Common Questions

Do you optimize for all major search engines?

If you’ve read the pages of my website, heard one of my presentations or saw a video that I’ve released about SEO, you may notice that I clearly focus entirely on Google. Many are curious if their pages will be optimized for Bing or Yahoo as well. The answer is “not exactly”. Allow me to take a moment to explain. My optimization is geared to provide top rankings in Google, not Bing. Here is why. 1) The lesser search engines tend to follow Google’s lead in how they structure their algorithms, at least on the key points. The minor details in those algorithms are quite clearly different, evident by the fact that they vary greatly but, for all practical purposes, optimize for Google and you will be optimized for the others and 2) Based on my experience, the potential traffic from search is overwhelmingly the result of a Google search without fail.

Do you participate in black hat SEO?

Absolutely not! We have been extremely successful with “white hat” strategies, which means we do ethical SEO well within the guidelines provided by Google and the other search engines. In addition, we reserve the right to refuse requests from a client who wants us to participate in anything we deem as “black hat”. This is to protect you in addition to protecting our own reputations.

Does your SEO come with a guarantee?

The short answer is “no”.

The idea behind good SEO is to do the right things to set the stage for high rankings in relevant searches, which we’ve done repeatedly. However, the ultimate decision still rests with the search engine and is driven by their ever-changing algorithms. While we don’t offer an official guarantee of certain rankings, we have a proven track record of obtaining high rankings, including many #1 spots, for all of our past clients. Add that to the fact that we’re extremely competitive and bent on customer satisfaction and the end result is that you are in good hands when you trust YowSeo with your SEO.

Quite honestly, a guarantee is not worth much in this industry. If you do manage to find a company that offers one, they generally have plenty of loopholes found in the small print.

How long does it take to see results?

There is no clear-cut answer to this question because so much depends on the age of your domain name, the keywords you want high rankings for, the strengths and weaknesses of your competitor’s websites, the content we have available with which to work and your definition of results.

For most campaigns, we’ve typically seen some page 1 rankings in the first month or two. With a brand new website, it could take closer to 4 or 5 months. Our goal is that you will see increases in new client inquiries 2 or 3 months in and that those will increase consistently, each month thereafter.

What is white hat and black hat SEO?

In simple terms, “white hat” SEO is gaining rankings through ethical strategy, which means it strictly stays within the guidelines established by Google and other search engines and essentially builds upon an excellent user experience while “black hat” SEO leans towards the strategies, tricks and linking schemes that fall outside those guidelines.

Black hat SEO often results in temporary high rankings because the tricks can work for the moment but will often be uncovered and can result in penalties or a complete ban from the search results.

Why is there a monthly ongoing charge associated with your SEO?

The biggest reason for ongoing SEO is because Google bases rankings for a search query, to a large extent, on which webpages have more inbound links pointing to them. With such a large demand for increased link popularity and Google’s insistence on the increase happening at a natural and steady pace, it is important to implement linking strategies that provide a consistent, ongoing effort.

In addition, most websites are continually evolving and growing so good SEO should be implemented into new parts of the site and specific pages. We have also found the most effective way of increasing rankings is to monitor progress and adjust strategy as we see how Google responds to previous changes and how searchers behave when they find your site from certain search queries. In other words, a lot goes into our SEO beyond the one-time page makeovers.

Will you do SEO for me and my competitor at the same time?

No. Once we begin SEO for a new client we will not enter into a contract with one of their competitors.