Don’t get caught believing these five common misconceptions, or your entire strategy could fall apart.
If you want to be successful in the SEO game, you have to be objective. You have to be unbiased, think critically about everything you see and read, and run your own tests to observe the data and apply the relevant changes to your approach. If you start believing things just because they sound good or because your instinct tells you they’re true, you start getting in trouble.
Because Google is so secretive about the nature of its search algorithm, there’s a lot of room for misconceptions and flat-out lies by deceitful companies. However, if you buy into these misconceptions, it could lead your campaign in the wrong direction, possibly compromising your results for the long-term.
Don’t buy into these five all-too-common misconceptions about SEO:
- More links mean higher ranks. It’s true that you need backlinks to succeed in SEO, but that doesn’t mean you should build links blindly on external sites—doing so could earn you a penalty. Instead, build links naturally by writing great content that people want to link to.
- Keywords are your gateway to success. They used to be, but today’s search engines use a process called “semantic search” to recognize natural human language. Don’t stuff keywords into your content; write naturally.
- Google is all that matters. Bing is getting nearly a third of all search traffic, and new search engines like DuckDuckGo are starting to emerge. Don’t pigeonhole yourself into only caring about Google.
- It’s impossible to measure your ROI. All you need to do is measure your inbound organic traffic, your total conversions from that traffic, and compare that monetary figure to how much you spend on SEO—just know that most SEO campaigns start with a low or negative ROI, and escalate sharply after a few months.
- Social media affects ranks. It actually does, but only indirectly. Greater shares on social media lead to more visibility, more visits, and eventually more links, which are what you really want.
Don’t believe everything that you hear—always consult multiple sources, rely on hard data, and when in doubt, ask a known expert in the field. SEO is too volatile and unpredictable a field to gamble with.
