SEO isn’t just about targeting keywords, there are several other factors that are incredibly important for your website to rank better in search engines. A myth is defined as a widely held but false belief or idea, and while myths are mostly harmless, in the world of SEO these myths can lead to an incredible waste of valuable resources, limited time and money for your business.
Common misconceptions about SEO
Keyword research is useless
One of the many potential consequences of not doing proper keyword research is that you choose the wrong keywords. When you decide to use an SEO strategy for your business, keyword research is often swept under the rug, neglected and considered something that is unnecessary and unimportant. The reason many people think keyword research is useless is because they assume that since they own a business, they must know their users best.
More keywords you use, the better your site will rank
When you’re doing SEO for your website, it can be tempting to use shortcuts and sneaky black hat tactics to boost your search rankings. These shortcuts will not only not help you, but will actually negatively affect your rankings. Many people are under the mistaken impression that if you want to increase your organic rankings, you need to use as many keywords as possible throughout the content of your website.
Content doesn’t matter if you’re targeting the right keywords
There’s a common misconception that SEO is literally just targeting keywords, and therefore if you can target the right ones, you don’t really need to worry about the actual content you’re cultivating. SEO and content go hand in hand and cannot work as effectively on their own.
Title tags and meta descriptions aren’t that important
You never get a second chance to make a first impression. How you present your website is how your users choose to view you and your business, In the world of SEO, there is a lot of emphasis on keyword targeting to the point where title tags and meta descriptions are often forgotten because they seem to be such core components.
Order is everything
Higher rankings seem to be the epitome of what SEO success looks like. And while rankings play a significant role in driving more users to your site, that traffic means nothing if those users aren’t converting on your site. To ensure that users stay on your site, enjoyable and useful content to ensure that your users have a pleasant experience and therefore interact with your content.
Page speed will make or break my website
One of the most common misconceptions about page speed is that it is a much bigger ranking factor than it actually is. While this can have a big impact, it’s not everything. Page speed can be a good way for your website to rank better because users will have a more pleasant experience on it, but in competition with relevance and quality of content, page speed alone will not save your website.
Links don’t really matter
Links and link building are at the heart of how Google decides whether or not to rank your page and greatly affects your site’s authority. It is also useful to have other websites link to your website and there are a number of link building strategies that use them to do this. You can try to create unique and high-quality content that people will naturally want to link to and use.
SEO doesn’t work, so don’t bother
When done right, SEO is an incredible way to increase your business visibility in search, increase traffic and therefore increase your conversions. But as we’ll explain, SEO isn’t one and done and it can take a while to set in because it’s more of a marathon than a sprint. In the case of SEO, slow and steady really wins the race, as you don’t want to have any suspicious spikes in traffic that will ultimately hurt your business.
