SEO is crucial to driving traffic to your website, but with Google’s algorithm shrouded in mystery and prone to change like the wind, it can be difficult to know which SEO tricks to focus on. In this article, I’ll expose eight of the most pervasive SEO myths and mistakes that could be damaging your website’s rank.
8 Common SEO Mistakes Small Businesses Make
1. Not Prioritizing it
Many companies have shifted their focus away from SEO and more towards SMM. While TikTok and Instagram can be great tools in your marketing repertoire, it’s still worth investing time in tried-and-tested techniques like SEO.
SEO still has the highest return on investment of any market strategy for a huge number of businesses, with 49% of respondents in this survey identifying organic search as producing the highest ROI.
When you craft SEO-worthy content that will land people on your website, you may realize that profit is soaring as you process transactions from various locations. Putting SEO at the top of your list of priorities can deliver unprecedented results you might not be expecting. So, trying it out by utilizing SEO testing is something you might want to look into for your company.
2. Not actively building backlinks
Backlinks can be tricky and it’s tempting to eschew them in favor of focusing only on the quality of your content. While high-quality, relevant content plays a huge part in how highly your website ranks, active backlinking campaigns are essential to your site’s performance.
Backlinks can help your content find its way to the top of engine results since most search engines will think the backlinks are enough proof that your content is valuable. Investing time and effort in backlinking can ensure that your content is not stationary on the world wide web and it’s crawling its way up.
Don’t be tempted to buy backlinks, though, unless you want to waste money and risk your website tanking. “The best you can hope for is that any manufactured backlinks will have no impact on your site’s ranking, but in some cases they can lead to a Google penalty,” warns Roy Stevens, business writer at Brit Student and Next Coursework.
3. Publishing short content
It’s a common misconception that short-form content, typically no more than 500 words, is ideal for SEO purposes. That is absolutely not the case.
This myth bloomed from the idea that people have short attention spans and are unlikely to persevere through walls of text. While there may be some truth in that, Google’s algorithm much prefers longer content, to the extent that most highly ranking blogs generally publish content with up to around 2000 words.
The key factor here is how fully and comprehensively your content tackles a topic. A poorly written thesis-length blog littered with irrelevancies and bad research won’t do anything to boost your website’s rankings.
When it comes to publishing lengthy articles, quality is vital. Long-form content can do the job of subtly integrating your product and its value in a well-researched post. You can focus on creating lengthy-quality content on detailed guides, product reviews, and tutorials.
4. Not doing keyword research
Some people promote the idea that including a bunch of keywords in your content is a waste of time. This couldn’t be further from the truth. If SEO is important to you, it’s essential that you do thorough keyword research and include relevant keywords in your content.
You can use a variety of software to accomplish this successfully. Knowing how a keyword competes with others in the digital world is crucial in making you discoverable.
5. Overly relying on title tags and meta descriptions
It’s completely true that meta descriptions and title tags are correlated to click-through rates, which themselves are used by Google to rank content.
“However, a meta description alone will not directly impact your page rank. All other SEO techniques have to be in place for meta descriptions and title tags to work holistically with other components,” advises Phyllis May, tech writer at 1 Day 2 write and Write my X.
6. Duplicating or plagiarizing content
You won’t be directly punished for duplicating your content, but it won’t do you any favors, either. Duplicated or plagiarized content is ignored by Google’s algorithm and won’t do anything to help increase your ranking. Focus your energy elsewhere.
Once you create plagiarized content, you may lose the ranking you have worked so hard to build if you have already built a considerable ranking on Google. Not only that, but the blogger you copied content from might sue you too.
7. Thinking that keywords must be exact
Exact keyword matches are an easy way to rank highly, but they’re certainly not the only way. Google matches keywords to queries by their intention, meaning that if someone searches for something that your content, in spirit, is a fantastic match for, it’ll still rank highly – even if the exact keyword match isn’t there.
8. Thinking that new content is needed daily
Back in 2011, Google updated its algorithm to favor new content. However, this doesn’t mean that fresh content is automatically rewarded; rather, Google decides if a particular query needs up-to-date sources, and if so, the age of the content is considered to be a vital factor when ranking results.
Final Thoughts
Clever SEO is still key if you want your website to rank highly. Google’s algorithm is notoriously enigmatic and the internet is rife with misinformation, but hopefully, this article has busted some of the most common myths, making it easier for you to focus your energy where it really counts.
