Give someone a fish and they’ll EAT for one day. Teach someone to fish and they’ll EAT for a lifetime. Yes, that’s an SEO pun. It’s also the goal of this article.

If you pop into either of the fantastic SEO communities on Twitter or LinkedIn, you’ll inevitably encounter some common SEO myths:

• “Longer dwell time means a good user experience, so it must be a ranking factor”
• “A high bounce rate indicates a bad user experience, so it must be bad for SEO”

Social media posts like these get tons of engagement. As a result, they amplify the myths we try to squash through repetition, false evidence, and faulty logic. The problem isn’t limited to social media, either. There are plenty of high-profile websites that package hypotheses as facts because readers eat them up.

These myths are a huge problem because they’re red herrings. They cause marketers to prioritize projects that won’t improve the content, user experience, or Google search performance.

So how can the SEO community rally around the truth? We can start by doing two things:

1. SEOs must admit our personalities and professions hardwire us to believe myths. We have a deep desire for answers, control, and predictability, as well as a fierce distrust of Google.
2. We need to recognize the psychological and environmental factors that influence our ability to sort fact from fiction.

So rather than busting individual myths, let’s ask ourselves “why?” instead. In other words, let’s learn to fish.

Internal reasons we believe SEO myths

Let’s dig into some internal factors, such as our thoughts and feelings, that influence our beliefs.

1. SEOs need structure and control

SEO is a fascinating branch of marketing because our performance is driven by a constantly evolving algorithm that we don’t control. In fact, there were more than 5,000 Google algorithm updates in 2021 alone.

In other words, SEOs live in a world of crippling dependency. Even the top-ranking signals that we know about can fluctuate based on the industry, query, or available content within Google’s index. For example, if you manage websites in the finance or health space, E-A-T is critical. If you publish news content, then recency is very important.

To gain a sense of structure and control, we look for more ways to influence outcomes. But there are two problems with that approach:

• We overestimate the impact of individual ranking factors
• We falsely believe something is a Google ranking factor that is not

Our need to amplify our own level of control is supported by psychology. A 2016 study revealed an individual’s need for structure made them more likely to believe in a conspiracy theory.

“The human tendency to recognize patterns even when none exist is shown to have applications in consumer behavior. The current research demonstrates that as one’s personal need for structure (PNS) increases (that is, requiring predictability and disfavoring uncertainty), false consumer pattern perceptions emerge.”

If you find yourself waffling between fact and fiction, don’t let your desire for control dictate your final decision.

2. The primal need to recognize patterns

The human brain is excellent at recognizing patterns. Throughout history, we’ve relied on that ability to make better decisions and ensure the survival of our species. Unfortunately, we’re so good at spotting patterns that we also fabricate them.

False pattern recognition has several drawbacks –

• It might influence SEO decisions that could have a sitewide impact
• If you overstate the connection publicly, others might misinterpret it as fact

An excellent example surfaced on Twitter recently. Google’s John Mueller was asked if adding too many links to your site’s main navigation could impact Google Discover traffic. The individual who asked the question ran several tests and saw positive results, but Mueller said it was merely an interesting correlation.

I’d still go with “unrelated”. As mentioned in our docs at https://t.co/kkA2QTzIJs “Given the serendipitous nature of Discover, traffic from Discover is less predictable or dependable when compared to Search, and is considered supplemental to your Search traffic.”

— 🦙 johnmu.xml (personal) 🦙 (@JohnMu) April 14, 2022

“I’d still go with ’unrelated’. As mentioned in our docs: Given the serendipitous nature of Discover, traffic from Discover is less predictable or dependable when compared to Search, and is considered supplemental to your Search traffic.”

Fortunately, this individual went straight to the source for an answer instead of publishing a case study that could have had serious implications for website navigation decisions.

3. Confirmation bias

It’s well-documented that people accept information that supports their beliefs and reject information that doesn’t. It’s a primordial trait that evolved when we began to form social groups. Early humans surrounded themselves with others who thought and acted the same way to ensure their survival.

One of the most famous confirmation bias studies comes from Stanford. For the study, researchers segmented students into two opposing groups based on their beliefs about capital punishment.

One group supported capital punishment and believed it reduced crime. The other opposed it and believed it had no impact on crime.

Each group was asked to react to two studies, one which supported their views, and one which contradicted them. Both groups found the study that aligned with their beliefs much more credible, and each became more entrenched in their original beliefs.

SEO practitioners are particularly prone to confirmation bias because we’re terrified of being wrong. We hypothesize, test, build, optimize, and iterate. If we’re wrong too often, we’ll waste time and money, and we could risk our reputation and our jobs.

We need to be right so badly that we may accept myths that confirm our beliefs rather than admit failure.

4. Lack of trust in Google

It’s safe to say most SEOs don’t trust Google. That has led to some of the longest-running SEO myths I could find. For example, even after seven years of repeated rejections from Google, many SEO experts still believe engagement is a ranking signal.

Here’s John Mueller shooting down the engagement myth in 2015:

“I don’t think we even see what people are doing on your website. If they are filling out forms or not, if they are converting and actually buying something… So if we can’t see that, then that is something we cannot take into account. So from my point of view, that is not something I’d really treat as a ranking factor.”

Nearly seven years later, in March 2022, John was asked the same question again, and his response was pretty much the same:

“So I don’t think we would use engagement as a factor.”

And yet, the SEOs piled on in the comments. I encourage you to read them if you want a sense of the intense level of mistrust. Essentially, SEOs overanalyzed Mueller’s words, questioned his honesty, and claimed he was misinformed because they had contradictory insider information.

5. Impostor syndrome

Even the most seasoned SEO professionals admit they’ve felt the pain of impostor syndrome. You can easily find discussions on Reddit, Twitter, and LinkedIn about how we question our own level of knowledge. That’s especially true in public settings when we’re surrounded by our peers.

Not long ago Azeem Ahmad and Izzie Smith chatted about impostor syndrome. Here’s what Izzie said:

“It’s really hard to put yourself out there and share your learnings. We’re all really afraid. I think most of us have this impostor syndrome that’s telling us we’re not good enough.”

This contributes to SEO myths in several ways. First, it erodes self-confidence, which makes individuals more prone to believe myths. Second, it prevents folks who might want to challenge inaccurate information from speaking out publicly because they’re afraid they’ll be attacked.

Needless to say, that enables myths to spread throughout the broader community.

The best way to combat impostor syndrome is to ensure SEO communities are safe and supportive of new members and new ideas. Be respectful, open-minded, and accepting. If more folks speak out when something doesn’t feel accurate, then we can keep some troublesome myths in check.

External reasons we believe SEO myths

Now let’s explore the external forces, like peers and publishers, that cause us to believe SEO myths.

1. Peer pressure

Peer pressure is closely related to impostor syndrome, except it comes from the outside. It’s a feeling of coercion from peers, whether a large group of SEOs, a widely known expert or a close mentor or colleague.

Because humans are social creatures, our urge to fit in often overpowers our desire to be right. When something doesn’t feel right, we go with the flow anyway for fear of being ostracized. In fact, social proof can be more persuasive than purely evidence-based proof.

I asked the Twitter SEO community if anyone ever felt compelled to accept an SEO ranking factor as fact based on popular opinion. Several folks replied, and there was an interesting theme around website code.

“Back in 2014, a web developer told me he truly believed text-to-code ratio was a ranking factor. For a while, I believed him because he made convincing arguments and he was the first developer I met who had an opinion about SEO.”

—  Alice Roussel

“Years and years ago I wanted code quality to be a ranking factor. Many thought it was because it made sense to reward well-written code. But it never was. Browsers had to be very forgiving because most sites were so badly built.”

—  Simon Cox

Similar to combatting impostor syndrome, if we develop a more tolerable SEO community that’s willing to respectfully debate issues, we’ll all benefit from more reliable information.

2. Outdated information

If you publish content about SEO, then you’ll be guilty of spreading SEO myths at some point. Google updates its algorithms thousands of times each year, which means assumptions are disproven and once-good advice becomes outdated.

Trusted publishers have a duty to refresh or remove inaccurate content to prevent SEO misconceptions from spreading.

For example, in 2019 Google changed how it handles outbound links. It introduced two new link attributes into the nofollow family, UGC and sponsored, and began to treat all three of these as hints instead of ignoring nofollow links.

So if you wrote about link attributes prior to September 2019, your advice is probably out of date.

Unfortunately, most SEOs update content because it’s underperforming, not because it’s wrong. So perhaps publishers should put integrity above performance to strengthen our community.

3. Jumping on trends

Sometimes SEO myths explode because the facts can’t keep up with the virality of the myth. One of my favorite examples is the LSI keyword trend. This one pops up on Twitter from time to time, and thankfully Bill Slawski is quick to quash it.

Trend-based myths go viral because they tap into the fear of missing out (FOMO), and SEOs hate to miss out on the opportunity to gain a competitive advantage. They also resonate with SEOs because they appear to offer a secret glimpse into Google’s black box.

Although trends eventually fade, they will remain a thorn in our side as long as the original sources remain unchanged.

4. Correlation vs causation

The most difficult myths to bust are those backed by data. No matter how many times Google debunks them, they won’t die if folks come armed with case studies.

Take exact match domains (EMD) for example. This article lists several reasons why EMDs are good for SEO, using Hotels.com as a case study. But it’s a classic chicken and egg argument. Does the site rank number one for “hotels” because it’s an EMD? Or is it because the owner clearly understood SEO strategy and prioritized keyword research, link building, internal links, page speed, and high-quality content marketing for the last 27 years?

We also can’t discount the fact that the domain has 42 million backlinks.

But if you want to hear it directly from the horse’s mouth, Google’s John Mueller says EMDs provide no SEO bonus. Here’s what he said on Reddit:

“There’s no secret SEO bonus for having your keywords in the domain name. And for those coming with “but there are keyword domains ranking well” — of course, you can also rank well with a domain that has keywords in it. But you can rank well with other domain names too, and a domain won’t rank well just because it has keywords in it.”

This is obviously correlation, not causation.

To be clear, I fully support running SEO tests to learn more about Google’s algorithm. But it’s incredibly difficult to create a signal vacuum that prevents outside influences from skewing your results. And even if you manage to isolate one ranking factor, you have no way of knowing how strong the signal is in relation to other signals. In a total vacuum, one signal may win. But in the wilderness of Google, it may be so weak that it’s virtually nonexistent.

Furthermore, the signal may only apply to certain types of content. We’ve seen signal fluctuations before regarding product reviews and E-A-T in YMYL spaces. So even if data suggests something might improve organic rankings, how reliable is the information, and how important is the signal?

All this is to say that we should be very careful when proclaiming new ranking factors, especially if they contradict Google’s statements or stray too far from universally measuring user experience.

5. It’s plausible, but not measurable

This group of myths is rooted in logic, which makes them particularly dangerous and sticky. Usually, they follow a simple formula: if A = B, and B = C, then A = C.

Here’s an example:

• Google wants to rank content that provides a good user experience
• If a webpage has a high bounce rate, it must provide a bad user experience
• Therefore, a high bounce rate is bad for SEO

This seems to make sense, right? Yet, Google has said many times they can’t see what users do on your website, and they don’t look at bounce rate.

I’ve seen the same argument applied to dwell time, time on page, SERP click-through rates (CTR), and so on. To be clear, Google says CTR  does not drive organic search engine rankings because that would cause results to be overrun with spammy, low-quality content.

Most often these myths stem from competing views about what a good user experience looks like and how to measure it. What constitutes a good experience for one type of search query might be a terrible experience for another. This lack of consistency makes it virtually impossible to identify metrics that can be deployed universally across all websites.

In other words, if potential user experience signals depend on too many factors, Google can’t use them. That’s why they launched the page experience update in 2021 which quantifies user experience with specific, universal metrics.

Here’s your fishing pole

In many cases, SEO myths fall into more than one of the above categories which makes them even more difficult to dispel. That’s why we keep seeing social media posts falsely identifying ranking factors like keyword density, domain authority, conversions, and meta keywords.

If you understand a few basic concepts about ranking factors, you’ll be better equipped to sort fact from fiction and prioritize SEO initiatives that drive more organic traffic.

Ask yourself these five questions when you smell the stench of a myth:

• Is it quantifiable and measurable?
• Is it scalable?
• Is it broadly or universally true, or does it depend on the user?
• Does it support Google’s goals of delivering a better user experience?
• Has Google confirmed or denied it publicly?

If you can check each of those boxes, then you may have a valid ranking factor on your hands. But don’t take my word for it. Run some tests, ask some friends, use logic, and confirm your theory. And if all else fails, just ask John Mueller.

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Jonas Sickler is a published author and digital marketer. He writes about SEO, brand reputation, customer attention, and marketing. His advice has appeared in hundreds of publications, including Forbes, CNBC, CMI, and Search Engine Watch. He can be found on Twitter @JonasSickler.

Subscribe to the Search Engine Watch newsletter for insights on SEO, the search landscape, search marketing, digital marketing, leadership, podcasts, and more.

Join the conversation with us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2022/04/28/why-were-hardwired-to-believe-seo-myths-and-how-to-spot-them/

The year 2021 was a relatively busy one for Google and SEOs across the world. The search engine behemoth is improving itself all the time, but in this past year, we saw a number of pretty significant updates that gave digital marketers cause for paying attention. From rewarding more detailed product reviews to nullifying link spam, Google keeps thinking of ways to improve the user experience on its platform.

Speaking of user experience: the biggest talking point of the year was June’s Page Experience update, which took place over a few months and notably included the Core Web Vitals.

After that happened, tens of thousands of words were published around the web instructing people on how to modify their websites to meet the new standards.

Mobile-friendliness became even more important than before. Some more inexperienced SEOs out there might have started looking to the Core Web Vitals as the new be-all ranking factor for web pages.

With all this new information on our hands since last year, it’s possible that some misconceptions have sprung up around what is good and bad for SEO in 2022.

In this post, I want to bring up and then dispel some of the myths surrounding Google’s bigger and more mainstream 2021 updates.

So, here it is – the not-so-SEO checklist for your 2022. Here are three of the things you shouldn’t do.

1. Don’t prioritize Core Web Vitals (CWV) above quality content

It’s no secret that Google’s Core Web Vitals are among the elements you’ll want to optimize your website for in 2022 if you haven’t done so already.

As a quick reminder, the Core Web Vitals are at the crossroads between SEO and web dev, and they are the measurements of your website’s largest contentful paint, first input display, and cumulative layout shift.

Those are the parts of your website that load first and allow users to start interacting with the site in the first few milliseconds. Logic tells us that the slower your load times are, the worse your site’s user experience will be.

First of all, this isn’t exactly new information. We all know about page speed and how it affects SEO. We also know how vital it is that your Core Web Vitals perform well on mobile, which is where around 60 percent of Google searches come from.

Google takes its Core Web Vitals so seriously as ranking factors that you can now find a CWV report in Google Search Console and get CWV metrics in PageSpeed Insights results (mobile-only until February of 2022, when the metrics roll out for desktop).

Given that, why am I calling it a misconception that Core Web Vitals should be at the top of your SEO-optimization checklist for 2022?

It’s because Google itself has explicitly stated that having a top-shelf page experience does not trump publishing killer content. Content is still king in SEO. Being useful and answering user questions is one of the most crucial ranking factors.

So, it’s a misconception that Google will not rank you well unless your Core Web Vitals are all in solid, healthy places.

However, having it all is the ideal situation. If you have great web content and optimized Core Web Vitals, you’ll probably perform better in organic search than would a page without strong Core Web Vitals.

In 2022, therefore, work on your Core Web Vitals for sure, but develop a detailed content marketing plan first.

2. Don’t assume your affiliate product-review site is in trouble

Another misconception that might have followed from a 2021 Google update is that affiliate sites, specifically product-review sites, were in some hot water after the Product Reviews update from April.

Google meant for the update to prioritize in-depth and useful product reviews over reviews that are spammy and light on details. In other words, just as in organic search, higher-quality content is going to win here.

If there was ever a point when someone actually made money by running a shady, low-quality affiliate site that featured nonsense product reviews that were then essentially spammed out to thousands of people, Google’s April 2021 product reviews update started to kill that.

The search engine now prioritizes long-form, detailed reviews, the kind that generates trust from users. Those are the types of affiliate content that stand to benefit from Google’s update, while the spammy sites will continue to vanish from top rankings.

Therefore, we can forget about the misconception that good, honest, hard-working affiliate product reviewers would somehow be hurt by the update.

As long as you are presenting something relevant and legitimately useful to users, you may have even seen your rankings rise since the April of 2021.

3. Don’t assume Google will rewrite all your titles

The last misconception I want to address here is the idea that you don’t need to put effort into your pages’ title tags because Google is going to rewrite them all anyway following its August of 2021 title tag-rewrite initiative.

First, some explanation. Back in August, many of you know that SEOs across the industry started noticing their page titles being rewritten, as in, not as they had originally created them.

Google soon owned up to rewriting page titles, but only those it believed were truly sub-par for user experience. In Google’s view, those junky title tags included ones that were stuffed with keywords, overly long, boilerplate across a given website, or just plain missing.

But SEOs still noticed that seemingly SEO-optimized title tags were still being rewritten, and the new titles didn’t always come directly from the original title. Sometimes, as Google has been doing since 2012, the search engine would use semantics to rewrite a title to be more descriptive or just simply better.

In other cases, Google’s new titles came from H1 text, body text, or backlink anchor text.

Google saw these efforts and still does, as one great way to improve user experience during the search.

Many SEOs, however, did not see it that way, especially given that Google’s rewrites were sometimes responsible for drops in traffic.

To put it mildly, there was uproar in the SEO community over the change, so much so that Google explained itself a second time just a month later, in September 2021.

In that blog post, Google said that it uses marketers’ own title tags 87 percent of the time (up from just 80 percent in August). The other 13 percent would be rewrites done to improve:

• too-short titles,
• outdated titles,
• boilerplate titles,
• and inaccurate titles.

And now to bring things back to the crux of this: it is a misconception that you’re wasting your time writing title tags after August of 2021.

Google does not actually want to rewrite your title tags. It clearly stated this in its September blog post.

What Google wants is for you to write high-quality page titles on your own, ones that are descriptive, truthful, and useful. Give users what they need, and Google will leave your titles alone.

However, throw a bunch of keywords in there, or use boilerplate titles all over your site, and you can expect Google to do some cleaning up on your behalf. The trouble is, you may not personally like the results.

Title tags matter in SEO, big time. Don’t think that your efforts are futile just because of the 2021 change. Focus on creating title tags that matter for users, and you should be just fine.

Going forward

The three misconceptions I have covered here can be dangerous to fall into in 2022.

Now, are Core Web Vitals, quality affiliate links, and title tags important to Google? You can bet they are. But SEOs also just have to be smart when approaching these matters. Everything Google Search Central does has the user in mind.

Optimize for Core Web Vitals, but still, put quality content creation first.

Run your affiliate marketing site, but ensure the reviews are useful.

And write amazing SEO title tags so that Google won’t want to rewrite them.

Following these guidelines can only help you in the year to come.

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Kris Jones is the founder and former CEO of digital marketing and affiliate network Pepperjam, which he sold to eBay Enterprises in 2009. Most recently Kris founded SEO services and software company LSEO.com and has previously invested in numerous successful technology companies. Kris is an experienced public speaker and is the author of one of the best-selling SEO books of all time called, ‘Search-Engine Optimization – Your Visual Blueprint to Effective Internet Marketing’, which has sold nearly 100,000 copies.

Subscribe to the Search Engine Watch newsletter for insights on SEO, the search landscape, search marketing, digital marketing, leadership, podcasts, and more.

Join the conversation with us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2022/01/04/the-not-so-seo-checklist-for-2022/

Myths, what are they? To Joseph Campbell, “myths are the world’s dreams. They are archetypal dreams and deal with great human problems.” Ultimately, they serve as a conduit to understanding. While true for most myths, this definition falls apart when it comes to the concept of SEO myths.

If you’ve been in digital marketing for any length of time, you’ve run into the fact that it is a fractured space. Between full-service agencies, vertical-specific boutique shops, independent consultants, and more, separating myth from reality when it comes to prescriptive SEO advice is a significant hurdle.

While the number of SEO myths out there are innumerable, I will nail down the four that I come across most often.

SEO myth #1: SEO and SEM can be approached in the same way

“If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

Although there are many useful concepts that can be taken from SEM and applied to SEO, looking at each channel as the same is a mistake. To start, consider this: a powerful concept in the management of Google Ads is to optimize your use of negative keywords — keywords that you do not want to show up for.

Because of how immediately transactional and visible SEM is — you set a budget, create an ad, and press go — it is common for people to carry that mindset over to SEO. Rather than thinking of what keywords are viable, those coming in with an SEM “bias” can bring a perspective that’s largely focused on what isn’t viable. This is accompanied by the belief that as long as you continue to build out what doesn’t work, what does work will rise to the top.

Unfortunately, this can stymie conversations around a campaign’s keyword research — the launch pad for all other SEO activities — and as you’ll see below, there isn’t a need to contextualize your keyword research within what doesn’t work so long as you approach that research from a sound SEO framework.

Keyword variations and match types

It is not uncommon for Google Ads campaigns to target thousands of keyword variations across a handful of match types. This is done to ensure that you’re able to connect with your audience despite slight variations in the ways that they may type and look for a certain query.

While a necessary practice in SEM, this is not needed in SEO. Though tracking the rankings of thousands of keywords is something we’ve seen our customers do, if you try to target every keyword you can think of, you make it difficult to target and optimize for those that matter most.

When done right, your keyword research for SEO purposes should be chunked out in “themes”. This process, referred to as thematic keyword research, allows you to distill a semantic grouping into a handful of related keywords. This then allows you to focus your optimization efforts and theoretically enables you to surface for all the keywords you would otherwise directly target in Google Ads.

Frequent changes to landing pages to improve ad quality metrics

Another habit that people bring over from SEM to SEO is the frequency that landing pages are changed, says Victorious SEO Strategist Jenni Bojanin. In SEM, specifically ad platforms like Google Ads, these changes help improve ad quality metrics like Quality Score and Landing Page Experience, which allows for a lower cost per click (CPC).

That said, frequently changing pages that are core to your SEO campaigns can cause problems. At best, depending on how often search engine spiders crawl your site, you could be making changes that are never seen in the pursuit of metrics that apply to SEO. At worst, you could be making changes at a frequent enough clip that it confuses search engine spiders and negatively impacts the indexation and categorization of the page itself.

SEO myth #2: SEO is a temporary fix

“You should not drive over 50 mph and no more than 50 miles with a donut-type spare tire. Driving for long distances on a spare tire can potentially cause damage to other car parts, including the transmission.”  – American Automobile Association

Viewing SEO as a temporary fix to your digital marketing problems is like riding on a spare tire at speeds and distances greater than recommended. It’ll work in the short term, but after a while, you can end up doing greater damage than if you had approached the problem with a long-term view on fixing the issue, that is, a new tire.

SEO is not a channel but the foundation of all other digital marketing activities. As such, we have frequent conversations with prospective customers about how integral it is to not view SEO as something you do one time to “clean up” a site, but rather as something to maintain long-term.

To better contextualize this, I’ll cover two scenarios.

The first is a company with a large site with many individuals responsible for the upkeep of the said site. As a site grows in size, the number of individuals you need to manage it begins to grow in tandem. And as you add more individuals, the risk of things going awry and negatively impacting the site’s SEO grow as well.

Now, let’s say you have a smaller site. Maybe you’re a solopreneur or a smaller mom-and-pop-type shop. It’s reasonable to think that with such a small site that the number of things that can go wrong has got to be very small. That is true, but only from the perspective of what’s happening on-site.

In SEO, the saying “if you’re standing still, you’re moving backward” is a very real thing. Just because there’s a comparatively small chance your site has egregious on-site issues, doesn’t mean your competition isn’t continuing to build out their site, both on- and offsite.

In both scenarios, regularly investing time and resources into your site’s SEO over, ideally, the life of the sites would prevent the two negative consequences of “quick fix” SEO: missing egregious issues due to a  lack of having someone reviewing the site and becoming complacent while your competition focuses efforts off-site.

SEO myth #3: Your SEO agency will handle everything for you

At my agency, Victorious, we view our engagements with our customers as partnerships. There are many things that a partnership can mean, but the idea that a partner should handle everything for you is not one of them.

Just like a one-to-one human relationship, a partnership works best when both partners are engaged and committed to finding ways to work together to achieve shared goals.

To better expand on this idea, I consulted an article on Oprah Mag titled, “The Best Relationship Advice, According to Experts”. In it, I found two helpful analogs to how your relationship with your SEO agency should ideally function, which are:

Schedule dates to talk about your relationship

If you don’t put time on the calendar to meet with your SEO agency, you’re missing out on an opportunity to better empower them to deeply understand your business and its needs. As much as you think the discussions you’ve had with them during your pre-sales and onboarding meetings should be enough, they’re not.

Your business is evolving — probably daily. Your priorities will shift and resources will change. If you’re not regularly updating your SEO agency about these shifts and changes, you cannot expect them to properly execute a strategy that ultimately serves your company well.

Don’t expect your partner to be your BFF

Just like you’d be setting yourself up for failure by expecting your partner in real life to be everything for you — confidante, therapist, etc. — you’re doing the same by expecting your SEO agency to handle and/or keep an eye on all aspects of your digital marketing.

When engaging with an agency, be very clear upfront with what your expectations are and allow space for the agency to push back on anything that would be out of scope. If you’re already engaged with an agency, be prepared to have open and candid conversations about your needs and understand that some of those needs may not be able to be accommodated by the agency.

And that’s ok. Let your agency do what they’re best at. Don’t try to fit a square peg in a round hole. Besides, most agencies will have referrals or be able to point you in the right direction to help support the need you are looking to fulfill.

SEO myth #4: SEO results are instant

Not even Instant Noodles are instant. Why would you think results from a marketing channel would be?

While it is true that every site, both new and old, likely has low hanging fruit that could result in fairly quick wins, seeing sustained and compounding SEO results takes time.

Depending on who you ask, the SEO flywheel can take a minimum of three to four months and up to one to two years before any visible “self-propulsion” of the flywheel begins to take effect.

Why is this the case? Because of the myriad of variables involved — some within your control, and some outside of your control. The top three are:

Competition

If you’re entering into a competitive space like credit cards with a brand new site, there are two elements of competition that you need to consider. The first is that a space like credit cards automatically lends itself to a lot of online competition since they are often targeted towards nationwide audiences, rather than regional ones. That alone means that the number of sites you’re competing against rise exponentially.

The second element to consider is the types of companies you’re competing against in the space you’re operating within. With credit cards, you’re going to be operating against some of the largest businesses in the United States, for example, companies like Bank of America, Discover, and the likes. The larger the business, the more likely it is that they employ SEO professionals, and therefore the more likely you are up against sites that are fairly well optimized.

Inbound links

In case you haven’t heard recently, links continue to be a top-ranking factor on Google. As a testament to that, Andrey Lipattsev, a Search Quality Senior Strategist at Google, stated years ago in a conversation about the top two ranking factors outside of RankBrain: “I can tell you what they are. It is content. And it’s links pointing to your site.”

And this isn’t going to change anytime soon.

So, how do you identify how many links you need to start surfacing on page one of the search engine results page (SERP) of the queries you’re targeting? In an earlier article I wrote for Search Engine Watch, “Five SEO tips that capture holiday attention and boost sales”, I discuss how to understand link acquisition needs.

The steps are broken down here succinctly:

1. For your target queries, take a look at the number of Referring Domains (RDs) pointing to the pages ranking in positions one through five for those queries. You can achieve this through tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, and the like.
2. Once you get the number of RDs, average them.
3. The product of this is the number of RDs you realistically need to break into the top five of page one of your queries’ SERPs.

Content

According to Victorious Content Strategist Ashley Cardell, when it comes to SEO content creation, a handful of things come into play. Those things are content length, the search intent of the primary query the content is targeting, and the cadence at which you should be publishing new content.

To figure out your content needs, a good first step is – gauging the number of pages your top organic competitors are ranking for. Ahrefs makes it easy. After plugging in the URL of the competitor you’re assessing, click “Top Pages” in the left-hand pane and look for the section that says the number of results, like the picture below:

Based on this number — 8,393 — you now have a loose target with regards to the number of content pieces you would need to produce to achieve “competitive parity” in terms of content footprint.

In Conclusion

Marketing is hard. With so many channels, competing internal interests and shared budgets, a shifting landscape, and ever-increasing goals, it’s understandable that you’d be tempted to apply the logic of a channel you know to one that you don’t know. I wish it worked that way, too. However, applying that kind of logic makes you vulnerable to falling for the myths of SEO.

SEO and SEM are as distinct as night and day. There is some overlap between them, and they complement each other, but they are not the same. Additionally, SEO should not be looked at as a short-term or one-time fix. It should be part of your long-term digital strategy. Within that strategy, it is important not to expect your agency to handle everything, but rather treat your agency as your valued partner and consultant. And most importantly, always remember that when implementing SEO into your strategy, keep in mind that results are not instant, and will take time.

With the above, I’ve given you things to look out for when approaching SEO with a predominantly SEM background. But at the end of the day, these tips won’t help you if you don’t view SEO as a foundational element to your overall marketing mix rather than a “set and forget” channel. With SEO, take the long-term view and things will pan out in the end.

Houston Barnett-Gearhart is Director of SEO at Victorious.

Top four SEO myths debunked: Director’s cut

Google Analytics is a powerful tool that’s unprecedented in its ability to measure your website’s performance. The data it gathers is invaluable to you as a marketer. They can give you a clear view of what decisions you need to make to benefit your brand. Data, however, are just numbers and graphs. On their own, they cannot tell a story. It’s your job as a marketer to deduce that story through sound and unbiased analysis and not fall for Google Analytics myths.

If Google Analytics terms and data confuse you more than they enlighten you, this article will help you understand four Google Analytics and SEO-related myths you need to avoid.

How do I use Google Analytics?

Business owners use Google Analytics (GA) to see what they’re doing right, in terms of getting quality traffic to their sites. If you’re a business owner hoping to expand your presence in online spheres, you’ll need analytics to measure your success.

With the use of metrics, Google Analytics tracks who visits your site, how long they stay, what device they’re using, and what link brought them there. With these data, you can discover how to improve your online marketing and SEO strategies.

Google Analytics basics

At first, it may seem like Google Analytics is serving you raw data that are too complicated to digest. Learning to speak the analytics language, though, it is easier than you think. Below are some basic terms to help you better understand the data reported by Google Analytics:

Pageviews

Pageviews are the total number of times a page on your site that users have viewed. This includes instances in which users refresh the page or when they jump to another page and promptly go back to the page they had just left. This underlines what pages are most popular.

Visits/Sessions

Sessions are measured by how much time users spend on your website, regardless if they spend it navigating only one or multiple pages. Sessions are limited to a 30-minute window. This means that if users stay on the site for 30 minutes but remain inactive and non-interactive with the page throughout, the session ends. If they leave the site and go back within 30 minutes, though, it gets counted as a session.

Average session duration refers to the average time users spent on your site. Pages per session, on the other hand, is the average number of pages that users view on your site within a single session.

Time on Page

This refers to the average time users spend on a page on your site. This can help you determine which pages users typically check out longer. This starts the second a pageview is counted until the subsequent pageview ends it.

Traffic

Traffic refers to the number of people accessing your website. This comes from a traffic source or any place where users come from before they are led to your pages.

Traffic is classified into direct and referral. Direct traffic comes from pageviews triggered by specifically typing the whole URL or when a user is given a URL directly without searching for it. Referral traffic is directed from links on other sites, like search results or social media.

Unique Pageviews

Unique pageviews are reported when your page is viewed once by users in a single session. These don’t count the times users navigated back to that page in the same session. For example, a user navigates the whole site in one session and navigates back to the original page three times; the Unique Pageview count is still at one, and not three.

Unique Visitors

When a user visits your site for the first time, a unique visitor and a new visit for the website is counted. Google Analytics uses cookies to determine this. If the same user comes back to the site on the same browser and device, it’s only counted as a new visit. But if that user deletes their cookies or accesses the site through a different browser or device, they may be falsely added as a unique visitor.

Hits

Hits are interactions or requests made to a site. This includes page views, events, and transactions. A group of hits is measured as a session, used to determine a user’s engagement with the website.

Clicks

Clicks are measured by the number of clicks you get from search engine results. Click-through rate (CTR) is the total amount of clicks divided by impressions or times you are part of the user’s search results. If CTR is dropping, consider writing titles and meta descriptions that capture your users’ attention better.

Events

Events are actions users take on a particular site. This includes clicking buttons to see other pages or download files. You are looking at what kind of content encourages users to interact with the page, thereby triggering an event.

Bounce rate

Bounce rate refers to users’ single-page sessions wherein they click on a page and exits quickly without interacting with a single element on the page. A high bounce rate can mean either that a user has swiftly found what they were looking for or that they did not think the content on the page was interesting enough to stay longer and engage.

Goals

You can input goals in your Google Analytics account to track user interactions on your site. These interactions include submitting a report, subscribing to your newsletter, or downloading files. If the user performs an event that you’ve identified as a goal, Analytics counts this as a conversion.

Four common Google Analytics myths debunked

Now that you have an overview of Google Analytics terms, below are five common misconceptions surrounding those terms and how to avoid these as a marketer.

1. The more traffic that goes to your site, the better

The myth

Generally, you’d want more people to visit your site. These huge amounts of visits, though, won’t matter if they don’t turn into conversions. Even if thousands of people flock to your webpages each day, if they don’t take the desired actions your SEO campaign is aiming for, these visits won’t provide any benefit for your site.

The truth

A good SEO strategy is built upon making sure that once you’ve garnered a pageview, the quality of your content drives the user to the desired action such as subscribing to a newsletter, for example.

Keyword research can help make sure that you use the right terms to get you a higher ranking on SERPs. The material on your site, however, is also crucial in satisfying your users’ queries, enough to get a conversion.

2. Users need to spend more time on webpages

The myth

Users spending a few quick seconds on your page is not entirely bad. This may mean that these users are looking for quick, precise answers. Quality SEO delivers this to them through well-placed keywords and concise content. Hence, if they quickly get the answers they need, they tend to leave the site immediately.

The truth

Quality SEO content ensures that your material is written in such a way that it invites users to learn more about the subject, which can be seen when they are led to another page on your site. This leads them one step closer to taking the desired action on your site.

3. The amount of unique visitors is an accurate metric to measure audience traffic

The myth

The upsurge of unique visitors on your page doesn’t necessarily mean that the amount of your audience is blowing up. Unique visitors are measured by cookies used by Google to determine if it’s a user’s first time on a site. The same user accessing the same page through a different browser or a browser whose cookies have been cleared is counted as a unique visitor too.

The truth

If you’re looking to study your audience, it’s not enough to look at how many of them go to your page. You can refer to the Audience > Demographics tab and see who are navigating your site and from what marketing links they were directed from. With this information, you can determine what types of content gather the most traffic and from what avenues this traffic comes from such as SERPs or social media posts, for example.

4. Traffic reports are enough to tell if your campaign is successful

The myth

Looking at traffic reports alone is not enough to determine whether your SEO campaign is successful, or that your keyword research paid off. Although at first, it seems as though heavy traffic signals an effective online marketing strategy, it only counts the quantitative aspect of your campaign and dismisses the qualitative side.

The truth

Maximize all the reports on GA. All these are correlated with how your campaign is going. Reports are valuable in comprehensively addressing issues instead of nitpicking on a single aspect of a campaign because, for instance, a report suggests it’s not doing its job.

These points will help you clear the air when it comes to Google Analytics and help you correctly derive insights.

Four common Google Analytics myths busted

If you’re in charge of managing a website, you’re probably always looking for ways to make your site smarter, faster and more relevant to users so it ranks higher in organic search results. Though, due to the unpredictable reputation of SEO, there have been many SEO myths circulating around how to achieve higher organic rankings.

To help your brand succeed in 2020 by optimizing your website for greater organic visibility, here’s the truth about the top four SEO myths.

SEO myth #1 – XML sitemaps automatically improve your search rankings

The XML sitemap’s main job is to help search engines crawl and index the pages of a website. Search engines especially like to see fresh pages added to the sitemap, as it indicates that the website is up-to-date and may be more relevant to online users. The real question here is, does the XML sitemap help boost a website’s search rankings?

According to the Google Webmaster Central Blog, an XML sitemap does not have a direct effect on the rankings of a website. Submitting a sitemap helps ensure search engines like Google know about all the important URLs on a website. This can be especially useful when certain web pages are not easily discoverable by crawlers. To put into layman’s terms, an XML sitemap will augment Google’s crawl and discovery process and may result in an increased presence and visibility of a website, but it will not automatically improve a site’s organic ranking.

SEO myth #2 – Too many keywords = poor organic rankings

There’s been buzz around the SEO industry for years when it comes to keywords, more specifically, keyword density. How many keywords are too many? Will Google penalize my website for over-optimizing it with keywords?

Despite what many online forums and articles may elude to, there is no one-size-fits-all option when it comes to keyword density. In 2014, John Mueller of Google said,

“Keyword density, in general, is something I wouldn’t focus on. Search engines have kind of moved on from there.”

At the end of the day, if the content on your website is natural and helpful to users, don’t spend too much energy trying to calculate the perfect number of keywords for a web page.

SEO myth #3 – Having a secure website isn’t that important

Okay, kids. It’s 2020. Let’s talk about the importance of having a secure website in today’s day and age. Website hackers are only getting smarter. Malicious cyber intruders will exploit every unprotected resource they can between your website and users. For this reason alone, it’s critical to protect your website by equipping it with a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) to help monitor and transfer data safely and securely between two points. In other words, the days of HTTP are over and it’s time to make the move to HTTPS.

Also known as Hypertext Transfer Protocol, HTTP is a protocol that allows for the communication between different systems across the web. HTTPS, or Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure, use an SSL certificate to create a secure encrypted connection between servers and browsers. This helps protect sensitive information from being stolen as it is transferred over the web.

There are SEO benefits to making your website more secure as well since one of Google’s top priorities is making sure that their services use industry-leading security. In 2014, Google announced that all HTTPS websites would receive a minor ranking boost over those using HTTP.

SEO myth #4 – Google will penalize your website for duplicate copy

Before we dive into the duplicate copy controversy, let’s take a step back and discuss the difference between algorithm devaluations and penalty devaluations. When Google releases new algorithm updates like Penguin, Panda, Pigeon, and Layout, different websites will see different results. Each time an algorithm is updated, one site may see devaluations, while another may see an exponential increase in organic traffic.

Penalty devaluations occur when Google decides that your website is in violation of the Webmaster Guidelines. When a website appears to use deceptive or manipulative behavior to gain traffic, Google may respond in a negative fashion by devaluating the site’s ranking in the search engine results page.

When it comes to duplicate copy on a website, the common misconception is that Google will penalize the site. The reality of the matter is that Google does not have a duplicate content filter. If there are multiple pages on a website with the same content, Google will simply decide not to rank all pages for the same query. Crawlers will choose which page to rank for what, which can have a negative impact on organic rankings.

Conclusion

Don’t let these common SEO myths sideline you as you work toward ranking your website for organic success. As Google and other search engines continue to tweak their algorithms to give users the most relevant search results, it will be important for content marketers and SEO experts to stay on top of the latest SEO trends and updates.

Claire Beutel is a Senior SEO Strategist at R2i.

Four SEO myths to shake off in 2020