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SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the process of tuning a website to increase its search engine ranking for particular keywords (keywords are the terms people use in search). A good keyword ranking puts a website on the first page or second page of search result, greatly increasing a website’s visibility with customers.

The goal of SEO is to optimize websites for natural (what we call “organic”) search based on keywords tuned for your business. PPC (or pay per click) also uses a keyword strategy and appears on the search result page, but the listing is paid rather than free. With a PPC campaign, you pay a set fee for each click on your listing. The click costs is based on demand, so the more competitive a keyword term is, the more you will pay. See this article for some truly crazy PPC costs!

Yes, if you’re serious about people finding you online, you should be doing at least baseline SEO. According to a study by BrightEdge, an average of 53% of website traffic comes from “organic” sources. This is the slice of the pie that represents people finding your website through search engines, rather than through direct links or paid ads. Whether you’re a local business or a global corporation, you at least need an understanding of how your current SEO strategy is working or if something needs to change.

This is a difficult question with many different answers — the most unsatisfying of which is it depends. The variability is based on the age/authority of your website, the quality of your content and the competitiveness in your field. That said, we can expect results, measured by rank and clicks, in as little as two months but more commonly 4-6 months with sustained investment in SEO content and link building.

SEO is an ongoing investment. Even setting aside the fact that search algorithms value new content (sometimes called “freshness”), algorithms are constantly evolving as search engines strive to improve their content delivery. This, combined with the fact that your competition is likely investing into SEO as well, means that maintaining good rankings in desirable keywords requires upkeep, time, and attention.

No (and you should avoid anyone who claims they can). As an SEO agency, 4All ensures your website follows best practices that make it more attractive to search algorithms. Ultimately, however, we do not control the algorithms, which makes it impossible to know with 100% certainty how your site will rank. Google does not have any form of “special submissions” or any “special relationships” with individual SEO agencies, and warns against working with companies who make this kind of claim.

Technical SEO is a set of best practices that make your website more attractive to, and easier to scan by, search engines. Technical SEO includes things like: using SSL (this is when a site appears as https:// rather than http://), improving page speed, fixing duplicate content, ensuring your site works well on mobile, and more.

Site performance, also called “page speed,” affects your website’s SEO performance both directly and indirectly. Page speed is one of the “direct ranking factors” Google uses to evaluate your website – particularly on mobile. Google studies also show that mobile users leave a site after about 3 seconds of loading time, which tells Google that they had a bad experience on your site. Google doesn’t want users to have a bad experience. So, in addition to page speed being directly evaluated by Google, slow loading speeds can increase bounce rates, which lead to further SEO penalties.