post by Stephanie Nelson
Today is Pi Day. 3.14 and so on and so forth. Irrational number. In its honor, let’s take a look at a few irrational beliefs about SEO.
- Every website that will provide a link to your website is great for your SEO and you should jump on them.
No. Link farms will hurt you. Sites with little to no relevance to your industry won’t help you and could possibly hurt you, depending on how the search engines view them. - Social media and SEO are completely separate.
Not exactly. While individual posts may not be indexed by the search engines (depending on the outlet), profile pages and bios are, so it’s important to have an SEO strategy for at least those elements of your social media. - Higher organic rankings automatically brings more site traffic.
Not automatically. Higher organic rankings mean there’s potential for more people to see you. But your title tags and meta descriptions, which are seen in the organic results, need to speak to the searchers in a way that makes them click the link to actually get you more site traffic. - You’ll “know your keywords” because you’re in the industry.
Nope. You may know industry jargon. You may know popular terms related to your industry. But true keyword research is needed to help pinpoint what terms people actually search for as well as which terms have the right level of search volume + competition to justify a strategy being built around them. Too little search volume means you’ll rank well but no one will search those terms; high competition means there’s already a lot of folks there, so you may never gain traction. - Ranking #1 is the ultimate SEO goal.
Not necessarily. Studies have shown for years that folks tend to click the first link, but then they want to make sure they’re not missing anything, so they check out links 2, 3, 4, and so on. They buy when they’re tired of looking and feel informed. So a lower average first-page rank may end up working in your favor.
If you’re looking to rein in your SEO beliefs vs knowledge, give us a shout. Use the button below to get in touch!
