The Most Common SEO Mistakes in 2024
SEO is a changing field and staying informed about the latest practices and tactics will help you navigate it better and bring or keep positive results for your website.
SEO is also filled with multiple outdated or wrong practices that can hurt your website’s performance and search rankings.
Mistakenly using such practices will cost you resources, rankings, and traffic potential as your website can get penalised by search engines.
What is an SEO Myth?
An SEO myth is an outdated or false concept about SEO practices or techniques. SEO Myths are kept alive by individuals with old or incorrect information about search engine guidelines and user experience.
Some myths persist even though they have been debunked, causing confusion or negative results.
How SEO Myths Can Cost You
As mentioned above, falling for SEO myths can cost you and your business.
Resources. Primarily wasted time and money spent on ineffective tactics that may bring short-lived results and will get you a long and hard recovery period for your search visibility.
Missed Opportunities. Not doing your research correctly will cause you to shift your focus to the wrong tactics instead of proven SEO methods that can help you reach your target audience.
Poor User Experience. Using old strategies will harm your visitor’s experience as they do not reflect present usability trends.
Visibility Loss and Penalties. Wrong or old strategies will bring along penalties from search engines, which will cause your website to drop rankings or even be banned from search results.
10 SEO Myths
Google’s Honeymoon Effect.
Some SEOs believe that new content will automatically be pushed at the top of the results and be kept there to see how users react to it. This means they will monitor the number of successful clicks, time spent on the page, and overall user interaction.
This is false. Google confirmed this is not the case and content gets rewarded based on relevancy. Fluctuations and good or bad start performances happen because Google algorithms are trying to learn more about the content through its relevancy and the overall website rankings and performance.
Paid Advertising Helps Organic Rankings.
It is a common myth and a bit understandable. Paying for ads on Google, for example, will push pages to the top of search results. The algorithm for ranking organic search results differs from the one used for ad placement. When the paid campaign ends, the pages will not be shown at the top.
Longer Content is Ranking Better.
This is a common SEO mistake. The number of words is not a direct indicator of the quality of the content.
This myth is kept alive because the best-performing pages usually have longer content, but this is not always true. Longer content is seen as more informative and valuable, as users can find more info on a single page rather than navigating to 3 different pages to find all the information.
However, in some niches, content that is shorter and highly targeted can surpass larger content since it addresses a specific topic that doesn’t need pages of explanations.
Length is not the only ranking factor. Relevance, quality, and meeting user intent are considered ranking factors.
SEO Results Take at Least 3 Months
Myth! How soon or late into the future you see results depends on more factors. It mainly depends on how competitive your niche is.
For low-competition niches, results might take less time to show. For high-competitive niches, results might take longer.
This is because there are a lot of other domains that the search engine algorithm is comparing your website to choose the most relevant and valuable content to display and in which order.
Keyword Stuffing Still Works.
Wrong! Keyword stuffing is a banned SEO practice and has been for years. Not only is it considered a search engine manipulation tactic, it also doesn’t deliver any valuable information to users and does not meet user intent.
This tactic makes the content difficult to read and will cause drops in rankings due to its low quality.
The More Backlinks the Better.
Backlinks are all about quality, not quantity. The whole purpose of a backlink is for a reputable domain to direct traffic to another reputable and relevant domain.
This signals to search engines that the receiver of that backlink is trusted and relevant to the context of the backlink.
Once, in the past, having as many backlinks as possible was a ranking factor. Things have changed since it was easy to manipulate search engines into thinking that a domain is reputable based on its number of backlinks, even though those backlinks were irrelevant and from low authority domains.
Having too many backlinks and no traffic signals search engines that a domain is engaging in search engine manipulation tactics.
Bounce Rate is a Ranking Factor
Not really! The bounce rate only tells us that users did not interact with content on pages after accessing it and left shortly after arriving.
Some SEOs use this metric to measure content quality, but, unfortunately, this is not a quality indicator.
There are many reasons why people only access a page for a short time without interacting with it.
A good example of this would be contact pages. Users who arrive there and decide to hit the call or email button are immediately redirected and leave the page.
Though, in some cases, high bounce rates can indicate poor content and user experience, this metric shouldn’t be used on its own. Always use more metrics to find the cause and the problem that needs fixing.
Placing Too Much Trust in SEO Plugin Scores.
One common SEO mistake is trusting the SEO plugin score shown by a plugin on your website. Having an idea of what practices you implemented on your pages is useful. However, the score displayed is not the real SEO potential of the page.
Plugins help with basic implementations like meta titles, meta descriptions, content length, alt tags, etc. They do not assess other ranking factors like the authority score, user experience, the quality of the backlink profile, or how valuable the content is.
This score can give a false sense of how optimised your page is for keywords, intents, or topics.
You Need to Include “Near Me” Keywords to Rank for Local SEO.
Google already takes into consideration the user’s location when returning search results. When optimising your website for local SEO, it is more important to focus on local content, location, and user intent.
Only High-Volume Keywords Should be Targeted.
High-volume keywords get between thousands and millions of searches per month. These are usually shorter and general keywords, like “Shoes”.
The myth is that you should always target high-volume over low-volume keywords since the latter doesn’t generate much traffic.
This couldn’t be more wrong.
Let’s think about it like this. We have one keyword with 1,000 searches per month that we are not ranking for in the first positions, since high-volume keywords have a high competitivity score.
However, we’re ranked at the top for 20 related keywords, each with 50 monthly searches. This approach is more realistic because the total volume is the same, and because the low-volume keywords are usually low in competition as well.
Targeting more specific and lower-volume keywords will most likely allow you to connect with the right audience because you know exactly what they might be looking for within that general topic.
An example of this would be the keyword “shoes”. When users are looking online for shoes, bigger brands might come up in the search results. However, when a smaller business specialises in selling pink running shoes, it might not be a great idea to try and rank for the keyword “shoes”. But it would be a great idea to try and rank for “pink shoes for running”, “ladies/men pink running shoes” or “bright pink running shoes”
These keywords might be lower in volume but target the users who are interested in their products more effectively.
How to Identify SEO Myths
To identify any SEO myths, it is important to possess some skills in this area.
The first would be to have some knowledge about SEO. Learn the basics of SEO, like keyword research, technical SEO, on-page optimisation, content, and link building.
Secondly, who is sharing that piece of information? Research, research, and again research!
Learn about SEO practices and the latest changes from reputable SEO blogs, forums, or industry experts.
Third, has Google said anything about that topic? Google will often release informative content on multiple SEO changes, so to keep up with the changes, check their blog.
Lastly, check how old the information is. Search engine algorithms update a few times a year, and so do SEO practices. By doing this, you can ensure you follow the latest practices, trends, and developments in SEO.
Why do some SEO myths not go away?
Some SEO myths are still around for multiple reasons, but the most common ones are:
- Some users do not keep up with the latest algorithm updates and still use outdated practices that have been banned or left behind.
- Others might misunderstand the rules, applying and sharing them incorrectly.
- Some SEO providers might try to win easy money by selling outdated advice and consultancy, promising quick fixes and first-page rankings.
Conclusion
Staying updated on the latest SEO strategies is not always easy. However, it is crucial to do so, to ensure your website and clients benefit from the best and most ethical SEO tactics.
By doing this, you can create reliable and ethical SEO strategies and avoid outdated or incorrect SEO myths that will harm your efforts and rankings.
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