Dispelling the 4 Biggest Misconceptions About SEO

By Solomon Thimothy

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short, is in everyone’s marketing book today. Every company must include SEO as part of its overall marketing strategy if it's really looking to grow in today’s Internet-driven market. Unlike other types of advertising strategies, SEO comes with a lot of unknowns that lead to a variety of misconceptions.

These misconceptions, however, can easily lead to big mistakes that could potentially ruin or limit the potential of a business online.

Here are four of the biggest misconceptions that the average business owner has about SEO. If you have these too, you might be hurting your business’s potential.

Misconception #1: Content Is Extra

One of the biggest misconceptions about SEO is that content is not a critical part of the SEO equation. While this may have been true five to six years ago, search engines have become very savvy and are truly looking for stellar, valuable content.

This means that content is critical for the success of your SEO component. In fact, it’s the driving force behind many of the initiatives for any campaign. This includes:

• Optimized content (with keywords naturally incorporated)
• Original content (to prevent duplicate content issues)
• Thought leadership content (for guest posts or industry-relevant sites, LinkedIn Pulse, and other professional publishing platforms )
• Blog content (regular, frequent, and fresh content)
• Shareable content (videos, SlideShares, podcasts, infographics, etc.)

If you think content is extra and you’re done writing after your website is up, you might as well give up before you start your SEO campaign.

Misconception #2: Backlinks Are Everything

SEO has changed drastically in the past two to three years, and if someone is telling you that the only thing you need to worry about is backlinks, then you should be wary of their recommendations. Quality backlinks are still very important to the overall reputation of your website. Notice the emphasis on quality? Yes, it’s all about quality.

While acquiring random directory links and social links was a good strategy back then, backlinks today are much harder to come by. That’s where content is key.

If you’re looking for quality backlinks, try getting published in your local newspaper, or big magazines or industry sites relevant to your business. Becoming a thought leader through your content will not only bring the quality backlinks you need, but it will also get you noticed by those in your industry, an even more important reason for becoming a thought leader.

Misconception #3: Any Website Will Do

It’s true that you can be successful with your SEO strategy using any type of website. Search engines aren’t out there to penalize you for not having a preferred version of a website. However, they will give preference to websites that provide a good, quality experience to their visitors. That means that they look for the following in websites as part of their assessment of rankings and authority:

• Mobile friendliness
• Text/font size
• Bounce rates
• Time spent on-site

That means that you are better off with a website that meets all these requirements and provides a positive user experience for all your visitors. This means you might need to invest in a responsive website that is mobile friendly and is user-focused.

Remember that you’re not doing this just for search engines. It’s all about how your visitors (and potential customers) interact with your website. If their experience is a frustrating one, they probably won’t give you another chance. A clean, easy-to-navigate website with valuable, engaging content is what every visitor is looking for–so why not give it to them? This will ensure visitors stay on your site for a long time and won’t jump off seconds after arriving.

Misconception #4: There’s No Way But Up

If you’re just starting out in online marketing, that’s probably true. If you’ve never invested the time or energy in optimizing your website for search engines, you will most likely see a steep incline when you first start out. However, it’s not always going to be an upward climb.

Traffic, leads generated on your site, or sales can be cyclical. This means you can’t expect your traffic to keep going up month after month. Your traffic may also plateau at a certain point. Remember that even if you’ve achieved your desired rankings, there are an average number of searches for those keywords. That means that a certain point you can’t expect more traffic if there are no more new searches.

And yes, your traffic can also go down. While most business owners panic when traffic dips slightly, there should be no reason for concern if all other metrics are positive and you’re still working hard at doing the right things.