Common SEO Myths Debunked

As a business, you’ll always need to compete against others when there’s more than one service or product for your target market to choose from – some of which could come from any country in the world. To carve out your space in the market and make sure the right people find you in the right place and at the right time, digital marketing -and more specifically SEO – is essential. Despite this, many businesses are still wary of using it to their advantage, and risk getting left behind by doing so. If you’re new to the world of search engine optimisation, here are the most common SEO myths you’ll need to leave behind if you want to succeed.

Myth 1: You Can Buy Or Cheat Your Way To Good Rankings
For far too long, unscrupulous "SEO experts" have given businesses the impression that SEO success is something that you can buy. Visit a search engine, and you’ll see international brands dominating searches, which only adds to this impression. It isn’t the case. There’s no single, clear-cut way to succeed with SEO. Google’s algorithms change often, and everyone is affected equally. An SEO plan is one that’ll constantly be changing and what will work for one business won’t work for another – even if both have similar offerings. To implement these changes you need to do certain things – and you won’t have to pay for them to take place, although you’ll need to pay someone to do it if you can’t do it yourself.

So what happens with websites that seem to be thriving in their SEO without big budgets? These businesses don’t know something that others don’t, and there are no secret tricks to their success. They’re successful because they rely on the ongoing assistance of specialists, whose job is to keep up with Google’s changes and make the necessary tweaks to the business’s SEO strategy. In the cases where the efforts of a company seem too good to be true; it probably is. It’s worth remembering that so-called Black Hat SEO never pays and even if a brand succeeds with it now, they’ll be heavily penalised for it later.

Myth 2: Content Trumps SEO
Well-written blogs and website content, infographics and branded imagery will keep visitors coming back to your website and clicking on your links but content isn’t “king” alone. Content is more like a valuable partner to SEO. It’s important, but not the be-all-and-end-all. You cannot create content which hasn’t been informed by research and strategy. You must have a solid SEO strategy that is aimed towards improving your ranking, that’s been optimised for keywords and will bring new traffic to your site every day.

You can have the best content in the world, but if the right people aren’t finding it, it’s useless. Your traffic is meant to stay for what you’re publishing. You can’t have one without the other, so do yourself a favour and get your SEO efforts underway today.

Myth 3: Loading Speeds Aren’t That Important
Let’s say that your SEO efforts are successful, and your web traffic increases to thousands of unique visits a day. This much traffic could slow your site speed down to a glacial pace. If this happens, and your infrastructure can’t handle the extra traffic, your business will suffer. If you’re relying on traffic to generate leads or even make sales from your online store, this could have real-world financial ramifications.

What’s worse than waiting for a website to load? Not much, to be honest. Page speed might be a tie-breaker when all things are equal, but when your traffic increases that much, there is no equality anymore. Your number of conversions will drop dramatically if your loading speeds are too slow. Hand in hand, your ranking will drop as well, so make sure that your infrastructure can handle the extra load.

Myth 4: Visibility Equals Success
Successful brands like Apple, Coca Cola, and Uber, have a significant presence online using both SEO and other marketing strategies to add to their success. These prominent brands are successful because people are familiar with them and they’re a household name because of more than just SEO. They have effective advertising, PPC campaigns and an engaging social media presence.

Just because a brand has a strong online presence doesn’t mean that it can be attributed to SEO or even if the brand is succeeding in meeting their goals and achieving a return on their investment. Don’t rely on SEO alone to become a well-known brand. Focus on meeting your online goals in terms of traffic, leads and sales, and as your business grows, you can create dedicated strategies to increase your brand recognition and awareness.

Myth 5: Social Media Pages Trump Website Pages
If your social media efforts are done well, you’ll get more exposure on platforms that reach a significant portion of your audience. The exposure from a social media presence will share your brand, reach more of your audience, and create an online persona that will do wonders for your business. It’s also true that you can create adverts here to encourage sales directly and generate leads – but collectively this isn’t enough to improve your brand’s rankings.
Social media will affect your SEO efforts by increasing your visibility online and driving more traffic to your website from the content you share. It will also increase the number of people who recognise your brand and those viewing you as an authority. It’s essential to your overall digital marketing strategy but should never replace your standalone SEO efforts.

Businesses in Auckland are making an effort to improve their SEO efforts every day. If you’re attempting to take on your SEO by yourself without hiring a specialist or outsourcing it, you’ll benefit from doing some research into the above myths to make sure your strategy is solid. An easier way of doing things would be to rely on an established and experienced Auckland SEO agency to assist you with the creation and execution of your strategy.

To learn more, contact the Team at Sprocket Digital.