Debunking SEO Myths – A Leading SEO Solution Company’s Advice

Any good SEO solution company understands that trends in SEO, and what is and is not considered good practice, moves onward constantly. If you want your website – indeed, your web presence – to feature high in the search engine rankings and stay there, the best way is to use the services of a leading SEO company. It’s their job to stay ahead of the game and keep their clients there too.

But there are plenty of myths flying round on the internet about what constitutes good SEO practice. If you’re dealing with your own SEO or the SEO agency you’ve hired to do it for you is proposing any of the following, it’s time for a rethink. Because if you are focusing your SEO efforts in the wrong direction, you simply won’t get the results you expect. Here, we take a look at some of the most common SEO myths that persist.

SEO Is Not The Be-All And End-All

One of the most frequent misconceptions held by a lot of business owners is that their marketing plans can begin and end with SEO, which will bring all the leads they need to their door. They therefore plough their entire budget into SEO. However, that’s not the case. You need to find a SEO company that employs an integrated approach to marketing, one that combines SEO with other tactics to deliver the best results. For example, a leading mobile SEO company will integrate search engine optimisation with social media marketing. Integration is a must; SEO is not a standalone tactic.

Another related false belief is that all you need is on-page optimisation of your website. Of course, this is the perfect starting point. However, you also need SEO services that offer link-building, social media optimisation, and offsite blog posts as well if you really want to raise the volume of traffic you get to your website, and therefore increase visibility.

SEO Is Not ‘Free’

A lot of business owners are also under the misguided opinion that SEO is essentially free traffic, as opposed to paid methods like PPC advertising. In fact, this could not be further from the truth. While you’ll often see the phrase ‘free organic traffic’ and are promised that you’ll benefit from it by using SEO, search engine optimisation takes a lot of work, technology, technical expertise, and time. So the groundwork you need to put in to achieve traffic naturally will cost you money, not least if you hire an SEO outsourcing company – but in return, it’s a wise investment so that you can enjoy long-term online success.

Keywords Aren’t King – Content Is

One of the biggest myths surrounding national and local SEO is that you should load content with keywords. It doesn’t seem, according to John Mueller of Google, that websites will be penalised for this by falling down the search engine rankings - the SEO guru stated that search engines had become more sophisticated than this. However, it’s still not likely to do you any favours.

Keyword stuffing is only liable to make your content less readable and therefore less useful. Google and other leading search engines want content that is unique, engaging, and of a high standard. Make sure your SEO content company isn’t stuck in the past and still spamming content with keywords. It’s far better to pay more attention to the design of articles, pages and blogposts that are genuinely helpful to your audiences.

Quality Backlinks Are Better Than Quantity

There’s another related misguided belief that also seems to float around regularly: the more backlinks you have, the better. Again, as with keywords, quality always triumphs over quantity when it comes to backlinks. You need to focus on connecting with high authority websites if you want to improve your ranking. What’s more, you want your backlink profile to be diverse, with a variety of referring domains. And remember, a few premium quality backlinks are worth much more than dozens of low-quality links.

Again, in terms of links, don’t get fooled into thinking they are the most important ranking factor. A good SEO firm knows that in fact, there’s no “most important ranking factor”: Google uses a whole host of measures when it ranks websites. But if you follow the SEO and marketing principles when building links, your efforts will become valuable as part of your overall strategy.

Cheap, Quick Fixes Don’t Exist

Another myth relates to the advertising that lots of SEO companies are guilty of. No, you can’t get to the top page of Google instantly for less than £100. It’s simply not possible. There is no miracle solution when it comes to getting onto the first page of any search engine. Don’t sign up with a company that’s going to build spammy backlinks into your website. This is a ‘quick-fix’ that actually hurts your business in the long run. You will end up spending much more on recovering from the Google algorithm penalties you will be subject to.

Social Signals Aren’t A Ranking Factor

It’s also important to remember that social media signals don’t have a direct impact on your rankings. Of course, creating compelling content may result in a greater number of people sharing your webpages with others, and that will lead visitors to your door, thus increasing your traffic over time. But your sole aim should not be to chase +1s for your contents.

Correlation Studies Don’t Show How Algorithms Work

Some SEO management companies swear by correlation studies. It’s true that these are useful for determining the properties of URLs that Google ranks. However, this doesn’t mean that the ranking factor you’re measuring is the same as the one that Google uses. One thing Google uses to rank pages, for instance, is user intent. The search engine aims to divine the meaning behind particular search terms in order to show the most relevant results – and that’s something that no amount of SEO, links and backlinks included, can necessarily affect. Again, it’s all about creating great content that attracts your target audiences and keeps them on your pages, because these can answer the questions your prospective customers are asking.

XML Sitemaps Are Helpful, But Don’t Automatically Improve Rankings

An XML sitemap will help guide search engines to crawl and index particular new pages or those that are difficult for crawlers to discover. If your SEO management company establishes a sitemap for you, it will certainly, therefore, help increase online presence and visibility. But it’s worth stating that it does not have a direct organic ranking effect on a website.

You Won’t Be Directly Penalised For Duplicate Copy

Contrary to popular belief, Google does not have a duplicate content filter and there’s nothing to suggest that including duplicate pages will result in a downgrade to your rankings. But indirectly, it will have an effect: what the search engine giant can do is not rank all duplicate contents entirely for the same query. And it’s this aspect that can have a negative impact on rankings. Don’t waste your valuable crawl budget on duplicate content. Make every page distinct and unique so you get the best value for money from each and every page.

Efficient White Hat SEO That Gets Results

These are among the most common myths out there about SEO and how it all works. And the fact that these misconceptions still exist shows the importance of using a leading SEO audit company to assess your current position and formulate a plan to get the results you desire. Moreover, if you have a better understanding of what SEO is all about, and how it works, it will help you to choose the right firm for your needs and enjoy a better relationship with its team from the outset.

An experienced, bespoke SEO company like Position1SEO understands what the search engines like Google are looking for and can tailor and implement an effective SEO strategy for your business to ensure you get to where you need to be in the rankings. We do the hard work so you don’t have to. To find out how we could help you or to see case studies of our past successes, contact us today on 0141 404 7515 or send us an email to office@position1seo.co.uk.