if we rank #1, we’ll win” is one of the biggest lies in SEO. Businesses pour time, effort, and money into gaming the system to climb to the top, but high rankings don’t guarantee success.

High Rankings Don’t Equal Authority

Imagine you walk into Jurassic Park’s visitor center, expecting a well-controlled, state-of-the-art experience. But as soon as you arrive, the fences go down, the power fails, and the dinosaurs are running wild. That’s exactly what happens when a weak website ranks high in search results. Visitors arrive expecting value, but when they land on a thin, spammy, or slow-loading site, they leave immediately. And what happens next?

Google sees visitors bouncing and drops your rankings.

Customers lose trust, thinking your business is unreliable.
Your competitors steal your leads by offering better content, faster pages, and a smoother experience.
If getting to the top is your only focus, you’re ignoring the entire reason SEO exists—to connect businesses with customers in a meaningful way.

Google’s Algorithm Changes Constantly

Just like Jurassic Park thought their fences were unbreakable, many businesses believe their SEO strategy is bulletproof. But then… the algorithm shifts.
Google updates its ranking system thousands of times per year, sometimes making massive changes overnight. What worked yesterday could crash and burn today. Keyword stuffing once worked—now it gets penalized. Buying backlinks was once a shortcut—now it can get you banned. Thin, surface-level content used to rank—now it’s ignored in favor of depth.
This is why ranking-first SEO strategies fail. If you’re gaming the system instead of building a real foundation, the next Google update could wipe you out completely.

Traffic Doesn’t Mean Sales

Let’s say your SEO strategy works and you hit page one. Traffic is flowing in. But then… nothing happens.
Why? Because rankings don’t convert visitors—your website does. A high ranking alone won’t:
Convince someone to buy. Make your site load faster. Create a compelling user experience. Build trust with your audience. SEO is not just about being found—it’s about turning visitors into customers. If your website isn’t designed to convert, all that traffic means absolutely nothing.

What Real SEO Looks Like

At Rad Websites, we don’t just rank websites—we build SEO ecosystems. Think of SEO like the Jurassic Park approach. Hammond’s mistake was thinking that bringing dinosaurs back to life was enough. In reality, he needed a well-maintained system, security, and control to make it sustainable. Great SEO is the same way. It’s not just about rankings—it’s about:

Technical SEO: The Backbone of a High-Performing Website

If your site isn’t fast, crawlable, and technically sound, it doesn’t matter how great your content is—Google won’t prioritize it.
– Page speed matters—slow sites kill conversions.
– Mobile-first indexing is the rule—Google ranks mobile-friendly sites first.
– Schema markup improves visibility—structured data tells Google exactly what your page is about.

Content Strategy: Engaging, Optimized, and Built for Users

Google isn’t just looking for keywords—it wants depth, expertise, and authority. That means your content needs to:
Answer real user questions with depth and clarity. Be better than anything else on page one. Engage visitors—longer time on page boosts rankings.

Conversion Optimization: Because Traffic Is Useless If It Doesn’t Lead to Sales

What’s the point of getting thousands of visitors if they leave without taking action? Clear call-to-actions (CTAs) drive results. Simple navigation keeps users engaged. Trust signals (testimonials, security badges, reviews) boost credibility. If your site isn’t designed to convert, your SEO investment is wasted.

Conclusion: SEO Needs a Strategy, Not Just a Goal

John Hammond thought too small. He built a theme park full of dinosaurs but failed to create a real plan for keeping them under control. Businesses that chase rankings without thinking about strategy are making the same mistake.
SEO isn’t just about ranking high—it’s about building a system that attracts, engages, and converts customers.

Here’s What to Do Next:

Stop chasing rankings—start thinking about user experience, conversions, and long-term success.
Invest in a real SEO strategy—not quick fixes or outdated hacks. Work with experts—because just like Jurassic Park needed real scientists, your business needs real SEO professionals. That’s where Rad Websites comes in. We don’t just do SEO—we build ecosystems. Want to go deeper? Grab Canadian SEO Made Simple—the blueprint for dominating search without getting eaten alive by Google’s algorithm updates.

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And millions of people around the world hire experts like AJ Frey for their SEO audits. Still not convinced? Let me ask you? Do you think it is a coincidence that you are here? No, it’s not! You are here because our SEO experts have spent hours auditing our website to ensure that we make it on Google’s page one–which is where you found us. 

And that’s just one reason people prefer hiring experts for their SEO audits. We’re the good guys. We believe in sharing information so we’re going to share some more reasons with you. Are you ready? Here then are 5 reasons people prefer hiring experts for their SEO audits. But for the newbie who is just starting out in SEO and has no idea what we are talking about, let’s first define an SEO audit.

What Is an SEO Site Audit?

Well, we are going to presume that you already know that SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. According to Yakkety Yak (a Chicago-based marketing agency) “an SEO site audit is an analysis of the factors that impact your website ranking in organic search. 

This often includes technical back-end factors as well as on-page, content-focused elements that make a website both easier for search engine robots to crawl and easier for people to navigate”. The objective being to understand the ranking of your site and to discover how to increase traffic to your site.

Why is this Important? 

A 2020 study (Search Engine Journal) found that the clickthrough rate for websites in the first position on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) is 25%. For websites in the second position, this number drops drastically to 15%, and 2.5% for websites in the 10th position. And this is all on the first page!!! 

Can you imagine what happens when you get to Google’s page 2? This means if your website is not on page 1, the odds are pretty slim for consumers to find you. Why spend money to build a website if not to generate revenue. However, if no one is visiting your site, then it means no leads and ultimately no revenue. 

So now you see the purpose of SEO, you can also understand why it’s important to do an SEO audit of your website to ensure it is properly optimized for the search engines. 

Why can’t I do it for free?

Good question. Let’s look at free: 

We all know that time is money, therefore it is unreasonable to expect an SEO Expert to spend the time to do an audit for free, right? So what’s left? DIY or have a team member who’s not an expert do it. Anyone else who promises free has an ulterior motive, whereby you are going to end up being penny wise and pound foolish. 

Note that a free SEO audit will generate incomplete and misleading information, which if acted upon could harm the quality, visibility and profitability of your website. If using a third-party, he/she could provide sales-oriented recommendations to steer you towards engaging with the third-party providing the audit. I.e. “Hire us” and we will fix the problem for you. This we call the foot-in-the-door tactic.   

What you will not get for free is valuable insights, historical contexts (past and present performance) and meaningful recommendations for what to do next. The danger of missing these three necessary ingredients is that you can end up making harmful decisions due to a lack of information, the wrong information, or information designed to lead you in a predetermined direction. 

Not only will you now have to deal with the financial fallout of an uninformed decision, but you will also have to bear the additional cost of fixing it–penny wise and pound foolish.

Why it is Worth Paying for an SEO Audit

A free SEO audit, as a giveaway, only provides limited useful information in its purpose, scope and strategic value. A paid SEO audit delves deep into your marketing data to analyse the meaning and implications of the site’s SEO performance.

Not only that, but it also presents a “comprehensive picture of how SEO affects overall marketing and business goals, so the audit delivers many times the value of your investment in revenue-driving conclusions”.

Having established that you are now left with a paid SEO audit, let’s now look at the 5 reasons people prefer hiring experts for their SEO audits. Also, let’s give a look how SEO Expert AJ Frey, the best SEO in Canada, can audit your site and ensure your audiences discover you on Google’s first page. 

You’re hiring a team of experts

Usually, SEO experts do not work in a vacuum. So what most people don’t know is that when you hire an SEO expert, you are actually getting a team of experts working together to do a comprehensive audit on your website. 

You’re getting value for your money

When you hire an SEO expert, you’re actually getting value for your money because he/she is going to evaluate your website based on your unique needs, foci and desired conversions. There is no one-size fits all in SEO, therefore, you cannot use a template to do an SEo audit. Even if you start with a template, it must be customized to meet the needs of that particular website. 

You’re getting thoughtful, Informed Insights

You could decide to purchase the SEO tool–which is good, and even the SEO experts use them sometimes. The only problem is, you may not be able to read and understand the outcome. What does “manual actions” and “tracking/analytics” really mean, for example? An SEO expert will give you thoughtful, informed insights based on the outcome after he/she has audited your website. 

You can expect to receive quantitative and qualitative information because well-trained experts like AJ Frey are looking through every single anomaly revealed through their SEO audit of your website. 

Issues like duplicate contents, excessive redirects, low word count, unlinked pages, etc. are recorded and categorized into subheadings. The SEO audit report will not read like a fill-in-the-blank generic report used by everybody. No, every section of the report will contain thoughtful insights about your website–information that has been obtained from the data collected.  

You’re Getting Honest and Forthright Recommendations

After a thorough evaluation, you can expect an SEO expert to provide a prescriptive list of categorize recommendations fit to your budget. And one that is easily implemented by you and your team. 

Many third-party auditors will give you a description of what’s “wrong” with your website–Usually in the form of a pdf file, and that’s where they stop. However, they will not prescribe the “medicine” needed for your “broken” site. 

With an SEO expert, an SEO audit report is not just a pdf file (though you will get that too), but also includes meaningful recommendations that go beyond “check your sitemap” and “improve content”. 

The SEO expert will have a conference call or face-to-face meeting with you to discuss the findings of the SEO audit. After giving you honest and forthright recommendations, he/she will answer all the  questions you may have concerning the audit and your website. You can expect to get honest feedback.

By the time you finish, there will be no doubt as to what your next move will be. This is another reason people prefer hiring experts for their SEO audits. If you do not have an SEO team, we will gladly assist. We have the best SEO packages in Canada, so you don’t have to worry about your bottomline. 

You will avoid Issues with Google

And the fifth reason people prefer hiring experts for their SEO audits is to avoid any issue with Google. If you know anything about SEO you know that Google has a Best Practice manual of the things one can and cannot do in order to rank on their pages. 

You’re an upstanding citizen, but unknown to you, when you decided to place your favourite keyword 20 times in your underperforming page Google sees that as a “black-hat” technique and penalises you. 

Google no longer accepts keyword stuffing (that’s what they call using a keyword too many times in one article) and so Google’s crawlers notice this on your web pages. What will happen is, you will see your page rank go down instead of rising, which means fewer people will find your page, and subsequently fewer leads and conversions.

As you can see, it’s bad enough If you make a mistake with your SEO campaign–if that’s all you had to worry about: wasted resources. However, your real problem starts when you get entangled with Google. If you’re not experienced with SEO-and most DIY web owners aren’t–you could accidentally conduct black-hat SEO techniques without fully understanding the consequences of your actions.

SEO Experts know all the rules. That’s why they are experts. A part of their job is to understand the ins and outs of the industry, to ensure they never run into legal issues. If they were to conduct “black hat” SEO, they could find themselves in trouble with Google, and you could take legal actions against them. 

Final thoughts

When It comes to SEO Audit, you could download a free SEO tool and DIY. However, if you did, and if you’re not an SEO expert, you coud not only hurt your bottomline: you could get into trouble with Google and your website could get penalised for inadvertently practicing black hat techniques.

Or, you could hire an SEO expert who will not only conduct a thorough audit of your site, but will also present the results in a timely, well-thought out manner, whether face-to-face or virtually. He/She will go through the results with you in a thoughtful way. 

Once through, you will receive a honest and forthright recommendations. So you can make informed decisions. The value you get from hiring experts for your SEO audit will be proportionally more than what it costs, if managed correctly and nurture your business to scale.

If you do not have an SEO team, we can provide SEO services to you, at a fraction of the cost seen on the Internet. Or, if you want to learn more about how search engine optimization can help your business grow, give us a call, or send us an email. AJ Frey is ready to help you!  

So there you have it. The 5 Reasons People Prefer Hiring Experts for Their SEO Audits. What are your thoughts? Let us know in the Comments box below.

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Why WordPress Is Still The Best

WordPress is by far the most popular open source CMS (content management system) – around 60% of all websites use WordPress and for good reason. In fact, over 10 million websites use it, with 500 new ones added each day, As of July 15 2018.

According to the latest statistics. as of March 11, 2021 some 455,000,000 websites are using it right now!, which means that around 20% of all self-hosted websites use it, too.

It also holds a whopping 61.8% of the Content Management Software or CMS that market share eclipses all the rest combined, That’s Drupal Joomla, Wix, go ahead name one.

In this blog article, we’ll go through the reasons why you should choose WordPress over other CMS systems such as Shopify, Wix, Joomla or Drupal. if you were not paying attention please re-read the first paragraph. Here we go.

WordPress Is Still Easy to Use

It’s a simple system which you can use with only minimal coding or even no coding skills. It just takes a single click to install and it is ready to go.

Once installed, you can start creating and publishing pages to your specifications. It’s possible to customize colours, design, and even features of a WordPress theme.

If you still feel hard to use there are literally hundreds of tutorials out there for you to learn from.

WordPress Is Still Free and Open Source

As we mentioned, it is free to use, edit and redistribute. That’s why you can easily find its original source codes publicly available. Because it’s free it ensures there are plenty of options and support available if you need it.

There are no monthly or yearly fees from it – you just have to pay for a domain and hosting.

Create Any Website With WordPress, Still

Today, it has a lot of versatility and gives you full flexibility to create any type of website. It has a wide range of themes and plugins increase its functionality to a great extent, giving you the ultimate flexibility.

You can build anything from an infomercial site to an ecommerce website which you can use to sell your products online. WordPress gives you several powerful plugins like Woo Commerce and WP eCommerce that make it easy to handle shipping and taxes.

WordPress is also quite good for supporting membership website. For example, you can sell subscriptions of any premium service or digital products that you have.

Still Lots of Troubleshooting Help Available

WordPress has a massive community of active users and developers. Its well-maintained support forum contains millions of queries and solutions to troubleshoot problems. You can also search for your query to get the answer to your question.

Post your questions unhesitatingly, and you’ll get a solution almost immediately.
Apart from its official forum, there are a number of other WordPress dedicated forums run by developers where one can ask queries and get solutions if you have more complicated or specific problems.

WordPress Still Has High Security

It has a high-security standard which is extremely important for any business. If your site is down, you lose money, customers, and potentially data.

Since it is so popular it also makes sense that hackers are continuously trying to find loopholes to get into your backend. But not to worry. Regular updates provided by WordPress strongly protect you from this vulnerability.

You should also ensure you have regular backups just in case.

WordPress Is Still Easily Integrated With Any Application

Default WordPress has a lot of built-in functionality but you can even make it more powerful with plugins.

When you install Plugins, it will add extra functionality in your WP website. Some plugin and free and others are premium. There are around 41000+ plugins available at its repository.

WordPress Is Still The Most SEO Friendly

What’s the point of having an amazing, beautiful website if nobody can find it, right? Google and all search engines show and rank websites in search results on the basis of various predefined parameters.

The more parameters you fulfill, the better your website ranks in search results. And it also checks all those boxes. Things such as fast loading speed times, navigation, site maps, and social media integration are all things that are easy with it.

One advantage it has over other CMS’s is user experience. Of course, user experience is great for the individual user, but with Google concentrating on how flexible a CMS is, it gives WordPress an extra boost.

WordPress Sites Make Up 14.7% of the Top 100 Websites in the World

The most successful companies in the world prefer WordPress as their CMS, including: Sony, Microsoft, UPS, Disney, TED, NBC, CNN, TechCrunch, People magazine, the NFL, Best Buy, Facebook, and even Star Wars . These are just a few, powered by WordPress.

If you still need more help please call The Best SEO in Canada AJ Frey. He can Help you with some rad marketing and a rad website. Using WordPress of coarse. Call now 250-801-6588

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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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If you’re like a lot of businesses out there, you’re probably not getting the traction to your website that you want. You have a great-looking website, you have a great product or service yet you aren’t getting enough sales. What went wrong?

Well the first thing you need to do perform an SEO audit to see where you stand and what improvements need to be made.

What Is An SEO Audit?

As a business owner, you should know what a SEO Audit is, and why it is crucial for your online presence. You need to identify issues that could and would prevent your website from being ranked on any search engines.

SEO Audits gives you a precise and detailed perception that gives you an overview of your site’s online presence. Ignoring these identifying issues, and your efforts will be in vain.

In other words,  your hard work will be paid off once you regularly audit your site. Also, this will make sure it’s properly crawled and indexed.

Pro tip: To make your content stand out, discerning content-related issues, indexing, proper use of backlink analysis, learning site architecture, and social media engagement are important factors to use in your internet marketing.

These components when understood and practiced will be important in helping you to identify strengths, weaknesses, and your website’s potential in gaining traction online.

Keep in mind that when you lose out all on the traffic, your possible sales will go down the drain. Quite the opposite when you regularly audit your website.

SEO Tool List

So how does SEO Audit procedure go? Here are tools you need to know:

1. Moz Site Audit Tool
2. Google Analytics
3. Google Search Console
4. Google Page Speed Insight

Starting The SEO Audit

The Crawl: This procedure is so important that you need to run it first before you do the other steps. Why is this important? Because this is where you identify your website’s problems, i.e., duplicate contents, low word count, unlinked pagination pages, excess redirects.

Moz Site Audit Tool

1. Go to the tool and open application.
2. On the top right of the screen, click new site audit.
3. Create new project.
4. Then enter your domain name followed by your project name.

With the exception of the limited checked pages, there is no need to edit any settings. However, if the need arises, remove URL parameters, bypass restrictions, or allow or disallow some URLs.

1. On Page SEO Score.
2. Organic Monthly Traffic.
3. Organic Keywords.
4. Backlinks.

As you scroll down the page, ‘Top SEO Issues’ will appear. Click on any of the URL for more information on your website’s issues. This way, you can review the pages; decide whether you need additional content. It’s crucial that you’ll have an insight on how Googlebot is crawling your site. You’ll know when your site is ranking well by manually searching your site.

Other Aspects To Check

When looking for relevant search results, how many of your pages pop up after? Do they come up first in the list when searching your site? Do you see your site in the list of end results when giving assessments?

Keep in mind though that despite your page’s not being at the top rank, it doesn’t mean that your page is uncrawlable, it only suggests that you need to realize the problem and what needs to be done.

You need to do this procedure in order to know if your page’s variation is in the right arrangement, in combination with duplicates. How do you do this? Go to Google and run a “site:domain.com.”

This will list indexed URLs for your domain. If you have mix site versions, then you potentially need to addressed to it. It’s important to run site search in order to have a preview of any used subdomains.

Checking your site’s indexed URLs is another procedure, it’s like running the same procedure as the above. You’ll be surprised to see a few pages Google has indexed after doing this.

Are these the results that you expect after a search? Then if not, there’s an issue that needs to be fixed. (The main culprit is usually the faceted navigation needs to be indexed). However, if it’s less than what you expected, your site then is being crawled or indexed.

How To Use Search Console

Seeing a drop in your site’s ranking or failing to rank high as it should be is anticipated once your site has violated Google’s Webmaster Quality Guidelines; this is where Manual Penalty comes in. If your brand does not rank then your site will be deindexed.

You can avoid this by checking in to see whether a manual action has been issued against your site by using the Search Console; look for:

1. “Security and Manual Actions” tab down the left-hand side of the menu;
2. Look for the manual actions link.
3. Click, then you will be directed to your status.

You can relax if you see the result with a green check. On the other hand, if an issue appears in a list, then you need a Manual Actions Report.

It has been an important factor for Mobile Ranking for a long time. Remember that User Experience is prevalent in SEO success so site speed is important.

In fact, data shows that if there’s a significant bouncing from a user, this increases a slower page load. The faster the page loads, the better result from SEO and UX perspectives. Use SEMrush Site Audit report to see load time statistics and list of highlighted errors.

SEO Audits and SSL Certificates

Implementing an SSL certificate is important if your site runs on HTTP. Once you run https://www.domain.com in your browser and see that your site remains on the HTTP protocol you can relax and head on to the next step. On the other hand, you need to address this issue if you are redirected to an HTTP version.

Make sure to keep up with the trend of having a mobile-friendly site. UX is a must if you expect to reach the top. You can check this on Search Console, look for Enhancements tab in the Mobile Usability section for any issues.

SEO Audits and Indexation Issues

How to analyze and resolve indexation issues? You will see valid pages or ones that have warning, plus, excluded pages as well as coverage errors, if you go to the index tab of the Coverage page in Google Search Console.

Prevention of site from being crawled and indexed is expected if there are underlying issues. Address this ASAP! Underlying common errors include:

1. Pages that have a noindex attribute and that are submitted in a sitemap.
2. Pages blocked from being crawled in your robots.txt file but that are included in a sitemap.
3. 404 pages submitted in a sitemap.

Excluded URLs are pages that are not currently in Google’s index. This includes:

1. Pages excluded with a noindex attribute
2. Pages that redirect
3. Crawl anomalies
4. Canonicalization issues
5. Pages that are crawled but not indexed
6. Not found (404) errors
7. Pages blocked by your robots.txt file

Deeply analyze the report and only clean the areas of concern. Of course, these reports don’t need to always be cleaned up. Usually, there are specific reasons these exclusions happen, i.e., due to site migrations. Those are the best moment to clean those reports.

Page user experience is the main goal in Google’s future objectives. A combination of Core Web Vitals signals with Google’s for a better Search ranking which gives better metrics for page user experience is a feat.

Other Tips to Improve your SEO Audits

Be a social media butterfly. Use social media as your tool for your SEO efforts. Let the dynamics of this platform be a conduit for consistent backlinks and engagement. It has the power to increase the number of your backlinks.

Those who follow your content might be more likely to link to it. This increases your brand awareness through queries about your brand. Also, let us not forget the “mentions” and “tags” that social media can offer to your brand.

As we take everything into account, we have touched on some techniques on how to do SEO Audit. We have given tools and procedures on how to fix issues and deal with it to keep your site up to its rank.

Final Thoughts

Always bear in mind that search engine algorithms, best practices, market trends, and most especially your competitors are always keeping track. So make it a habit to keep your site up to date; address issues immediately after audit. Eliminate duplicates. Monitor your site analytics, and make sure you’re engaging in any social media platforms.

The more your presence you have in social media, the further you’ll push your relevant search terms. Be consistent, and your SEO ranking will soon reach the peak of success.

The post How To Easily Do An SEO Audit appeared first on Responsive. Award-Winning. Dynamic. RAD. Canada's Best.

On his website he’s described as handsome, debonair, suave, charming and a technology-lover who also loves Ghostbusters, StarWars and cheesy 80’s TV. You may disagree with all of the above–after all, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, or the buyer, according to AJ Frey.

However, one truth that is undeniable is that AJ Frey is an incredibly brilliant Search Engine Optimization specialist aka SEO expert, who hates pay per click. Thought that would get your attention! It is no secret that AJ Frey has a sense of humour.

But when it comes to his clients and helping them to achieve website’s success, he will do whatever it takes to position your product or service on page one. AJ Frey is the owner of Best SEO in Canada.

He Offers a comprehensive range of SEO services, dedicated to driving traffic that meets your lead, acquisition, or sales objectives.

But why Is AJ Frey So Sure About Your Website’s Success? Because success leaves clues. What he has done for others he will do for you. Let’s look at some of what he’s done for others and for himself to make it to page one on Google’s search engine: 

1. Experience and Process for SEO Delivery

When it comes to SEO these days, anyone with a laptop, access to the Internet and a WordPress-installed blog can boast of being an SEO expert After all, YOAST plug-in is the #1 WordPress SEO plugin, and is available on all WordPress sites.  

What you won’t see behind those claims, however, is the experience and process they take to deliver results. This is fundamental, and something you should watch out for. When a so-called SEO expert is offering his or her service, the first thing you should do is visit his/her website.

Next, do a simple search in Google to see if they show up on the search engine’s organic positions. If they don’t, it means they have little to no experience, nor have they implemented whatever SEO strategy they are claiming to deliver. How can you give what you don’t have?

Therefore, a fundamental characteristic of great SEO experts is that they have experience implementing SEO for themselves first. In addition, they should have a process, showing you how they intend to make your website a success:

2. Thought Leadership 

SEO is always evolving, as you no doubt have seen with the genesis of BERT–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.

And if you’re just returning to the planet and have no idea what I’m talking about, check out this article (link to: What is the Best Word Count for SEO in Canada?). 

This is Google’s last major update. However, in one year alone, Google made upwards of 3,200 updates to its search engine algorithms. How can you be expected to keep tabs of all these updates while focusing on managing your business?

You need thought-leadership, and that’s another characteristic of great SEO experts. They must know what is happening in the industry and are able to adjust accordingly. Ensure they’re keeping up with these ever evolving SEO best practices and are sharing tips to help your business adjust for maximum impact.

3. An Outstanding Portfolio

Experts aren’t born, they’re created. Becoming an SEO expert overnight is impossible.

In order to be an SEO expert, you have to put in a lot of work and dedication. Experts study a lot and practice a lot. This gives them impressive portfolios which every SEO expert wants to show off.

Who wouldn’t toot his own horn? In the world of SEO the louder the horn the better. When an SEO expert works with a client to put his/her website on Google’s page one, this gives him/her a feeling of great pride and accomplishment.

And they should feel proud of their accomplishments. Getting on Google’s page one is hard work! Naturally, they are going to publicise this great feat by posting it on their websites. 

This is good for you. This is your opportunity to scroll through their portfolio to see the kind of work they have done and are doing. You will also get to see the calibre clients with whom they work to determine if you, too, would want to be in that “club”. 

As an SEO expert, AJ Frey is no exception in wanting to highlight his outstanding portfolio. Here you can peruse some of the work he has done for clients just like you. 

4. Real Life Testimonials

Naturally, if an SEO expert has a portfolio, it means he/she has clients. What do satisfied clients do? They give testimonials. So not only do SEO experts toot their own horns, but their clients toot louder.

Developing winning SEO strategies, managing their implementation, and guiding teams on their execution to generate results is not easy. When an SEO Expert does all this hard work and gets those fantastic results, their clients reward them with testimonials, having gotten value for their money. 

Thus, sharing real-life testimonials is a characteristic you’ll find with most great SEO experts like AJ Frey. 

5. We’re a Team of Creatives

When you hire AJ Frey you’re not just getting the most brilliant SEO expert on the planet, you’re getting his team — an eclectic group of creatives with various backgrounds, who manage to work together with our clients to plan out and implement an extensive strategy to boost your website in the Google rankings.

10 years ago a crack squad SEO unit was sent to prison by a Google court for a crime they didn’t commit. These men promptly escaped a maximum security stockade, changed their SEO strategy, and went underground.

Today still wanted by the search engines they survive as web designers and SEO specialists. By bringing together a team of the very best SEO experts in Canada with specialties in site optimization, mobile UX, link building, analytics and SEO content, AJ Frey is sure about your website’s success. 

AJ Frey doesn’t only talk the talk, but he walks the walk. He specialises in helping anyone (small businesses, large enterprise businesses and everything in between)boost their online presence and get found on not only Google, but all major search engines across the world – not only in Canada.That’s a recipe for success–your success!

6. Only SEO-optimised Content Marketing

And that’s not all!

AJ Frey, through his evolving proven whitehat secret recipe generates millions of organic SEO traffic to his clients’ blogs and websites–all done organically. I.e. no Instagram and Facebook Ads.

Only SEO-optimised content marketing. It is for this reason that many small and large businesses trust AJ Frey to deliver SEO strategies that put them on Google’s page one. 

7. 5-star Ratings 

Still don’t see why AJ Frey is so sure about your website’s success? How about this: Across several review sites, including this one, this SEO expert’s team of creatives’ expertise and penchant for perfection have seen them receive 5-star ratings from happy customers. 

8. King of Backlinks 

At the beginning of  the article we mentioned BERT–Google’s AI that interprets data on a page and delivers meaningful search results for your keyword search.

One of the algorithms BERT interprets is the number of backlinks pointing to web pages and websites on a whole.  The more backlinks, the more BERT sees your site as authoritative.

However, due to its “intelligence”, Google’s search engine cannot be fooled by many backlinks that are from dummy sites, or sites with irrelevant information–though many have tried.

When it comes to acquiring backlinks, AJ Frey comes highly recommended as the king of backlinks.

He will help you to generate high-value backlinks, ensuring search engines interpret your website as important and rank it above those of your competitors for keyword searches. This is another reason AJ Frey is so sure about your website’s success. 

When you sign up for one of AJ Frey’s SEO packages you receive expert consultations, market and keyword research, search engine webmaster tools setup, and a myriad of other tools that will aid in the success of your website. 

Whether or not you own an ecommerce website, or maybe you just have a simple landing page, but you want it to be on Google’s page one for your keyword search, you need a team of creatives who are passionate about organic traffic and SEO white hat best practices.

You need AJ Frey–who is sure about your website’s success. 

What to Expect from The Best SEO in Canada

1. Onboarding and Project Management

We value your business. We understand how important your website is to you. In order to assist you to reach your goal(s), we will assign a project manager to handle your account. He/She will need access to some of your assets. 

Depending on the scope of work, this could mean anything from access to your website/blog, your Google Analytics login info, your in-house staff, etc. This is why an onboarding process is important.

From this exercise, the project manager will be able to advise concerning the management of your project. I.e. how long the process will take, what is the full scope of the project, etc. 

2. Strategy session 

Of course, before your project manager proceeds with the onboarding process, a strategy session is organised. Your decision to work with AJ Frey, an SEO expert, came from the desire to rank high on Google’s search engine.

Or, it may be that you are seeking to generate more traffic to your site. Whatever the reason, you’re here for results. You have heard that AJ Frey can make your business successful, and trial and error is costly. 

We know that no two businesses are alike, therefore, the SEO strategies that work for one may not work for the other. Great SEO experts like AJ Frey, from experience working with different businesses, know this.

Thus, we do not simply take your information and send you proposals. Instead, and in order to help you, we allow you to share your unique needs and business case during our strategy session.

3. Research and Recommendations

After sharing your needs and business case with our SEO expert during our strategy session, your information is then used to conduct in-depth research. This is done in order to gain insights into your industry and your target audience. 

Once done, our SEO expert will share the results of the research, and offer recommendations based on the findings, in order for your website to be successful.

We use all the available digital channels available to you, including telephone, email and video conferencing. 

4. A Contract Detailing the Deliverables

So far, you’ve had several “meetings” with our SEO expert, and no mention yet of a contract. We believe in value for money and putting our money where our mouth is.

So, we will only offer a contract for your acceptance, after our strategy sessions, which includes a digital project kickoff meeting with your team (onboarding) and platform specific optmsation consultations (See numbers 2 & 3 above).

If our strategy session and follow-up discussions with our SEO expert looks like a good fit for the exchange of mutual value, then and only then you’ll receive our contract for your business.

Not only that, but our brilliant SEO expert won’t just send you a contract, but you’ll receive the contract detailing our deliverables–what we’ll deliver, how we’ll deliver and when you should start expecting results.

AJ and SEO  

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is not a one-size fits all, fly-by-night strategy implemented by black hat SEO “experts”. SEO takes time before its results become apparent.

Any SEO “expert” who tells you he/she can produce overnight success is clueless about SEO strategies, or is practising black hat techniques–which will find your website being penalised by Google for illegal practices.

The minimum time on average for any signs of improvement is approximately 3 months. It could be sooner, but we do not make wild promises. We prefer to be conservative, and work hard at fulfilling our obligations. 

AJ Frey is an incredibly brilliant Search Engine Optimisation specialist aka SEO expert, who hates pay per click. His strategy, which he calls his secret sauce, is a white hat, Google-friendly strategy that is guaranteed to get you positive search results, regardless of the search engine. 

He offers a comprehensive range of SEO services, dedicated to driving traffic that meets your lead, acquisition, or sales objectives. If you give it approximately 3 months, you’ll start seeing results—qualified traffic, leads and sales. 

AJ Frey can do all that was mentioned above and then some. As you have seen from the testimonials, many clients have testified to the success of their websites. If he is able to help make their websites successful, he is sure about your website’s success.

A few words From AJ to You

Hi! I’m AJ Frey, and I would love to hear from you.

If you enjoyed this article and are in need of digital marketing, a cool website, or improving your ranking on the search engines, contact me at 1 250 801 6588, or just leave me a comment in the box below by way of introduction. Your website’s success means business for me!

My team and I will help you build a RAD website that will attract customers through good design, cool integrations and SEO. 

So why is AJ Frey so sure about your website’s success? Because you found him on page one.  If he can do that for himself, imagine, just for a moment, what he can do for you! 

He hates PPC! That’s someone you want in your corner. 

The post Why Is AJ Frey So Sure About Your Website’s Success?  appeared first on Responsive. Award-Winning. Dynamic. RAD. Canada's Best.

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.

The post Tips on How to Create an SEO Friendly FAQ Page appeared first on Responsive. Award-Winning. Dynamic. RAD. Canada's Best.

“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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