What Questions Should I Be Asking?
-
I just read a discussion that was originally posted by Steve Ollington on May 22, 2011 where he states that many people are asking the wrong types of questions on this forum. He said that he wonders if he will see a shift from people asking questions on "how to rank" to questions dealing with "how to work out the best KPIs" (Key Performance Indicators - yes I had to google it).
I was once told we learn more by asking questions about a topic than by just listening. I've also been told that sometimes the right question to ask is, "What questions should I be asking?" So here is my question, what types of questions should I be asking to be better at SEO? Perhaps these are some of them:
- Is it possible to be good at SEO when it is not a full-time job? It is very tempting to look for easy answers when you only have limited time.
- What are considered KPI's? Are they different for every industry?
- How do you know what is junk information vs what is truly good SEO advice? Is it just simply trial and error? It seems to me that if people find truly good SEO information, they aren't going to be sharing it so easily. It's the whole, "You get what you pay for".
Maybe some of you can tell me more of the questions I should be asking.
-
Humble and modest EGOL, but we all know you should be on that list too!
-
Yeah, I actually think that cheap/paid advice can be just as dangerous and absolutely agree that the "who" can be more important than the "where". The other thing I'd add is that so much advice isn't good or bad so much as contextual. When someone asks how they should handle duplicate content or a major site architecture issue, it's tough to give a quick answer. Even when I can and that answer is right for them, that doesn't mean it's right for everybody. Eventually, you really have to understand some of the fundamental principles behind the answers people give.
Let's step back from SEO. Look at generic, internet health advice. Should you drink milk, for example? If you're malnourished, yes, absolutely. If you need more Vitamin D, sure. If you're lactose intolerant, probably not. If you're allergic, you could die. No matter how smart anyone is, there's no one-sized-fits-all answer to that question, IMO. That's true for a lot of complex SEO issues.
-
How do you know what is junk information vs what is truly good SEO advice? Is it just simply trial and error? It seems to me that if people find truly good SEO information, they aren't going to be sharing it so easily.
First, I think that most of the content posted on SEO forums is either incorrect or dangerous (ducks!)... so rather than deciding WHAT to listen to I decide WHO to listen to.
At the top of my list of WHO to listen to would be Bill Slawski (seobythesea), Rand Fishkin (seomoz founder), DazzlinDonna (dazzlindonna), Alan Bleiweiss (seomoz member), iamlost (cre8asiteforums). Listen to people who you think are successful and who you have followed for a while.
Free information can be really really good (if you are careful)... but the most dangerous information is cheap information.
-
Hi Kade - welcome to the Moz Q+A! Thrilled to have you here. I'll do my best on your three queries.
#1 - It's definitely possible, and often times, in early stages of a business, you've got to find proficiency in lots of areas, figure out what's critical/core to your business and then scale those individual functions to experts. As an example, at Moz, I started getting "good" at SEO when web design and usability consulting was my day job. As I got curious and better at it, that became more of my role until I couldn't scale anymore and we hired consultants to help. Even as recently as this year, we brought in Tom Critchlow from Distilled to work in-house at Moz for 3 months, helping our marketing team establish great strategy around lots of inbound initiatives (as I had other obligations as CEO).
#2 - There are usually some KPIs that are cross-industry and company and others that are very specific. For example, nearly everyone cares about visits and conversions (whatever a "conversion" might mean). But some companies care much more about pages per visit (particularly those that are ad-revenue based) or average membership lifetime (for those who have subscription models). Figuring out the KPIs for your organization is the first step to good analytics.
#3 - Weirdly, I've found that in the SEO field, 95%+ of the great, white hat information is shared publicly. It's often accompanied by other signals of trust - good-looking, professional websites, authored by well known and referenced industry authorities who speak at conferences and have impressive client lists. The ones you need to watch out for come from the two extremes of the spectrum - first, the mainstream media which, to my knowledge, has never done and effective job covering how SEO works or the tactics one should follow. The second are the low-quality "craphat SEOs" who play on ignorance and make "too-good-to-be-true" offers.
If you stick with sources like those covered here - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/best-seo-blogs-top-10-sources-to-stay-uptodate - you should be great. If you want a more expansive list, I actually like http://seo.alltop.com as well.
Hope this helps!
Rand
-
The best advice I can give is to ask goal oriented questions whenever possible. Questions that help you tackle and issue, not necessarily a symptom.
I don't think (most) of the questions that are asked on here are bad, I just think the tactical questions are on a different level that the strategic questions that could be asked.
The more KPI related the questions get, the more subjective answers will become, too.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Duplicate Content Question With New Domain
Hey Everyone, I hope your day is going well. I have a question regarding duplicate content. Let's say that we have Website A and Website B. Website A is a directory for multiple stores & brands. Website B is a new domain that will satisfy the delivery niche for these multiple stores & brands (where they can click on a "Delivery" anchor on Website A and it'll redirect them to Website B). We want Website B to rank organically when someone types in " <brand>delivery" in Google. Website B has NOT been created yet. The Issue Website B has to be a separate domain than Website A (no getting around this). Website B will also pull all of the content from Website A (menus, reviews, about, etc). Will we face any duplicate content issues on either Website A or Website B in the future? Should we rel=canonical to the main website even though we want Website B to rank organically?</brand>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imjonny0 -
Of the two examples of markup (microdata, schema) code below, which of the two is better designed for its purpose of Q&A, and what might be suggested to improve upon these lines of code (context: questions and answers within article content.
ANSWER SEEN 'WITHIN THE QUESTION' BRACKET So you ask, why is the sky blue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RedFrog
Well, the answer is not so simple; In the day-time, when it's clear and cloudless,
the sky is blue because molecules in the air scatter blue light from the sun more than they scatter red light.
When we look towards the sun at sunset, we see red and orange colours because the blue light has been scattered out and away from the line of sight. See Structured Data Testing Results 'QUESTION' AND 'ANSWER' IN 2 SEPARATE BRACKETS Why Is The Sky Blue? Well, the answer is not so simple; In the day-time, when it's clear and cloudless,
the sky is blue because molecules in the air scatter blue light from the sun more than they scatter red light.
When we look towards the sun at sunset, we see red and orange colours because the blue light has been scattered out and away from the line of sight. See Structured Data Testing Results Thanks, Mark0 -
SEO question regarding rails app on www.site.com hosted on Heroku and www.site.com/blog at another host
Hi, I have a rails app hosted on Heroku (www.site.com) and would much prefer to set up a Wordpress blog using a different host pointing to www.site.com/blog, as opposed to using a gem within the actual app. Whats are peoples thoughts regarding there being any ranking implications for implementing the set up as noted in this post on Stackoverflow: "What I would do is serve your Wordpress blog along side your Rails app (so you've got a PHP and a Rails server running), and just have your /blog route point to a controller that redirects to your Wordpress app. Add something like this to your routes.rb: _`get '/blog', to:'blog#redirect'`_ and then have a redirect method in your BlogController that simply does this: _`classBlogController<applicationcontrollerdef redirect="" redirect_to="" "url_of_wordpress_blog"endend<="" code=""></applicationcontrollerdef>`_ _Now you can point at yourdomain.com/blog and it will take you to the Wordpress site._
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Anward0 -
Question about optimising an inner pages apposed to the homepage
Hi Everyone, I'm currently looking to optimise the inner page of a website opposed to the homepage itself. I was wondering if I should stick to some kind of link distribution? For instance, say my website is about widgets and the url is http://www.widgets.com, I want to optimise for a much easier "blue widgets" term on an inner page with the url: http://www.widgets.com/blue-widgets. Does google discriminate against a website with a higher number of links pointing to an inner page than the homepage? If so, what would you recommend a safe distribution between the two? Your thoughts would be greatly appreciated, Peter.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RoyalBlueCoffee0 -
Google PR & OSE DA/PA Question
Hey Moz Community, Can anyone explain why a website would have a PR4 Home page and most inner pages PR3 with only a DA12 and PA14 from OSE? The website in question is my Rotary club http://carymacgregorrotary.org. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WhiteboardCreations
Patrick0 -
YouTube hosting question
The "How it works" video that is embedded on my sites homepage is currently linked to an individual YouTube account not our company account. I would like to change the ownership so that the company profile can enjoy the added views (currently 13K +). Is there a way to move the video to a different account without losing the views it has already accumulated? Also, a related technical question - our R&D team says the video is slowing down the site. It links to YouTube but there is nothing in the source of our page about YouTube. Any suggestions for embedding it more effectively?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
.htaccess question/opinion/advice needed
Hello, I am trying to achieve 3 different things on my .htaccess I just want to make sure I am doing it the right or best way because I don't have much experience working on this kind of files. I am trying to: a) Redirect www.mysite.com/index.html to www.mysite.com so I don't get a duplicate content/tag error. b) Redirect mysite.com to www.mysite.com c) Get rid of the file extensions; www.mysite.com/stuff.html to www.mysite.com/stuff This is the code that I'm currently using and it seems to work fine, however I would like someone with experience to take a look so I can avoid internal server errors and other kinds of issues. I grabbed each piece of code from different posts and tutorials. Options +FollowSymlinks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eblan
RewriteEngine on Index Rewrite RewriteRule ^index.(htm|html|php) http://www.mysite.com/ [R=301,L] RewriteRule ^(.*)/index.(htm|html|php) http://www.mysite.com/$1/ [R=301,L] RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.html Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
Rewritecond %{http_host} ^mysite.com [nc]
Rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [r=301,nc] Thanks a lot!0 -
Privacy Policy & T&C's SEO related question
With Adwords they request a Privacy Policy and T&C's sometimes for an Ad to be approved. Silly question I know but do you think Google looks out for pages like this to identity websites which are more genuine for organic? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0