Most myths are harmless. Silly tokenisms that don’t carry much weight are thrown around as fact all the time. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for most SEO myths. At best, they’re slightly misleading. At worst, they lead you to waste precious time, money, and resources on things that will never improve SEO! At My Social Biz, we believe in doing things smarter, not harder. Let us unpack some of the most misleading beliefs in circulation today:
- SEO is a one and done!
SEO is a bit like going to the gym. It’s okay to miss a workout here and there, but things soon start to fall apart if you stay at home eating chips too often.
There are several reasons this can happen:
- Your competitors overtake you (by consistently working on their SEO).
- You start losing backlinks due to ‘link rot’ (old links expire, are not credible anymore)
- Your content loses ‘freshness’ and can be outdated
Is this true for absolutely all sites? No. There are rare instances where a site can be neglected for years and continue to pull in consistent traffic month after month.
- Using as many keywords as you can, right?
One of the most common SEO myths is that the more you integrate keywords on your pages, the more your ranking will improve. Many people still believe that if you want to rank, you need to use the keyword as often as possible throughout your content, so that Google understands your page is relevant to the query that a user searched.
The reality, however, is that integrating your keywords too often leads to keyword stuffing, which is a negative ranking factor.
Google could penalize your site for overusing a keyword because it views this strategy as a black hat SEO technique. “Black hat” SEO techniques go against Google’s guidelines, so using any of those tactics will hurt your site’s ranking.
- As long as you have keywords on your site, you don’t need to publish content often…
Content creation is a critical component of SEO. One of the most common SEO myths around content creation is that you don’t need to create it often. You may have heard that you can post a blog occasionally and that it’s enough to help you rank or keep your ranking. However, this is arguably the largest SEO myth.
If you want to make the most of your SEO, you need to create content often. When you create and post content habitually, you create new ways for leads to discover your website, which means more traffic for your business. Not only that, but more content means you can target more keywords.
An expert tip from the My Social Biz team is to create a content calendar to manage your topics. Let us know in the comments if you would like a blog on how to kick start a successful SEO strategy in 2021!