What is SEO & Local SEO? How does Google Search work? What is keyword research?
SEO FAQs

What is SEO?

SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization, a set of processes used to improve your website’s ranking in organic search results . SEO helps increase the volume of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.

What is Local SEO?

While SEO can be for a website that serves an international, national or local audience, Local SEO is specific to optimising your website to rank better for a local audience.

If you have a local business, like a shop, restaurant, office or hotel etc., regardless of whether you serve customers at your location or service them away from your workplace but within a specific locale then optimizing your website for that service in that area helps people are find you in real life. This includes having a presence on Google My Business so your business can be found in local search and Google Maps.

Where can I learn SEO?

There are many great resources out there if you’re trying to learn about doing SEO. Read blogs on Search Engine Journal, Moz, Search Engine Land, Marketing Land, SEMRush etc. And above all read
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide by Google.

What is keyword research?

Keyword research is a way of determining which queries people are typing into search engines. So you need to research what keywords or phrases relate most closely to your business or services you offer. This will allow you to use those keywords for SEO in your website so your pages can show up in search results.

For example if you are an Optician then you may use ‘prescription glasses’ as a keyword.

How does Google Search work?

Google uses web crawlers ( Googlebots), also known as spiders (because of the ‘web’), to fetch information from website pages and other publicly available content and organise that within its Search index.

There are millions of web pages that Googlebots crawl and index and when someone performs a search, they present them them with pages carrying potentially relevant information.

The order in with these results are displayed is called the ‘Search Ranking’. Google uses very sophisticated algorithm to figure out how the pages should be ranked.

What is a Google Data Centre?

All the web pages/content that is crawled and indexed by Googlebots is stored in Google Data Centres which are located all around the world.

We have got a video showing you what happens in a Google Data Centre. Watch Google Data Centre Video.

How does VOICE search work?

Voice search works like any other online search on the available search engines but the choice of search engine varies from device to device.

Which search engine does Alexa use?

Alexa uses Bing for local searches but Bing Local Business results are Powered by Yelp. This is an old old partnership that started in 2012.

Bing has been integrating Yelp’s reviews and detailed business information such as photos, operating hours and more into Bing Local results.

How can we do SEO for voice search?

As the results of voice search are fetched from selected search engines, you must ensure that your website is optimised for search.

To be found by Alexa you must ensure that your business is listed on Bing Local Business listing as well as Yelp. Reviews on Yelp help your website appear in the top search results by Alexa.

Webpages with speakable (schema) structured data can use the Google Assistant to distribute the content through new channels and reach a wider base of users.

What is Speakable Schema?

The speakable schema.org property identifies sections within an article or webpage that are best suited for audio playback using text-to-speech (TTS). Adding markup allows search engines and other applications to identify content to read aloud on Google Assistant-enabled devices using TTS.

• What you need to know about Voice Search in relation to SEO.
• Searching with Voice Assistants (Amazon Alexa, Google Dot, Nest Hub etc.).

What is mobile-first index?

Mobile-first indexing means Google predominantly uses the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking. Historically, the index primarily used the desktop version of a page’s content when evaluating the relevance of a page to a user’s query.

In other words the mobile version of your website becomes the starting point for what Google includes in their index, and the baseline for how they determine rankings.

What is site structure?

A website’s structure refers to how the website is set up, i.e. how the individual subpages are linked to one another. It is particularly important that crawlers can find all subpages quickly and easily when websites have a large number of subpages. For this reason, a website’s homepage needs to have links to the most important subpages. Files such as sitemap.xml and robots.txt also help the crawler do its job in this regard.

How to create best internal links?

What is sitemap.xml file?

The sitemap.xml file in an XML file that is saved to a website’s server. It contains a list of all the subpages belonging to the website. These files help search engines to learn more about the structure of a website. This speeds up the crawl process and reduces the likelihood that the crawler will overlook subpages. In addition, the file can provide additional information about certain content, e.g.:

• Information about images or videos that can be found on a website or the duration of a video and its subject.
• General information about the website, e.g. when it was last updated.

What is Robots.txt file?

Robots.txt file is a text file that can be saved to a website’s server. It determines if and when the search engine crawlers can visit a website’s subpages and include them in their index. In doing this, certain subpages can be excluded from the search results.