SEO FAQs

Find in-depth, non-biased answers to all of your SEO-related questions below.

SEO Knowledge Base

At Wildcat Digital, transparency is important to us. We also understand the importance of providing answers and educating customers. This is why our SEO experts have spent time answering real questions we’ve received over the years from genuine clients and prospects.

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How Many Blogs Do You Need to Write for Your Website?

Aim to initially create around 20-30 blogs. This will help to improve your website’s domain authority and get your SEO moving in the right direction. From here, it’s a good idea to continue posting blogs regularly (once or twice a month) to keep your site up to date. To be effective, these blogs should be structured for SEO, target relevant keywords and queries and include internal links, especially where your competition has high domain authorities.

Learn more about this in our in-depth blog.

What Happens If You Stop Doing SEO On Your Website?

If you stop doing SEO on your website, you won’t see an instant drop in results. However, over the coming weeks and months, you may lose rankings, which would stop you from reaching as many users online. If you lose traffic to your site, your sales and leads will likely be impacted, which in turn will lead to less revenue for your business.

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If I Write Blogs Myself Do I Need an SEO Agency?

If you write blogs yourself it’s still recommended to hire an SEO agency that can create a strong strategy and properly optimise your content. SEO agencies will also ensure good user experience and check that technical health of your website is in order so that you don’t get penalised by search engines and hurt your site’s ranking ability.

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How Does the SEO Content Process Work?

The SEO content process starts with keyword research, mapping and strategy before a clear roadmap is created. From here, individual pieces of work are created using this information alongside thorough research. The work is then internally proofread and quality checked twice before being sent to the client for approval. Finally, once any amendments have been made, the content is uploaded and regularly reviewed.

Learn more in our detailed blog

Is it Worth Targeting Keywords With Low Volume?

It is worth targeting keywords with lower search volumes as it will allow your business to dominate in low-competition areas that are actually relevant to your business. Additionally, high volume keywords are often very difficult to rank for. Therefore, targeting lower volume keywords may be particularly beneficial for newer websites and those with lower domain authorities.

Learn more about this in our blog, Is It Worth Targeting Keywords With Low Volume? 

Are Keyword Planners’ Reliable Enough For Keyword Research?

Keyword planners and tools are reliable to an extent when it comes to carrying out your keyword research. If you have ever used one of these platforms, you may have noticed different data on various tools. This is because keyword tools make their ‘best guess’ for search volume depending on the information they have access to. They also do not tend to capture low volume keywords very well because they have limited data.

As a result, you may be wondering how to work around this gap. We’ve come across this difficulty with several clients in niche areas so there’s no need to worry if you are struggling to find relevant keywords with search volume. Instead of taking keyword planners at their word, simply use them as a guide. Use the tools to discover new keywords but always remember to do further research to determine whether those keywords will help you reach your SEO goals.

Learn more about this in our blog, Is It Worth Targeting Keywords With Low Volume? 

How Can I Rank Better in My Local Area?

To rank better in your local area you will need to pay special attention to your SEO basics: Google Business Profile, structured data annotations, local citations and backlink profile.

Learn more about this in our dedicated blog.

Why Does an SEO Agency Need My Input?

You may be paying for an SEO agency to do the work, but it’s important to understand that the relationship is a two-way street. There are a number of things that an agency will need from you to ensure that things move smoothly towards a common goal. You know your business and wider industry better than anyone; a good SEO agency will want to capitalise on this to ensure that what they’re working on is 100% accurate and super-relevant to your business.

Additionally, an SEO agency will naturally want you to be happy with your campaign and see the value in the work they’re doing. Being involved ensure that you’re kept in the loop on what they’re doing and how the campaign is performing. You’re less likely to get 6-months in and be completely unhappy or unsatisfied with your results.

Learn more about why an SEO agency needs your input in our dedicated blog.

Is Digital PR and SEO the Same Thing?

SEO and PR may have similar goals in driving traffic and brand awareness. But, they have have very different strategies. SEO focuses on getting web pages to rank highly on search engines. Meanwhile, PR focuses on increasing brand awareness and perception.

 

Learn more about the relationship between SEO and PR in our dedicated blog.

What is Domain Authority and How Do You Improve it?

Domain authority is a number ranking from 1-100 that can impact where your website ranks on search engine results pages. An excellent domain authority score is anything above 80, however it would take a lot of time and improvements to achieve this, especially on newer websites.

Learn more about domain authority and methods to improve it in our dedicated blog.

What is Black Hat SEO?

Black hat SEO uses unethical techniques in an attempt to generate more traffic. Examples of Black hat SEO methods include keyword stuffing, buying backlinks, and hiding content. Instead of earning a position on a search engine by implementing correct SEO strategies, Black Hat SEO makes use of improper methods. It is essentially being impatient and not putting in the effort to get where you want to be.

Learn more about Black Hat SEO in our detailed blog.

What is a Google Penalty?

A Google penalty is essentially a punishment that Google gives to websites that do things it doesn’t like, such as using Black hat SEO tactics to improve their rankings. These penalties can make a website’s ranking in Google SERPs (search engine result pages) drop significantly.

Learn more about Google penalties and how to recover from one in our detailed blog.

What is the Difference Between Short and Long-Tail Keywords?

A keyword is a word or phrase that represents the main topic of your content. They are used to improve the search engine rankings of websites. Short-tail keywords, like ‘vets’, are brief and general, while long-tail keywords, such as ‘how much are the vets in Ely’, provide more specific information.

 

Learn more in our detailed blog.

How Many Backlinks Do I Need to Rank

You should aim for quality backlinks rather than quantity. The industry you operate in will determine what backlinks are necessary for you to stand out against competitors. For example, healthcare or finance related content will need more backlinks to rank well than content about hair and beauty.

 

Learn more about this in our dedicated blog.

What are Conversions in GA4?

Conversions in GA4 are events that are marked for their importance. For many conversions, these have been set up because they give data on how many leads, purchases, or form completions you have received through your digital channel.

 

Learn more about GA4 Events and Conversions in our dedicated blog,GA4 Glossary of Terms: The Basic Terminology.

What are Events in GA4?

An Event in GA4 is a specific user interaction or action tracked on a website or app. Events help in measuring user engagement and behaviour beyond traditional pageviews. Examples of events include button clicks, form submissions, video plays, downloads, and interactions with embedded elements like widgets.

Learn more about GA4 Events in our blog,GA4 Glossary of Terms: The Basic Terminology.

What Does Source/Medium Mean in GA4?

A “Source/Medium” is a critical dimension that reveals how users discovered your website or app. It comprises two key components:

Source = the origin of the user’s visit, such as a search engine , a specific website, a social media platform , or  where the user typed your website URL directly into their browser.

Medium = the broader category to which the source belongs. It signifies how the user arrived, such as through organic search, paid search, referral , or direct.

 

Learn more about this and other GA4 terminology in our blog, GA4 Glossary of Terms: The Basic Terminology.

What Does Users Mean in GA4?

In Google Analytics 4 (GA4), the terms “Organic Active Users” and “Organic New Users” each paint a distinct picture of user engagement. Organic Active Users are those that are engaged with your website; the log a session lasting a minimum of 10 sections, plus at least one conversion event or two or more page/screen views. Organic New Users are those that have never visited your website via a search engine before.

Learn more about the different GA4 metrics and terminology in our dedicated blog,GA4 Glossary of Terms: The Basic Terminology.

What is Engagement Rate in GA4?

Engagement Rate is how the interactions of user sessions are measured. It is represented as a percentage of organic engaged sessions on your website. Engaged sessions are those that surpass the 10 second mark, contain a conversion event, or boast at least two pageviews or screenviews.

Learn more about this and other GA4 metrics in our dedicated blog.

Is AI content bad for SEO?

No. Google states that it does not care how content is generated, but rather on the quality of the content, and how it measures up against their E-E-A-T guidelines. Of course, if you’re churning out one AI article after another, without fact-checking or proofreading first, then it is likely that you’ll get penalised. However, if you do review and add your own touch to AI-generated content, then it is likely that your content will be beneficial to users and therefore benefit your website rankings.

Learn more in our dedicated blog, Is AI content bad for SEO? 

What Is the Difference between Follow and Nofollow Links?

Follow and Nofollow links are in relation to links pointing towards a page on your website. This can be internally from your own site, or externally from another website.

The main difference between the two is that ‘follow’ links pass link equity (also known as ‘link juice’) to a website, which enhances its authority. On the other hand, ‘nofollow’ links don’t pass authority. Follow links are more beneficial for SEO, although nofollow links can still bring value to your website.

Learn more in our dedicated blog.

How Do I Get Google to Index My Sitemap?

Simply submit your sitemap to Google Search Console and Google should discover it within 48 hours. You can see when Google’s last read it and how many URLs it has discovered.

Learn more about Sitemaps in our dedicated blog, What is a Sitemap?

Do Small Websites Need a Sitemap?

Google suggests that if your website is under 500 pages, you don’t necessarily need a sitemap. However, considering that creating a sitemap and submitting it can take less than 30 minutes, it can be beneficial to have it from the get-go.

Learn more about sitemaps in our dedicated blog, What is a Sitemap?

What Is The Difference Between On-Site And Off-Site SEO?

The difference between on-site and off-site SEO is that on-site is completely within your control but off-site is not. On-site SEO refers to the optimisation of your website through keywords, quality content, title tags, H1s, meta descriptions and more. Off-site SEO refers to the efforts on other platforms to refer back to your content such as backlinks, digital PR and local SEO.

Learn more in our dedicated blog.

What is Crawling and Indexing in SEO?

Crawling in SEO refers to the process undertaken by search engines to find the pages on your website. It literally crawls the web from link to link (which is why internal linking is so important!) and indexes the pages it finds.

Indexing in SEO refers to a huge database (or index) of each and every page that a search engine has crawled. If your page isn’t indexed, it cannot be found on search engines.

Learn more about crawling and indexing in our dedicated blog.

How Do I Track my Keyword Rankings?

The best way to track keyword rankings is to use a tool such as SEMrush or Ahrefs. These tools tell you where your pages rank for a given keyword as well as rich result features such as snippets, images, People Also Ask and more. These tools are great, but work best as part of a tailored SEO strategy.

Learn more in our dedicated blog.

What Is Link Building?

Link building is the process of gaining backlinks to your website from high-authority websites in order to increase the authority of your own website. Backlinks tell Google that the content on your website is useful, relevant, trustworthy, and worth viewing. These links also help Google to find your website easier for crawling and indexing purposes.

Learn more about link building in our detailed blog.

Can You Increase Keyword Rankings Without Link Building?

A good link profile holds a lot of SEO value, but there’s more than one way to improve keyword rankings. These include:

  • Accurate keyword planning and strategy
  • Producing high-quality and engaging content
  • Checking your website’s core vitals to see where page speed can be improved
  • Crawling and indexing optimisation
  • Evaluate on-page SEO factors (internal links, organic CTR, user experience)

Learn more about this in our detailed blog.

What is Repurposing Content and How Do You Do it?

Repurposing content means taking existing content, such as an article, and altering it to serve a different purpose. For example, turning blog content into an infographic, social media post, e-book, or gated content. You can also repurpose video content by turning it into a TikTok, or Instagram Reel, or by adding it to your website.

Learn more about content recycling from our detailed blog.

Do Accountants Need Marketing?

Marketing is an important part of business for accountants in the modern world as it is becoming increasingly simple for clients to switch companies. Clients have more choice and power now, therefore you need to ensure that your business can:

  • Be found
  • Retain existing clients
  • Succeed in a highly competitive industry

Learn more about how marketing can help you business by reading our detailed blog.

How Do You Market a Dental Practice?

There are a number of strategies you can take when marketing your dental practice. But, one of the most important things you can do is to literally put yourself on the map with Local SEO. PPC ads, referral schemes and customer experience are other great marketing techniques for dentists.

Learn more about how you can market a dental practice by reading our detailed blog.

How Do Personal Trainers Get Clients?

Personal trainers get clients through marketing by ensuring their content is tailored to relevant keywords, creating optimised email campaigns, and building their social media brand. All of these factors help to put the brand in front of the right audience and convince them to convert into a lead.

Learn more about how personal trainers get clients by reading our detailed blog.

Why is Marketing in Healthcare Important?

Healthcare marketing can help you to boost your brand, both online and offline. It can also help you to secure new clients, engage and retain existing clients, and increase your overall competitive advantage.

Learn more about why marketing in healthcare is important by reading our detailed blog.

How Do You Target Multiple Cities Without Hurting Your SEO?

The key to not harming your SEO when targeting multiple cities is to only target areas in which you legitimately operate. You need to:

  • Prove that you operate in the area.
  • Create location pages.
  • Claim your Google Business Profile.
  • Use location schema.
  • Geotag relevant images.

Learn more by reading our detailed blog.

How Do I Find Guest Post Opportunities?

There are several ways to find guest blogging opportunities, including:

  • Searching for a business-related keyword + “guest post”, “looking for writers” or a similar phrase
  • Using social media platforms to connect with journalists
  • Tools such as HARO (Help A Reporter Out) or JustReachOut
  • Auditing your competitors’ backlinks

Learn more about how to find guest post opportunities by reading our detailed blog.

How Can You Do SEO For Vets?

A successful SEO campaign is tailored to the individual business, its industry, and the region in which it operates. For vet SEO, it’s important that you:

  • Ensure key technical SEO tasks are completed before anything else
  • Build a strong keyword strategy
  • Share your knowledge through helpful content
  • Own the local area with local SEO
  • Give the option of online booking to improve conversion rates
  • Make your voice heard through PR and local outreach

Learn more about how to do SEO for vets by reading our detailed blog.

How Do You Audit Site Speed and Performance

Website speed can be audited using various (free) tools available on different websites such as Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, ShortPixel, and DotCom-Tools. These tools give us more information about where speed and performance can be improved.

Learn more about how to audit site speed and performance by reading our detailed blog.

How Do You Set Up a 301 Redirect?

Implementing your 301 redirects depends on a variety of factors, including your CMS and reasoning. For example, redirecting a whole website is a different procedure than redirecting a single webpage. Usually, the most efficient way to add a redirect is through the server itself, although other options are available.

Learn more about 301 redirects by reading our detailed blog.

How Do You Audit Canonical Tags For SEO?

When looking at your canonical tags, there are 3 important factors that you need to consider. These are; recording each page that has a canonical tag, ensuring that the tag is placed correctly and directs crawlers to the correct landing page, and checking for any technical issues that are preventing the page from being crawled.

Learn more about canonical tags by reading our detailed blog.

How Do You Optimise A Blog For SEO?

To optimise a blog for SEO, begin with keyword research. Then:

  • Implement keyword research, prioritising the title and subheadings
  • Ensure the structure makes sense, is easy to read and isn’t just a wall of text
  • Be sure to highlight experience, expertise, authority and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T)
  • Optimise metadata

Learn more about optimising blogs for SEO by reading our detailed blog.

What is YMYL and Why is it Important for SEO?

YMYL stands for Your Money or Your Life and, in Google’s words, refers to “pages or topics that could potentially impact a person’s future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety”. It’s important for sites within YMYL niches to show expertise, experience, trust, and authoritativeness, otherwise it’s less likely users will trust the website.

Learn more by reading our detailed blog.

Why is Google Analytics 4 Better than Universal Analytics?

The main advantage of Google Analytics 4 is the new, customisable reports that allow you to track and monitor the exact niche of data that you require. Using GA4, you can now create reports that detail every step users take before making a purchase, or explore the different paths users take to get to any valuable information on your website. The in-depth exploration provides new, valuable insights that you may not otherwise have discovered.

Learn more by reading our detailed blog.

What Does Google See When it Crawls Your Site?

When a search engine crawls your website, it reads the on-page content and links, but in the form of HTML code. Additionally, it looks at the title and header tags and meta description of your page. Google also sees images by reading their alt text and looks at schema markups to understand what the website offers.

Learn more by reading our detailed blog.

What is E-A-T in SEO and Why is it Important?

E-A-T stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness and was introduced in 2018 within the Search Quality Evaluator guidelines. Google values each of these factors and judges the E-A-T of the website, the content, and the creator of the content. E-A-T is especially important for Y-M-Y-L niches.

Learn more by reading our detailed blog.

Why is Duplicate Content Bad for SEO?

Whilst there aren’t official penalties for duplicate content, it can result in negative SEO repercussions. Duplications confuse the algorithm – it doesn’t know which instance of the same content is the most relevant for a given search query and may result in decreased rankings, traffic and conversions.

Learn more by reading our detailed blog.

What is a Technical SEO Audit and Why is it Important?

A technical SEO audit reviews the technical fundamentals of a website including: indexing, search engine appearance, URLs, structured data, duplicate content, crawlability, linking, redirects, security, site speed, mobile usability & more. A website is more likely to succeed if these factors are optimised.

Learn more by reading our detailed blog.

How Do You Avoid Keyword Stuffing?

To avoid keyword stuffing, you want to make sure you’re still including your keywords to improve SERPs rankings but only where relevant. Don’t insert words in such a way that is unnatural to the flow of content, don’t include keywords that aren’t relevant to the content, and don’t write a group of keywords together.

Learn more by reading our detailed blog.

What are Google Ranking Factors?

Google ranking factors are a range of requirements set by Google which evaluates the quality of web pages and determines a suitable rank on search results. Such factors include high-quality content, user experience, internal and external linking, and page speed among other factors.

Learn more by reading our detailed blog.

What is Thin Content and can it Harm SEO?

Thin content is website content that either lacks in quantity and/or quality. This can have a negative impact on SEO with Google devaluing an offender’s website resulting in losses to rankings, traffic and sales.

Learn more by reading our detailed blog.

What Should be Included in a Content Audit in 2024?

Content audits need to take various on-page content factors into account in order to gain useful insight. Key categories include Thin/No Content, Page Structure, Keywords, Duplicate Content and Blog Content.

Learn more by reading our detailed blog.

Why You Should Implement GA4 Before July 2023

One of the main reasons why you need to make the switch to GA4 before July 2023 is because you can’t explore historic data. In other words, the sooner you implement the new generation of Google Analytics, the more of your data you will save and collect to explore. GA4 stores data from the date that you switch, not from the beginning of your UA data collection.

Learn more my reading our detailed blog.

Why are Featured Snippets Important for SEO?

Snippets are important because they gain what is known as “Position 0”, above ads, local SEO and the site that ranks first organically. This steals traffic away from those other links, and increases visibility, brand awareness, and brand authority. It can also help a site to improve its rankings.

Learn more by reading our detailed blog.

What are the Different Types of SEO?

There are six main types of SEO available to help you rank higher on search engines: technical SEO, content SEO/On-Page SEO, off-site SEO, local SEO, eCommerce SEO, and mobile SEO.

Learn more by reading our detailed blog.

Is There a Downside Of Having Too Many Keywords?

Using too many keywords is bad for SEO because it negatively affects user experience and can seriously harm your site’s rankings. Not only will the content be difficult to read for users but search engines actually now penalise sites who use keyword stuffing to increase their rankings.

 

Learn more about this and keyword best practices in our dedicated blog.

Does SEO Guarantee Rankings?

SEO cannot guarantee rankings for your website. However, a solid strategy along with help from an expert SEO specialist can place your website in the best possible chance to rank on SERPs. This plan should include keyword research and mapping, quality content and technical tasks.

 

Learn more about this in our detailed blog, Can you Guarantee Rankings with SEO?

How Do I Create E-E-A-T Content?

E-E-A-T content is content that leans on your personal expertise. Content should be 100% factual, whilst also containing ‘golden nuggets’ of information that come directly from your qualifications and experience in the industry. E-E-A-T content should also be backed up with an author profile which lists any formal qualifications and accreditations. All in all, E-E-A-T content should promote trustworthiness.

Learn more about writing E-E-A-T content in our recent blog.

Why Has My Organic Traffic Dropped?

Here are some of the main reasons why your organic traffic may have dropped:

  • Drops in keyword rankings
  • Broken links
  • Algorithm changes
  • Page speed issues
  • Changes in trends/search volume
  • Navigational issues
  • No-index tags
  • Google Penalty
  • Cannibalisation
  • Weak AI content

 

Learn more about why your traffic may have dropped in our detailed blog.

 

What is robots.txt?

Robots.txt is a text file on your website that instructs web robots and crawlers on which pages they should or should not access. When it comes to search engine agents, the robots.txt file allows us to stop Googlebot, Bingbot, and other crawlers from accessing certain areas of your site, and better manage the crawl budget.

The robots.txt file is part of a number of tools that website owners and developers can use to implement the Robots Exclusion Protocol, alongside X-robots-tags, robots meta tags, and rel attributes.

Learn more about robots.txt in our recent blog.

How Long Should Title Tags Be?

Title tags should be between 50 to 60 characters long. This is because Google and other search engines will only show the first 60 characters of a title tag. It’s essential to have the right length so Google can recognise what content is on your page and index it accordingly. Likewise, so that users understand what your page is about.

Learn more about this, including if title tags can be too short, and what a good title tag looks like in our recent blog.

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