There are many articles and people advertising “quick SEO fixes” on the internet.
A quick Google search for “SEO tactics” returned about 14,100,000 results in less than a second.
But if there’s one thing the last few decades have taught us, it’s that you can’t believe everything you read online.
Some of the SEO tips you’ll find will be outdated, inaccurate – or even just plain stupid.
These recommendations and tactics may have been based on the author’s misunderstanding of how search works.
They could be the result of a lack of experience or industry knowledge.
Where did they come from, here’s a list of seven of those stupid SEO tactics to avoid so that they don’t seriously damage your long-term SEO performance.
1. Assembly Line SEO Strategy
I define “mountain line SEO” as when a person or agency uses the same precise tactics for each client without any customization.
Many of the larger SEO agencies use this strategy for their SMB sharing because it is effective to manage.
Typically, after the site goes through its first round of on-page optimizations, the routine tactics include blogging and paying for links.
However, just because it’s easy doesn’t mean it’s always the best.
This kind of strategy can be fruitful in the short term, but unless there is zero competition, the site is bound to experience growth.
What To Do Instead
Instead of getting bogged down in this routine “task-based” strategy, focus on finding unique ways to deliver value to your site’s audience.
Find out what your competitor’s top content is, and how they approach their content strategy.
Make a list of all your competitor’s strategies and look for content shortcomings.
Take these opportunities and make sure your content is built to serve your audience at every stage of their buying funnel.
Continuous research and content production may be more time consuming, but it will inevitably be more fruitful.
Another added bonus is that this will show your stakeholders that you really care about their performance.
2. Blaming Performance Drops On Algorithm Updates (Without Evidence)
Performance crashes can occur as suddenly and frequently as algorithm updates, depending on the site.
Nowadays, algorithm updates happen so often that it might be easy to show Google and say they caused your rankings and organic traffic to drop.
However, more often than not, yield declines can occur for a variety of reasons.
Some common reasons for declining organic yield include:
Given those possibilities, it’s important that we don’t take the easy way out and blame an algorithm update.
If your site has just been successful, don’t panic!
Some things just happen, and your traffic will come back on its own.
What you don’t want to do is start making major changes to your site. This can lead to even more complications with your organic activity.
What To Do Instead
There are several SEO recovery guides that you can refer to for deeper steps on how to recover from organic performance drops.
Here are some quick tips on how to find out if your site has really been hit by an algorithm.
Did Google Discover New Technical Issues?
A technical problem is one of the more common reasons why a website’s performance may decline.
This usually happens when a webmaster unconsciously updates various parts of the web site and creates serious technical problems.
Explore this issue by checking the following locations:
This is another common cause for significant rank fluctuations. Some websites, such as e-commerce, often change content.
If your site rarely updates content and experiences a decrease in organic traffic or rankings, then you may want to investigate whether your client or other webmaster has made any unexpected changes.
Some ways you can explore website changes include:
It is rare to find websites that are unaffected by any seasonality.
Whenever someone is terrified of website performance failures, be sure to check your year-by-year benchmarks.
Compare three-month trend lines on top of each other so you can show your stakeholders that these dips may not be unusual.
Additionally, you should anticipate to let them know of future expected lows based on the trends of the previous year.
The key here is that you still get better year after year.
Some traffic changes may occur due to a competitor improving their organic strategy.
Typically, this will be indicated by a steady decline in organic yield, and it is unusual for it to occur with sharp drops in yield.
If you think your competitors are starting to steal your rankings from you, don’t panic!
I have a Python script that allows you to spy on your organic competitors. It will show who is continuously ranking for your topic keywords.
Manual actions are not as common as before, but they still happen.
If your site has experienced a severe drop in traffic, check out the Google Search Console for some manual actions.
3. Copying Location Page Copy
When developing site pages for large sites with multiple sites, creating a unique copy for each site can be tedious and time consuming.
It may seem like the easy way to use just the same copy for each site page, but I strongly advise against it.
You can get much better local ranking performance by focusing on a unique copy for each site page.
Check out my local page checklist to learn how to create the ultimate local page.
4. Using Automated Auditing Tools To Drive Strategy
Relying on automated tools may not be the best way to drive your organic strategy.
Many new SEO professionals tend to do their initial SEO reviews with automated tools and let that guide their global SEO strategy.
These SEO-grade tools don’t “ask.”
The key to any good SEO strategy is to ask questions including, but certainly not limited to:
What To Do Instead
Invest in a tool like Screaming Frog or Sitebulb and learn how to look at a website holistically.
Use imaging tools to analyze the structure of a website.
Look for content gaps and make sure your technical structure is good.
Once your technical background is clean, search engines may have an easy time discovering, crawling, and imaging your web pages.
5. Paying For Links
Now I know that this article is intended to focus on white hat tactics, but there is a gray hat method of link building in which you can pay link building companies for guaranteed links.
This is a great way to ensure that you get a specific number of backlinks for your customers each month.
However, quality and importance are almost never equal.
What To Do Instead
Link building tends to have a snowball effect.
If you receive links in well-known publications, it is possible that another writer will discover you and link to you in their own articles.
However, this is a less common case with smaller DA backlinks.
I recommend investing in some PR partners to help you create content and get features in notable publications.
These larger posts tend to have a greater speed to organically grow your backlink profile through the snowball effect.
6. Being Too Scared To Ask Questions
It’s too easy to just look for the answers to your questions, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
However, when it comes to strategy or addressing specific issues, Google may not always return the correct answer for you.
It is good to contact your colleagues for help. Even the best of us often vote and ask for help on Twitter. There is absolutely no shame in that.
In fact, it is very encouraging!
No reputable SEO will make fun of you for not knowing anything.
If you’re still a little nervous, contact the Search Engine Journal’s Ask SEO column to get your anonymous questions answered publicly. Thus others can benefit from the common knowledge.
7. Ignoring Other Pillars Of SEO
Most SEOs consider that there are three pillars of SEO: content, link building and technical.
However, I like to add “local” as a fourth pillar because it really uses elements from all three in a unique way.
Ignoring any of these pillars for too long can either delay your rankings of improvement or hinder them all together.
For example, if your initial reviews show that there are a large number of technical issues, you may want to remove them and spend all your time cleaning them up.
If possible, try to allocate your resources to work on each pillar of SEO at the same time.
If you spend all your time fixing technical issues or leading links, but you forget to improve your content, then your rankings may not improve the way you intended.
Final Thoughts
Now, I know that some of these SEO tactics could work for some websites for a period of time.
The point here is that the bigger image of SEO is much more complicated than what is captured by these simple techniques.
Don’t be distracted by them and stay focused on driving sustainable and lasting results.
Featured image: Show Thipsorn / Shutterstock
Which of the following affect SEO ranking?
Page speed has been cited as one of the top SEO ranking factors for years. Google wants to improve the user experience on the web, and fast-loading web pages will do just that. Google has announced an update to a mobile phone-focused search engine algorithm, which began to affect websites in July 2018.
What are SEO rankings? Rankings in SEO are related to the position of a website on the search engine results page. There are various ranking factors that influence whether a website appears higher on the SERP based on the content relevance to the search term, or the quality of backlinks pointing to the page.
What affects your SEO ranking?
What Are the Most Important SEO Ranking Factors?
- Secure and Accessible Website.
- Page Speed (Including Mobile Page Speed)
- Mobile Friendship.
- Domain Age, URL and Authority.
- Optimized Content.
- SEO techniques.
- User Experience (RankBrain)
- Links.
What is SEO example?
Companies are looking for search engine optimization, or SEO, to help them gain more awareness and elevate their company in the rank of search engine. SEO is used by search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Bing, etc. Search engine optimization uses keywords that attract a user to the company.
What is SEO in simple words? SEO stands for search engine optimization, which is a set of practices designed to improve the appearance and positioning of web pages in organic search results.
Is Google an example of SEO?
(For example, Google has more than 200 ranking factors in its algorithm.) In most cases, when people think of “search engine optimization”, they think of “Google SEO”. That’s why we’ll focus on optimizing your site for Google in this guide.
Comment faire du SEO Google ?
- Allow Google to see your page as seen by Internet users.
- Create unique and accurate page titles.
- Check your title links and excerpts in search results.
- Use the tag meta description.
- Use title tags to highlight important text.
Comment être plus visible sur Google ?
To be referenced by Google, your site must be visible in the first time of the search. See this, find the URL to the Google index with the Google Search Console before optimizing. Objective: to appear on the first page thanks to natural SEO.
What are some examples of SEO?
Examples of SEO strategy: 9 examples of what a good SEO strategy includes
- Keyword optimization. First is keyword optimization. …
- Optimization of on-page elements. …
- Improving the backend of your site. …
- Create user pages. …
- Create content. …
- Building links. …
- Analyzing your competition. …
- Search engine optimization.
What is an example of SEO?
White hat SEO helps to improve the performance of a website while still following the rules and regulations of the search engine. Say, for example, if a company were to use Google, they would observe their terms when using their SEO services.
What is SEO and how it works?
Well, SEO stands for ‘Search Engine Optimization’, which is the process of getting traffic from free, organic, editorial or natural search results in search engines. It aims to improve the position of your site on search results pages. Remember, the higher the site is listed, the more people will see it.
How does SEO work in simple words?
SEO works by optimizing the pages of a website, doing keyword research and gaining inbound links. You can generally see results of SEO efforts after the webpage has been crawled and indexed by a search engine.
What are SEO ranking factors?
What Are the Most Important SEO Ranking Factors?
- Secure and Accessible Website.
- Page Speed (Including Mobile Page Speed)
- Mobile Friendship.
- Domain Age, URL and Authority.
- Optimized Content.
- SEO techniques.
- User Experience (RankBrain)
- Links.
What are Google’s ranking factors? These ranking systems consist of not one, but a whole series of algorithms. To give you the most useful information, Search Algorithms looks at many factors, including the words of your query, the relevance and usability of pages, the expertise of sources, and your location and settings.
Is SEO a marketing tactic?
Fortunately, a robust search engine optimization (SEO) marketing strategy will help you rank at the top of search results for keywords relevant to your business. And the right SEO marketing strategy elements will allow you to drive more valuable traffic to your website.
What kind of marketing is SEO? Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of improving your website to increase your ranking in Google for key terms related to your business. SEO is one of the most effective digital marketing tactics in which you can invest your time, and there are a variety of ways you can take advantage of the practice.
Is SEO a tactic or strategy?
SEO strategy and tactics SEO strategy is your overall, long-term plan for achieving business goals; SEO tactics are the tangible steps you take to implement your strategy.
How do you define your SEO strategy?
An SEO strategy is a detailed plan to improve a website’s search engine rankings to capture more organic traffic. This plan should draw from several fundamental pillars, including technical SEO, content strategy, on-page SEO, link building, and user experience.
Is SEO the right marketing strategy?
SEO Can Be A Wise Choice For Any Budget Search engines are like websites are found and your website could not be more important for your business success. If you want to get the most out of a small digital marketing budget, SEO is your best choice.
Is SEO a long-term strategy?
Remember: SEO is a Long-Term Strategy If you find a hack that provides fast SEO results, it will probably help you only for a short time. If you want to see success in the long run, you need to have a long-term plan. Don’t think of SEO as a one-time project.
Is SEO a marketing search?
What Is The Difference Between SEO And SEM? The main difference is that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is focused on optimizing a website to get traffic from organic search results. On the other hand, the goal of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is to gain traffic and visibility from both organic and paid search.
Is SEO a form of digital marketing?
SEO is an integral part of any digital marketing strategy. It’s basically a holistic move to drive customers to your business through online platforms. And to do that, you need to make sure that the site ranks higher in the SERP (search engine results page).
How is SEO different from SEM?
SEO is sometimes used as a roofing term that includes SEM, but because SEM is strictly related to paid advertising, they are in fact separate. SEM is about getting traffic with paid ads, and SEO is more about getting, monitoring, and analyzing organic (unpaid) traffic patterns.
What is search engine in digital marketing?
Search engine marketing (SEM) is a form of internet marketing that involves the advertising of websites by increasing their visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs) primarily through paid advertising.