15 Common SEO Myths Busted

There are many misconceptions about SEO, and it’s definitely true when they say a little bit of SEO knowledge can be dangerous. Far too often business owners come to us and say “my friend told me…” or “I heard that…” and then reel off age-old myths about SEO, or black hat techniques that used to be best practice but are now frowned upon. So we’re going to bust some of the most common SEO myths right now!

Do It Once?

If SEO was as easy as 1, 2, 3, then everyone would do it. If there was a simple step-by-step guide on reaching the top of Google then SEO wouldn’t exist and I would be out of a job. Unfortunately, you can’t just get rankings over night and it can take months of hard work to get where you want to be – which of course is the top!

PPC Boost

ABSOLUTELY NOT! We hear the question “if I do PPC will it help my organic rankings?” way too often. Google has categorically confirmed that there is absolutely no relation whatsoever between your paid ads and organic results. They are two totally different entities.

Links

Boooooring! Here we go again. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again. Just because the way we do link building has changed drastically over the years, it doesn’t mean we should stop, it just means we need to change the way we think about link building. Click to read our recent blog about how there’s so much more to link building than you might think!

Social vs SEO

Well, I kind of see where people are coming from here, but no. You can’t just do SEO or social media and expect your website to be a success. Social media and SEO go hand in hand, and social signals are crucial for proving the authenticity of your business, promoting trust to the search engines and sending additional visitors to your website.

Domain Age

This is no longer true. Domain age is no longer a ranking factor, and you can see this for yourself in Google’s SERPs. The majority of the highest rankers are those with newer domains as they generally have fresher, better content and are more SEO friendly.

New Website

Actually, you do. Older websites tend to have SEO limitations and they are often less search engine friendly. We always recommend a website every four years as a maximum. As web design techniques and technology develops, so do Google’s already very sophisticated ranking algorithms, therefore it is crucial that your website also moves with the times.

Moving Domain

If you don’t know much about SEO then I get why moving your website to a new domain might seem a little daunting, but trust me when I say that it won’t. It might take Google a little time to figure out what you’ve done (and by that I mean not much time at all), but your SEO won’t be negatively impacted.

Meta

If you’ve performed an audit on your website and meta descriptions have been flagged up, do not panic. Google actually dropped meta descriptions as a ranking factor years ago, because they realised that it was far too easy for website owners to spam them and stuff as many keywords in there as possible. So why do we still use them?

Meta descriptions are still important for gaining clicks to your website and should be used as marketing space in SERPs to encourage potential customers to click through to your website. So although they’re no longer important for getting you to the top of Google, they’re crucial for increasing your click-through rate (CTR).

Good Content?

WRONG. We’ve heard the words ‘content is king’ hundreds of times! So much so that some people actually begin to forget about the fundamentals of technical SEO. Yes, content is important, however, your perfectly written content isn’t going to get you very far if your website isn’t functioning properly and lacks user-friendliness.

Google rankings nationwide

We get lots of business owners asking us to perform SEO audits on their website, and they then are confused when the rankings are different on the report they receive to the ones they get when they type their search terms into Google. Google’s number one aim is to provide the best (and most relevant) results to their users, and therefore no matter how hard you try, you cannot get away from local search results, even if you enter a nationalised keyword into your search bar.

Job Done In One?

Unfortunately not. As I mentioned before, Google is constantly evolving and therefore you must evolve with it. In twelve months time SEO will not be the same as it is now and Google is more than likely to move the goalpost yet again. If you neglect your SEO, your competitors are more than likely to beat you to the top spot that you’ve worked so hard to achieve

Google Penalty

If you get hit by a Google penalty then don’t go into meltdown-panic-mode just yet. It IS fixable, it will just take hard work. Listen to the chatter amongst webmasters in Google forums to see what sort of penalty you might have received. Take a look in Google Search Console to see which kind of penalties have actually been applied to your website. Has Google rolled out an update to one of its main algos? Did someone duplicate your content? Have you been building bad links?

If you can’t figure it out we’re here to help! Give the HushBots a call on 01325 361279 and we will do our best to help your rankings and traffic recover!

Security

Google now warns website users when a website is not secure and poses a potential security risk, which is why it is important to ensure you have the highest level of security on your website and an SSL certificate.

Keyword Research

Long gone are the days when you could choose a list of 10 keywords that you wanted your website to rank for. Extensive research into the most efficient keywords should always be carried out as part of the initial stages of any SEO campaign. Just because you sell “shoes” doesn’t mean you’ll rank for the word “shoes”, and just because the word “shoes” is searched for the most, doesn’t mean you’re going to get the most clicks (or any at all) for that keyword.

I don’t need SEO

Having a website without any SEO or marketing is like having a Ferrari and not driving it. It looks pretty, but no one can see it!

Want to find out more about SEO or have your questions answered? Speak to the HushBots today! Drop in for a coffee or give us a call on 01325 361 729.