FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions

Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to techniques that help your website become more visible in organic search results for the people who are looking for your brand, product, or service via search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

For an in-depth encyclopedia entry, refer to Wikipedia. Or the #1 authority on the SEO industry (for now), Moz.

Yes. As demonstrated by our Portfolio, Rankings and Reviews, we have witnessed first hand how our SEO has helped many businesses in Singapore grow not only their revenues and profits, but also their brands and expanded their companies.

SEO drives business results exactly because it helps businesses target the most interested potential customers a business could possibly have, right at the moment those prospects are looking for the products or services that the businesses offer.

While other online advertising or marketing channels interrupt a target audience’s activities (e.g. a Facebook ad interrupts a person’s leisurely browsing of his newsfeed, so does a YouTube ad interrupts a person’s watching of an entertaining or educational video, etc), SEO beats all of the other marketing channels as it delivers to the exact audience right at the very moment they express their desire for a product or service, with warm intent of purchase.

The key to how SEO achieves this is in choosing the right keywords or search terms that your target market typically types into the search engines. Knowing this data, and knowing how to execute an SEO plan to target these search terms is part of the strategic SEO services we provide.

Each client will have access to their own SEO tracking dashboard. You can compare your site ranking before and after you sign a contract with us. Also, check out our portfolio of ranking successes.

The time it takes to see results differ from client to client. It may take weeks, months, sometimes a year or more. It depends on what industry your business is in, the resources you are allocating for SEO, and the quality of SEO being done. Generally, our campaigns take approximately 2-3 months to see significant movements in the search engine. For lasting impact and stable rankings on the first page, usually anywhere from 7 to 12 months.

As part of our strategic planning, we do competitive analysis which includes “spying” on your competitors that are ranking highly in the search results, where you want your website to be.

But not to worry! The “spying” tactics we refer to are totally legal, as they rely on readily available data which most non-SEO’s don’t know where to find or how to read.

As SEO is partly a zero sum game, where you have to displace an incumbent to rank high up in the search results, competitive analysis or (legal) competitive spying is necessary.

What is involved in this competitor spying? Again, note that all these information and data are readily available via SEO tools, some from Google itself, and involve NO hacking or ‘social engineering’ or deception whatsoever. For some of them, it’s as simple as using the browser’s check source code function on a target website.

We look at: what keywords your competitors are ranking for and estimate how much traffic they’re receiving, where do their backlinks come from (since backlinks are an essential component of SEO), a timeline of their backlink building process, the anchor text distribution, what is their site speed, what is their content management system, how SEO-friendly is their underlying HTML code.

Don’t worry if some of the terms are too technical and you don’t understand them. We do.

They are not just jargons thrown around to make us sound impressive. We know what each term means and more importantly we know how to make use of the data and information we gain to your advantage, if you are our client.

In the strictest interpretations of Google’s playbook, doing anything at all to try and influence other websites to link back to you is frowned upon. The link building aspect of SEO is strictly not against any valid international laws of any government in the world regarding the Internet, it is just something that Google doesn’t like as it affects their rice bowl – which is their advertising revenue stream.

With that said, there is a spectrum of activities that can be generally considered white hat, grey hat and black hat in the SEO community.

To put it simply, white hat link building is extremely slow, depends on luck, depends on your real world personal networking and connections with the big leagues or celebrities, or depends on extremely brilliant but one-hit-wonder public relations manoeuvres – let’s face it – the average decent small business website have very little chances of being in this category.

On the other end of the spectrum, black hat link building is extremely tempting, it can get fast results, but they are often short-lived, or can be costly in the long run to maintain as you cover up your past shady tracks. It takes the manipulation of Google’s algorithms to the extreme. It can also sometimes be borderline illegal as some tactics may involve some form of hacking or defacing other websites to place a link to yours, or bringing down competitor sites through DDOS attacks.

Where most good SEO’s play, including us, is in the Grey Hat range – where we take a little bit of black hat concepts, and build backlinks while maintaining a clean white hat image in the eyes of Google as much as possible. Grey Hat SEO’s work based on social contracts and mutually beneficial relationships and understanding between one another, by building backlinks off each other’s websites and offering benefits in exchange.

For e.g. it is not illegal at all in any liberal capitalist country in the world for a website to sell space for a feature article and backlink inside it for a fee or other compensation, provided the content and activities related to it are legal. This is simply a Guest Post or Sponsored Editorial. Google may not like it, but both Google and that website and the one it links to, all work under a capitalist system, and it’s totally legal.

Unless you are an established website like BBC or Wikipedia, you will not get high rankings or good backlinks simply by writing great content.

Backlinks are a key component in how Google (and by extension the other search engines that don’t quite have as much of a market share as Google) assesses a website’s eligibility to be placed higher up in the search results pages. You can have a website with the best content, the best design, hosted on the fastest servers, and have all the technical SEO aspects perfectly taken care of, but if your website don’t have a single backlink pointing to it, chances are it will be ‘invisible’ in the search engines. This is undeniable.

Having fresh, useful posts regularly on your website is one of the best ways to achieve good rankings. They will attract visitors and provide new content for bots to index. Other sites may also link to the new information, increasing your domain authority and number of backlinks. But good content alone is not enough to get high rankings. It needs to be supplemented with a good comprehensive SEO strategy that covers link building and good on-site SEO architecture.

When your rankings go down, it may be because of one of or several reasons. Here are the most common (but don’t panic, we have ways to manage):

In a Bad Case:

a) Google has released a new search engine algorithm that affects everyone;
b) Your website has lost some good backlinks, lowering your domain authority;
c) Your website was filtered by Google bots due to technical issues with your site;
d) Your website was penalized by Google’s employee due to violation of guidelines;
e) Your competitors have improved their SEO and now outranks you.

In A Good Case (Most Common):

f) If it’s a sudden drop after weeks of continuous climbing, it’s good news – Google is ‘testing’ your site against alternatives – we usually see this a lot just before it climbs back up again and continues climbing and stays at the top for a long time.

This is the most common scenario for our customers. Therefore, DO NOT PANIC if you see a drop. Fluctuations in rankings especially in the first 3 months of SEO is a normal thing. Google has successfully found you, saw the SEO improvements and is trying to get a sense of where to rank you against others, hence the fluctuations.

In this scenario, the initial rankings are restored in a couple of days or weeks, sometimes you might even earn better rankings than before.

Unfortunately, yes. Some competitors might resort to unethical ways to outrank you. The best way to protect your website from negative SEO attack is to have someone closely monitoring and reporting bad backlinks your website is getting.

We’re glad to say this monitoring service is part of all our SEO packages.