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
-
To subdomain or to subfolder, that is the question.
Hi All, So I have a client that has two restaurants that they are wanting two sites for. Right now they have one site for their two locations that ranks pretty well for some bigger keywords for their style of food. With them wanting two sites, i'm struggling on whether we should just build them all within one site and just use separate folders on that site restaurant.com/location1 & restaurant.com/location2 with a landing page sending you to each, or if we should split it into subdomains. The content will be roughly the same, the menus are identical, i think each branch is just owned by a different family member so they want their own site. I keep leaning towards building it all into one site but i'm not sure. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | insitemoz10 -
Internal Duplicate Content Question...
We are looking for an internal duplicate content checker that is capable of crawling a site that has over 300,000 pages. We have looked over Moz's duplicate content tool and it seems like it is somewhat limited in how deep it crawls. Are there any suggestions on the best "internal" duplicate content checker that crawls deep in a site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tdawson091 -
Question about Syntax in Robots.txt
So if I want to block any URL from being indexed that contains a particular parameter what is the best way to put this in the robots.txt file? Currently I have-
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DRSearchEngOpt
Disallow: /attachment_id Where "attachment_id" is the parameter. Problem is I still see these URL's indexed and this has been in the robots now for over a month. I am wondering if I should just do Disallow: attachment_id or Disallow: attachment_id= but figured I would ask you guys first. Thanks!0 -
Pagination and View All Pages Question. We currently don't have a canonical tag pointing to View all as I don't believe it's a good user experience so how best we deal with this.
Hello All, I have an eCommerce site and have implemented the use rel="prev" and rel="next" for Page Pagination. However, we also have a View All which shows all the products but we currently don't have a canonical tag pointing to this as I don't believe showing the user a page with shed loads of products on it is actually a good user experience so we havent done anything with this page. I have a sample url from one of our categories which may help - http://goo.gl/9LPDOZ This is obviously causing me duplication issues as well . Also , the main category pages has historically been the pages which ranks better as opposed to Page 2, Page 3 etc etc. I am wondering what I should do about the View All Page and has anyone else had this same issue and how did they deal with it. Do we just get rid of the View All even though Google says it prefers you to have it ? I also want to concentrate my link juice on the main category pages as opposed being diluted between all my paginated pages ? - Does anyone have any tips on how to best do this and have you seen any ranking improvement from this ? Any ideas greatly appreciated. thanks Peter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Subdomain SEO question (php script on domain + wordpress on subdomain)
Hi Moz fellows, I am doing my first website which is entirely .php scripted. But I would like to have a wordpress blog to create content and blog posts, while the .php side of the website is more for sales pages and user generated listings.The only way to do this is to install wordpress on a subdomain "blog.website.com" QUESTION: If all my keywords targeted content is on the subdomain's Wordpress blog, but all my guest blogging efforts link to my main website, which one will rank? The subdomain or the domain? I need the domain to rank well as it is a Fiverr-like script, so if tons of people land on my "blog.website.com" subdomain, they will not convert into users... Let me know if you have experience with such a scenario, and thank you all in advance for your help! -Marc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marcandre0 -
Duplicate Content Question
We are getting ready to release an integration with another product for our app. We would like to add a landing page specifically for this integration. We would also like it to be very similar to our current home page. However, if we do this and use a lot of the same content, will this hurt our SEO due to duplicate content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NathanGilmore0 -
Are videos content to Google bot? and other questions.
It seems as though my site has been hit, possibly because of above the fold adverts or lack of content above the fold, so I have a number of questions regarding this. 1. Are videos regarded as content by Google Bot? 2. If three adverts are placed above the fold with text content clearly readable. Will these three adverts still affect my search engine rankings? 3. Is it better to put text before the video and have the video placed a bit lower? 4. I have a number of pages that have video but no text, could these pages combine to decrease the value of my best landing pages? thanks 😄
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | phoenixcg0 -
Question about HTTP Vary for Mobile
I'm reviewing https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/redirects, and wondering where exactly to add HTTP Vary: Desktop request which has a mobile page to add “Vary: User-Agent” to the response HEADER Or if the request came from mobile device, than add “Vary: User-Agent” to the response HEADER
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0