7 Things You Believe About SEO That Are Not True
Having run an SEO firm since 2003 Ive had the opportunity to interact with thousands of clients and potential clients. In those interactions Ive seen a long laundry list of misconceptions when it comes to SEO. Things are not always as they would appear, or as one would expect them to be. While many misconceptions have been clarified over time and rarely come up anymore, others tend to persist like bad habits. And since Google started rolling out its animal-themed updates a few years ago, many of the finer aspects of SEO have changed such that what once worked no longer does. In some cases what used to produce good results can even damage your online marketing efforts today. While this list could be longer, here are some of the common misunderstandings I see amongst our clients when it comes to SEO.
1. Its All About Rankings.Stop! Rankings do not matter. That is, rankings dont matter unless they lead to other,more important metrics. What really matters? Traffic, leads, sales, and profits. You can get better rankings without generating more traffic. You can get traffic that doesnt generate leads. You can get leads that dont generate sales. And you can get sales that dont generate profits. Profits are what a business truly depends on to stay alive and grow, just as the human body requires food for survival. The problem with rankings is too many people focus on them as the ultimate deliverable, when in fact theyre down the line. Rankings shouldnt be ignored, but when you focus too much on rankings (and almost everyone does) you take your eye off the real goal. As a result, the decisions you make about your SEO efforts will not be the ones that give you the best possible growth in profits.
Instead of focusing on rankings, work backward from profits with these questions:
2. I Need to Rank for My Top Keywords.The old way of SEO focused on a small number of golden keywords which, individually, generated a lot of traffic. For example, our headquarters is located in Utah, so we used to focus a lot of attention on ranking well for utah seo. We were #1 for this keyword for years, but now we dont focus on that keyword so much anymore. Why not? Because we noticed that it accounted for less than 3% of our total search engine traffic, and that visitors who found us by searching for utah seo werent as likely to convert, or turn into leads, as were visitors who found us through other keywords. Someone searching for utah seo might be looking for a job at an SEO firm, writing a research paper, or be a competitor. But someone searching for hire utah seo company is very likely to be looking to engage a firm like ours. In addition, its easier to optimize for these long tail phrases because most of your competitors are still going after the more generic, shorter terms.
3. Google Loves Content.You may have heard people tell you Google loves content, the more content the better! Google does not love content, Google loveshigh qualitycontent. Writing a small amount of high quality content that provide real value to readers and therefore gets shared on social media and linked to by other websites is much better than generating a lot of poor content nobody will care about.
4. The More Links the Better.Wrong. As with content, when it comes to inbound links its more about quality than quantity. At best, low quality incoming links will have no positive effect, and at worstbad links may result in damaged rankings or a Google penalty. Focus on natural link building, rather than manually building links. That means focus on creating high quality content people will want to link to, rather than asking for links.
5. Buying PPC Ads Will Help My Organic Rankings.Its logical to believe that since Google sells pay per click ads alongside the natural, organic rankings, that if you pay Google for those paid ads then maybe, just maybe, theyll give you a little boost in the organic rankings. But its not true. Theyre entirely separate. However, for those who believe this is the case for all search engines, you also believe something that isnt true, because if youreoptimizing in China for the search engine Baiduthen running a PPC campaignwillpositively affect your organic rankings.
6. SEO Can Be Affordable and Effective.I could be wrong on this one. After all, I can only say that in the 10+ years Ive been in the industry, Ive neverseenanyone get good results by spending less than $2,000 per month on SEO, with the exceptions of highly focused, local SEO campaigns, or niche SEO services that arent comprehensive. What I have seen is that companies that get good results from SEO either spend over $2,000 per month on SEO with an outside firm, or they spend a lot of time working on it in-house.