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3 SEO Myths You Shouldn’t Believe in 2020

It’s hard to separate from SEO myths from the actual truth. Due to the overwhelming number of resources online, SEO myths can quickly be considered facts.

It’s important to be aware of these SEO myths because you might believe in them and unknowingly damage your search engine rankings.

Today, we’re going to discuss the most common SEO myths and what you should be doing instead.

Let’s get started.

SEO is all about keywords.

If you’re new to SEO, you might think that all you need to do is use the right keyword in the right places as many times as possible.

Search engines have grown so much smarter in the last couple of years, which means that SEO is so much more than keywords. To improve your search engine rankings, you need to invest time in finding the right keywords, creating content, link building, speeding up your website, and several factors.

Keep in mind that search engines like Google and Bing have one goal–to provide users with the information they’re looking for as quickly as possible. They want to ensure the information is from trusted and secure sources.

For example, an effective SEO strategy could improve the following:

• Determining which keywords your potential customers are using and creating relevant content.
• Getting links to your website from blogs in the same niche.
• Improving your website speed to ensure it loads quickly for mobile users.

Needless to say, this type of strategy isn’t effective for every business or industry. You will need to adjust depending on your target audience and how competitive your field is.

SEO can be completed.

Some people might think that you’ll be done with SEO once you use your target keywords several times throughout your website. They would be wrong.

SEO is an ever-evolving thing that requires long-term effort. Search engines change how they rank pages, and your competitors are doing their utmost to outrank you in search engine results pages. You need to stay on top of everything to ensure you don’t get left behind.

For example, back in mid-2018, Google rolled out its Speed Update. The update made page speed a major ranking factor in search engine results. Even if your content is as good as your competitor’s, they may rank better than you if their website is faster.

If you’re unaware of this update and believe you’re “done” with SEO, you’ll drop in search engine rankings, losing the chance to find more potential customers.

Depending on your niche, you may also need to update your content regularly. For example, at Cornerstone Digital, we aim to update our website several times a month since our niche is quite dynamic. We need to show search engines we’re aware of all the recent updates in our field.

In a nutshell, you can never be truly done with SEO. You need to stay on top of the changes search engines make to their algorithms and keep track of what your competitors are doing.

All links are important.

Links are important because they tell search engines that other people find your content valuable or helpful. The more links you get from relevant websites, the better you search engine rankings will be.

Link building is using strategies to create more links to your website and improve your search engine rankings. It could involve creating excellent content that others would want to link to, guest posting on other blogs, finding broken links and offering to replace them with your content, and so much more.

However, Google is getting better at identifying which links are organic and which ones are “unnatural”. These unnatural links were created for the sole purpose of improving search engine rankings, not because a blogger found the content helpful.

For example, leaving blog comments used to be considered an effective link building tactic. People would leave comments on authority blogs in their fields and include a link to their website or a blog post they wanted to draw attention to. These comments often looked like spam and added no real value to the comments section.

Before you launch link building initiatives, determine which links and which websites could truly help your search engine rankings. Instead of pitching guest posts to all sorts of blogs, identify ones that are relevant to your niche.

We highly recommend working on your content first before doing any link building. Study the competition for your target keywords, and determine how you can create something better. What’s the average word count for the top five search results? How are they presenting information? Are they using videos, images, or audio files?

The bottom line is, you need to have something worth linking to first.

Conclusion

SEO is an ever-changing thing. What worked five years ago will be obsolete by this point.

If you’d like to improve your search engine rankings, you may need to examine your existing strategies. The majority of them may no longer be effective.

Need help improving your search engine rankings? Cornerstone Digital is an SEO agency in Sydney that can help you find your ideal customer via SEO. Call us on (02) 8211 0668 or email us atinfo@cornerstone-digital.com.au.

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Darlyn Herradura

A self-professed book and digital marketing nerd, Darlyn Herradura focuses on building trust between customers and businesses with the written word. She understands that creating valuable content is the best way to get found online and happily spends her time doing that.