SEO is a dynamic industry and as a business owner, you really need to keep yourself posted on the latest happenings in the SEO industry. If you don’t, you’ll easily fall prey to outdated SEO practices and SEO misconceptions. In today’s post, we’ll address 8 of the most common SEO misconceptions that you need to watch out for in 2019.
The Most Common SEO Misconception:
Let’s start with the greatest misconception that a lot of business owners are a victim of. It is believing that SEO is only a “one time thing”.
Search engines, particularly Google, constantly keep updating their algorithm which means as the website owner, you’re gonna have to stay on your toes. This is not to say that a website can’t keep its rankings forever (because many websites do). But it definitely means that you should be aware at least of major algorithm updates so that you can take any necessary steps to keep your rankings intact. It is easier to get high rankings than to keep them so you’ll need to constantly optimize your website and content.
Always remember that SEO is not a sprint, it’s a marathon!
Quantity over quality:
If you constantly dump your website with a lot of content and think that it will have a positive effect on your rankings, you’re utterly mistaken. Google does love websites that regularly publish content but a bulk of content alone won’t do you any good. You should instead put more efforts into quality rather than quantity.
Publishing one high-quality blog post a week will do better for your traffic and rankings than posting one low-quality blog post every day. So take your time and make your posts more worthwhile instead of focusing on their frequency.
Google is everything:
Google definitely holds the largest market share in terms of internet traffic. However, what most business owners seem to neglect is that it is not the ONLY search engine. If you don’t want to leave a lot of potential traffic then focus on other search engines.
Search engines like Yahoo, Bing, and several others are an untapped traffic source that your competition is likely missing on. Don’t make the same mistake.
SEO is primarily about keywords and links:
It was until a few years ago, but not anymore. Search engines today use sophisticated algorithms that take plenty of factors into account while ranking sites for specific queries. Google itself has over 200 ranking factors that it considers before deciding where your site will appear, if at all, in the SERPs.
Keywords still are the basis of SEO and links still play a major role in getting you ranked; however, there a lot of other factors at play now as well. Modern SEO revolves around things like E.A.T, user intent, LSI keywords, and user experience. What this means for you as a business website owner is that you need to optimize every bit of your website; from content to site structure to everything in between.
Content marketing beats SEO:
It’s actually a quite old debate now, but one that many people are still confused about. There’s really no “versus” between SEO and content marketing. Both work towards the same goal (success of your business) but in different ways. Nonetheless, the two get along very well with each other and a lot of the time, overlap each other.
Content is what websites are made of, and content marketing is the practice of making sure that the content appears before the right audience at the right time; a goal not possible to achieve without SEO. As a matter of fact, SEO and content marketing are so closely related that it would be impossible to define each one in complete isolation from the other.
SEO Needs a Professional:
Not really. While it is beyond doubt that bringing in a professional SEO company is likely to result in greater SEO success, it certainly doesn’t mean that you can’t do anything without them.
There are actually plenty of basic search engine optimizations you can do on your own to help with your website’s rankings. For example, improving the quality of your content, putting in time to really understand your potential buyers and their pain points, analyzing your competition, improving your site’s user experience etc; all of these are things that can have a tremendous impact on your rankings.
However, there are other reasons where your best would be resorting to a professional SEO company e.g. if you don’t have the time to perform optimizations yourself, or are in a really competitive industry etc.
SEO Brings Immediate Results:
Nope, it absolutely doesn’t. Search engines have their own mechanism of operating and you can’t really force their crawlers into visiting your website when you publish new content or perform any optimizations on your site.
Although there are ways to amplify the process, there’s no sure shot way of forcing the search engines. What this means is that SEO takes time to manifest itself. No matter how many and how frequently you perform optimizations, search engines only register those improvements once their crawler visits your site. So next time when you optimize your site, don’t expect your rankings to skyrocket overnight.
Guest blogging is useless:
A lot of people think that the sole purpose of guest blogging is to get backlinks, and that’s where they’re wrong.
Guest blogging DOES get you backlinks and those backlinks DO help with your rankings; however, there’s more to guest blogging than this. It actually allows you to directly promote your business and win brand mentions across the web.
Imagine your published guest post on a blog that receives thousands in organic traffic a day. If the audience likes your post, a lot of them will check out the author bio and will come to know about you and your business. A small percentage of those visitors will even visit your site to know more about your business.
Moral of the story: guest blogging is neither dead nor useless, even in 2019!
If you need help with SEO for your business, have a look at our kick-ass SEO services, suitable and customizable for businesses of all sizes and all types. You can also schedule a free SEO consultation with us to see what we can do for your business.
