6 Common Misconceptions About SEO and How to Avoid Them

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Here at Golden Lasso, we look at Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, like it’s a fun — and never ending — puzzle. The fact that no one (except Google itself) knows the “true” algorithms that go into SEO means that, at any moment, there are plenty of rumors swirling around about best practices, ranking improvement, and more. Plus, Google reportedly constantly updates their algorithms, making it even more difficult to nail down a clear understanding of them. 

For all is opacity, SEO remains one of the most important aspects of your company’s digital marketing plan. It’s easy to see why: if no one can find your site on the internet, what good is your product or service? 

That’s why it’s so important to ensure that you’re tackling SEO with clear, evidence-based tactics and that you avoid getting caught up in the rumors and misinformation surrounding SEO. Here, we’re breaking down the misconceptions that we hear most often from our clients — and how to ensure your website doesn’t fall victim to them.

Misconception #1: It Only Takes One Effort to Improve Your SEO 

Perhaps the most important “rule” of SEO is consistency. Unfortunately, there’s no one-and-done effort that can increase your site’s ranking and keep it there. Nope — one of the most important parts of a good SEO strategy is staying on top of it. This means a few different things: 

1. Your site should be frequently updated.By this, we mean that you should shoot to publish “fresh” content on your site regularly. While some take this to mean every single day, we don’t think that’s necessary in most cases. Instead, we encourage producing content as regularly as you can manage while keeping the quality of the content high. In other words, don’t post an article full of “fluff” every day just to say you posted an article. Rather, post an article that is a legitimately helpful addition to your site regularly — exactly how regularly will ultimately be up to you.

2. You should regularly optimize your site’s pages. Again, since the key word (SEO pun intended) is consistency here, it’s beneficial to have a rolling schedule of checking your site’s pages for optimization. At the risk of getting too far into the weeds, this might look like changing dates for blogs that were published years ago and would be unlikely to be searched for any longer. For example, if you focused on the phrase “Marketing Ideas 2014” in a piece of content, you would want to rework that page by updating it with either a more “evergreen” piece of content or making it relevant to the year in which you’re writing. This also looks like repairing dated or broken links and updating meta tags and alt tags. If you have a big website, all of this can feel overwhelming. Luckily, that’s what we specialize in. 

In short, SEO isn’t some quick process where an expert can come in and easily “fix” your existing website in one fell swoop. While we can help optimize it from top to bottom, it’s not a process that is ever really finished. 

Misconception #2: Keyword Research is Overrated 

When you’re planning to publish a new web page or a new piece of content on your site, the keywords you want to focus on can sometimes feel obvious, especially if you’re marketing a relatively specific product or service. And we agree — thinking up a keyword or phrase in this manner is a perfectly acceptable place to start. However, it’s important that it’s not where you stop. Instead, you’ll need to conduct keyword research in order to ensure that you’re aware of the keywords or phrases that would be most advantageous to your content — and website. 

In layman’s terms, keyword research essentially allows you to find data about key terms or phrases that are commonly searched on Google. Keyword research can show traffic volume as well as generate other commonly searched terms that are similar to your original ideas. This means that you have more options for your site to focus on — and concrete data to prove their effectiveness. While it can take some time, keyword research is worth the temporal and financial investment. If you’re going to the effort of working to optimize your site, in other words, you may as well do it correctly, which leads us to…

Misconception #3: It’s All About the Keywords 

If keyword research is so important, you may think, why not just throw keywords all over your site and hope for the best? Well, you want to do this…but you want to do it strategically. 

A major no-no in the SEO world is known as keyword stuffing. It is what it sounds like: stuffing your site or content full of keywords that you’re hoping to rank for but that don’t necessarily add anything relevant to your site’s copy. Google’s algorithms are smart — they’re capable of understanding the nuance of writing so that they can tell if your keyword usage is legitimate or not. This means that when you determine the keywords you plan to focus on, the copy or content on your site should integrate them when and where they actually make sense. 

If you’re focusing on the correct keywords, this shouldn’t be that difficult. Whoever is producing your content should work to seamlessly integrate the keywords into the writing so that they don’t feel out of place. It should feel — and really, it should be — relatively simple to use them naturally. Again, our puzzle metaphor applies here as you want to shape your content to feel authentic to your product or service, be beneficial to your customers or site visitors, and also fit those keywords neatly into place. 

Misconception #4: Content Doesn’t Really Matter

While there are many aspects to SEO that are more technical and algorithmic — site optimization, keyword research, links, and more — an aspect that is most definitely not to be overlooked is solid content creation. Publishing high quality content on your site, in fact, matters for a variety of reasons: 

1. Content is the place your keywords lay. It’s simple, but you have to have somewhere to place your carefully researched keywords that makes sense. By creating valuable content and placing it on your site, you provide opportunity to add those important words and phrases that can increase your ranking. 

2. Google pays attention to bounce rate.Your bounce rate is how quickly users “bounce” off of your site. Translation: if you offer up a piece of non-relevant content or copy, your site visitors are likely to quickly leave your site. Google can track this. If they see that your bounce rate is high — that most people leave your site very quickly — it can make you look illegitimate and harm your SEO. This means you’ll want to create content that causes visitors to linger: articles that they might find helpful or information about your product or service that increase understanding. 

3. Content (along with site design) helps with readability. Website visitors are likely to scan your site quickly in search of specific information that brought them there. This means you have just a few moments to draw them in. Rather than presenting content in a long form style every time, we recommend breaking it down into manageable chunks. Use headers, subheads, and lists. There’s a reason the “listicle” is popular these days: it offers readers an easy-to-digest article that they can skim over to more easily find the information they seek. This isn’t to say that long-form articles or blog posts aren’t necessary, though. In fact, we absolutely recommend longer pieces (like this one!) when the occasion requires it. But be selective and mindful about what readers are looking for when you’re planning your content. 

4. Good content creates more avenues for your site to be found. The more valuable content you publish, the more valuable your site becomes. You want your site to be sought after so that your ranking is increased and so that your site is backlinked (which go hand-in-hand, but we’ll get to that in a moment). In short, posting content with varying keywords opens you up to more avenues in which you can be discovered, which, really, is the whole point. 

Misconception #5: Links Matter Above All Else 

As Sergey Grybniak from SEMRush puts it, links are important, but they’re not the be-all-end-all of SEO anymore. Much like the way Google’s algorithm can tell if your site is keyword-stuffed, it can tell when your site links to or is backlinked by spammy, irrelevant websites. 

Let’s back up. If we think about the internet as a web, you can imagine how each proverbial strand is connected: through links. One site links to another, which links to another, and so on. But if your site is linking to sites that aren’t relevant to your content, or are outdated, or have moved the page you originally linked to and created a broken link, Google will question your site’s credibility. Similarly, when another site links to your website, known as backlinking, and that site is not credible, it can make yoursite look bad. (We know, we know — it doesn’t seem fair, but that’s the way it is.) There are things you can do to combat backlinks you don’t want. You can disavow the link in Google’s Search Console and contact the site that has linked to you and ask them to remove it. That said, you do want as many goodbacklinks as you can get, which goes back to what we discussed above regarding producing high quality content. The more relevant content you produce, the more other sites are likely to notice it and link to it. Not only does this drive traffic to your site, but it shows Google that you’re legitimate, thereby improving your SEO ranking. 

Similarly, you want to ensure that your site’s content includes interlinks as well. This means you want to link to other pages from your own website so that users stay engaged or easily find other information that they might find useful. For an example of this, take a look at the links interspersed throughout this article: you’ll see a link to an outside sourcethat we found useful (and thought you might too!) as well as interlinks to the pages on our site that you’d likely be interested in if you’re reading this. Plus, interlinks can help users stay on your site for longer, which is also to your benefit (remember what we mentioned above about bounce rate? That’s why.). 

All of this to say: links are important, but they’re not the only factor that matters with regard to your SEO. In sum, use links wisely. Continually audit the links you use by making sure they’re not broken and that they link to the most relevant content you can find. Pay attention to your own backlinks and watch out for spammy sources. Utilize interlinks to your advantage to help your bounce rate. And remember that your site’s optimization is ongoing, links included. 

Misconception #6: Title Tags and Meta Descriptions Are Irrelevant Now

Simply put, these “nitty gritty” details matter. Your title tag and meta description contain the copy that will appear on the search engine when your webpage appears there. For example, if your webpage is titled “Marketing Tools 2021” with a meta description underneath that explains a sentence or two about your article, a user seeking that information is much more likely to click into your site since they have an idea of what that page is about. If it’s missing, well — they’re unlikely to click into it. Essentially, this bit of copy is your first chances at “grabbing” a website visitor, so make it count. 

Don’t overthink title tags and meta tags. We’ve got experts who write these if you need them. We focus on ensuring that they have the right number of characters and include your relevant keywords where possible. These tags should feel like a true representation of your site’s tone, provide the content in an easily digestible bite, and be optimized so that Google likes them.  

SEO at Golden Lasso

There are undoubtedly countless other common SEO misconceptions that we could add to this list since digital marketing can be a moving target. We believe in trying different avenues, staying malleable, and consistently working to master the puzzle that is SEO. Contact us today if you’d like to give your website a free audit and discuss optimizing its performance.