Netconcepts FAQS

We’re happy to provide you with information on our previous projects.

In business, diversification is a winning strategy. The pandemic taught many companies the lesson that sometimes e-commerce is the only commerce. You’re missing a huge opportunity to compete by not having a good-looking, user-friendly website. 

There are many companies out there with sub-par expertise and poor follow-through. That’s definitely not us! We stand by our track record. 

When you hire us, the first thing we do is a deep-dive analysis of your site. Then, we tell you exactly what the issues are - and we fix them!

Get in touch! We may be able to put together a presentation for your board or management team to show them the kind of ROI you will get when you team with us.

Heck yeah. We’re happy to audit your website and provide a list of recommendations to fix any problems we find. 

We’re more than happy to put together a presentation to show what kind of results can be achieved, just drop us a line!

Effective marketing is all about data. As soon as someone clicks on your website, you have amazing insight into who they are, where they came from, and what they’re looking for. The more traffic you get, the better your understanding of your average customer. And that’s invaluable!

We offer different tiers of engagement that will all depend on the particular objectives of your business. 

We offer pricing that ranges from a one-time consultation on a specific issue to monthly packages. Give us a call to customize a plan that will work for your budget and your needs.

If you could magically get traffic to your website for free, that would be great. There are always going to be costs involved in running a website. Whether that means regularly producing content, paying for advertising, or investing in SEO--time, energy, and money are needed to stay competitive. That said, an effective SEO strategy can increase your sales and reduce your ad spend over time.

In one sense--that you don’t have to pay for clicks--SEO is free. But maintaining your Google rankings does take work. If you’re not prepared to set aside a budget and resources for SEO, then you might be better off sticking to paid advertising. In the long term, an investment in SEO will be cheaper. And our aim is to coach our clients so they can optimize their sites themselves.

There’s no reason why you can’t do both. In fact, developing an SEO strategy raises some key questions about your core business, who your customers are, and how you go about your marketing. And it can help you solve many problems, both offline and online. 

Social media is vitally important to any marketing strategy. However, the fact is, most transactions still happen outside of social media--usually on a website. If you rely on one social media site for traffic and conversions, you’re putting all your eggs in one basket. A good SEO strategy will help you draw on traffic from a range of sources, maximizing your business potential.  

Google is a strange beast, so there are a number of factors to consider when estimating the time it will take to rank. One thing we can say is that results are not often achieved overnight, especially if you want to secure your rankings for the long term. Once we’ve completed an analysis of the opportunities for your site, we will provide an honest assessment of how long it will take to achieve your goals.

That’s great. Starting from scratch means you have the opportunity to get things right the first time. Without seeing the site, it’s hard to know exactly how long it will take to rank in Google. We will work with you to provide a roadmap for your online success.

Wrong! When it comes to SEO, this is one of the biggest misconceptions out there. Like any marketing initiative, maintaining your Google rankings means constant tweaking, testing, research, and of course regular updates with fresh engaging content. Chat us up to figure out a budget that will work for you to achieve your goals. 

Generally, Google updates its algorithms several times a year. There’s no way to know when or why a Google update will happen, so it’s best to adhere to best practice SEO guidelines at all times.

A site with no links to it from outside websites must not be a useful, link-worthy site. Such sites, not surprisingly, tend not to get indexed by Google. If they do get indexed for some reason, they are unlikely to rank in search results.

That’s correct. If you want those pages in Google’s index, then you’ll need to allow Googlebot access to the pages without requiring login or cookies. To do this, you’ll need to use the schema.org paywalled structured data element to ensure that Google parses your paywalled or subscription content correctly.

An image alt tag is the text that appears in a small box when you hover your cursor over an image. Alt tags should convey the key information from the image that the user would not receive if she had image loading turned off or she was visually impaired. Search engines also look at alt tags to a limited degree, so it’s helpful if the alt tag contains relevant keywords.  Not all images have or should have alt tags defined. For example, graphical borders should not, as that would make for a very frustrating user experience for a blind person using a screen reader.

We’re glad you asked! Check out Stephan’s book, The Art of SEO.

Featured snippets are the answer boxes that appear at the top of the Google results page. You can attempt to rank for featured snippets by providing a concise, useful answer to a common query.

Google truncates title tags at around 60 characters, so keep them between 50 to 60 characters.

Google truncates the meta description at around 160 characters, so the optimal length would be 50 to 160 characters. Include your keyword if you can, but make sure your meta-description entices the reader to click on your page.

Don’t bother with meta keywords. They are not a ranking factor and are useless in terms of SEO.

No, there is no harm in letting Googlebot access your JavaScripts.

Optimizing for Google images, the image search engine at https://images.google.com involves two things. First, make sure the image names have good keywords in them, separated by hyphens. Not too long though. Do keyword research to identify the best keywords to use. Second, make the content around the image and the alt tag for the image have good keywords in them. Before you begin optimizing, an important question to ask yourself is: am I sure I’ll actually attract high-value customers through Google images? It could be that you’ll end up getting plenty of traffic but the conversion rate could be quite poor because they aren’t shopping for your product but instead just for an image of it.

You can view your ranking data in Google Search Console, though it should be noted that there is some debate over how accurate this data is.

Submit your XML sitemap to Google via the “Sitemaps” section of Google Search Console. Before you submit your sitemap, make sure it is formatted correctly.

The quick answer to this is that if all your pages are indexed in Google, you have no penalties and you receive a substantial amount of organic traffic, you’re probably doing most things right. However, without a detailed audit of your site, it’s not possible to know whether there are any serious issues. Some sites receive large amounts of traffic but still have problems that are holding them back from their true potential.

Tools like  Ahrefs and SEMRush can give you an accurate indication of the traffic and ranking difficulty of a particular keyword. In our experience, Google Ads Keyword Planner isn’t particularly accurate, so we wouldn't rely on it when conducting keyword research.

No! You should never buy backlinks. If Google finds out (and they usually do), you will likely be hit with a penalty.

Once upon a time, SEO practitioners were obsessed with finding the perfect “keyword density” (the number of times a keyword was mentioned on a web page) for their content. These days it’s much harder to trick search engines by “keyword stuffing” your pages. Instead, focus on creating great content that your visitors will enjoy. Ultimately, this is a much better strategy for earning rankings.

At a minimum, you’re going to need Google analytics if you want to see increases or decreases in your traffic. If you want to track more SEO-specific metrics like how many keywords you rank for, number and quality of backlinks, or number of pages indexed, we would recommend SEMrush, Ahrefs, and  LinkResearchTools.

There’s a simple answer to this question: publish more content. If Google notices that you only publish one post per month, then it’s not going to bother crawling your site every day. If you were publishing regularly but your posts aren’t being indexed, check your robots.txt and XML sitemap to ensure you’re not blocking Google’s bots. Also, make sure your site loads quickly and you don’t have issues with thin or duplicate content chewing up your crawl budget.

Technically Google can crawl and index dynamically generated URLs, though they can result in problems like duplicate content (multiple URLs pointing to the same location) or use up your crawl budget. Dynamic URLs are also harder for humans to read and thus result in fewer clicks. Ideally, your URLs should be short and simple and include your target keyword. For example: site.com/best-hamburger-new-york.

There is a persistent myth that spending money on Google ads will have benefits for your organic listings. However, this is not the case at all. There is a clear division between Google’s paid and organic departments, and there is no SEO benefit from buying Google ads.

One of the benefits of SEO is that you don’t have to directly pay for traffic. However, even if you are doing well organically, there is no harm in experimenting with Google ads if you have the budget. You may want to use Google ads to test out the new niches or keywords before you invest in SEO. One thing to avoid would be bidding on keywords you already rank for, since you can wind up paying for traffic that you may have gotten for free.

If you want people to link to your site, you need to give them a reason to link to you. That means creating amazing content (linkbait), mentioning their name or brand (egobait), or giving them something useful like an infographic. Once you have something noteworthy, start an outreach campaign to tell people about it.

If you want to get traffic to your website, and customers to buy your products online, then SEO is vitally important. Without it, you either won’t get found, or you’ll get found by the wrong people.

Sure. There are plenty of resources online to learn the basics. We have been in the business for several decades; so if you want advice on what really works get in touch! We also offer a comprehensive SEO course, The Art of SEO.

While you may be directly competing with a company we’ve worked with to rank in Google, no two businesses are exactly the same. In fact, the keywords you need to target may be completely different.

We will explain everything we recommend in layman‘s terms, or we are happy to work with a developer or marketing person who is technically minded. When it comes down to it, even the most technical aspects of SEO can be explained in simple terms.

Absolutely! The first thing we do is a technical analysis of your site. Then, we’ll provide you with a list of recommendations and we can chat about the implementation. If you feel that you and your team can handle the work internally, that’s great. We’ll be there to provide guidance and further recommendations where needed.

The best keywords aren’t always the most obvious. For example, if you were a doughnut shop, you might think that you want to rank for the term chocolate doughnut. However, good keyword research can reveal what your customers might really be searching for, for example, “where can I buy donut holes right now.”  Sometimes, trying to rank for the most popular or obvious term can be a waste of time and money. We can help you scour the web for keyword opportunities that your competitors may be missing. We’ve helped many clients uncover an untapped keyword niche that’s ripe for mining.

Sure! Just drop us a line.

Absolutely! The first thing we do when taking on a new client is a deep dive audit on their website. We then provide you with a list of actionable recommendations to fix any issues.

If you’re a cookie company and you don’t show up in Google for cookie-related terms, then you are missing out on A LOT of customers. If you think your other marketing efforts make up for that then that’s great. But for most companies, they don’t. SEO can always add something to the mix.

While your developer or IT department might understand the basics of SEO, it’s not all technical. A large part of a successful SEO strategy is creating fresh, engaging content. An SEO professional ideally will have a grasp on both the technical aspects of web development and the more creative aspects of marketing. Needless to say, this skill set is rare!

Even if you’re a huge brand making a ton of money online, there are always opportunities to make more! Why rest on your laurels when you could be dominating your competitors?

WordPress plugins can be great for automating tasks and making website maintenance more efficient. However, if you rely on plugins alone, your SEO strategy will ultimately fail. SEO takes an investment of time, money, and resources to maintain your rankings.