Unless you are an expert on SEO, someone who spends hours and hours a week keeping tabs on industry developments, you probably fall into one of two categories:
- You know you don’t know everything about SEO
- You don’t know you don’t know everything about SEO
Not sure where you stand? Here are five signs your understanding of SEO is out of date.
1. You Put a Lot of Emphasis on Rankings
Rankings used to be THE way to assess SEO campaigns. No longer true! Because Google now personalizes SERPs (search engine results pages) according to the user’s geographic location, search history and other variables, rankings are relative — what ranks No. 1 for you could rank No. 30 for someone else.
2. You Believe in Cookie-Cutter SEO Campaigns
If you think you can succeed in SEO with a low-cost, prepackaged campaign, you are living in the SEO past. In earlier times, cookie-cutter campaigns sometimes worked because SEO was more uniformly executed. Today, Google is more sophisticated, which requires clients to build SEO strategies and campaigns unique to their business.
3. You Think Piles of Inbound Links Are Good for SEO
In the old days, any inbound link was a good inbound link. Today, quality is as important as quantity. In fact, Google might penalize you for having certain kinds of links. For SEO success, your inbound link strategy must focus on links that are relevant, diverse and placed on authoritative websites and blogs.
4. You Don’t Think Content Quality Is Important
Formerly, just about any quality off-site or on-site content was good enough to impress Google as long as the word count and keywords were correct. Today, Google’s search algorithm is far more sophisticated, recognizing and rewarding high-quality content. Without high standards, a company cannot expect SEO content to achieve anything.
5. You Think Keyword Stuffing Is a Best Practice
If you are still jamming keyword phrases into your on-site and off-site content left and right, you’re doing more harm than good. At one time, several mentions of important keywords signaled a positive sign to Google crawlers. Today, Google sees too much repetition of keywords as a way to game its system. Nowadays, one or two mentions of a keyword phrase are enough to get the job done.
How did you score? If you’d like to discuss your SEO requirements and ways to improve your SEO lead generation, please contact us. We are eager to learn more about your situation.