There are a lot of articles and people on the internet advertising “quick SEO fixes”.
A quick Google search for “SEO strategy” returned about 14,100,000 results in less than a second.
But if the past few decades have taught us one thing, it’s that you can’t trust everything you read online.
Some of the SEO advice you find will be outdated, inaccurate – or even just stupid.
These suggestions and strategies may be based on the author’s misunderstanding of how search works.
They may be the result of lack of experience or industry knowledge.
No matter where they come from, here’s a list of seven stupid SEO tactics to avoid so they don’t seriously hurt your long-term SEO performance.
1. Pipeline SEO strategy
I define “pipeline SEO” as an individual or agency using the same strategy for every client without any customization.
Many larger SEO agencies use this tactic for their SMB departments because of how efficient it is to manage.
Usually, the site passes the first round page optimizationregular tactics include blogging and paying for links.
However, just because it’s easy, doesn’t mean it’s always the best.
This strategy may bear fruit in a short period of time, but unless there is zero competition, the site is bound to experience a growth plateau.
How to do
Rather than getting caught up in this routine “task-based” strategy, focus on finding unique ways to provide value to your website audience.
Investigate what your competitors’ top content is and how they approach their content strategy.
list all your competitor strategy And look for content gap opportunities.
Take advantage of these opportunities to ensure your content serves your audience at every stage of the buying funnel.
Ongoing research and content production can be more time-consuming, but it is bound to be more productive.
An added bonus is that this will show your stakeholders that you genuinely care about their performance.
2. Algorithm updates cause performance degradation (no evidence)
performance drop can occur suddenly and frequently Algorithm updatedepending on the website.
Algorithm updates are so frequent these days that it’s easy to blame Google and say they’re causing your rankings and organic traffic to drop.
Sometimes it’s true!
Typically, however, performance degradation can occur for different reasons.
Some common causes of decreased organic performance include:
- Newly discovered technical issues on the site.
- The content has changed significantly.
- seasonal.
- Competitor changes.
- Manual operation.
Bearing these possibilities in mind, it’s important that we don’t take a simplistic approach to blaming algorithm updates.
Disclaimer:
If your website has taken a hit recently, don’t panic!
Something just happened and your traffic will return on its own.
What you don’t want to do is start making major changes to your website. This can lead to more complexity in your organic performance.
How to do
there are several SEO Recovery Guide There, you can refer to more in-depth steps on how to recover from organic performance declines.
Here are some quick tips on how to investigate if your website is actually under attack by an algorithm.
Has Google discovered new technical issues?
Technical issues are one of the more common causes of slow website performance.
This usually happens when site administrators unknowingly update various parts of the site and create major technical issues.
Investigate this issue by checking the following locations:
- Check coverage report google search console.
- Run a Screaming Frog or Sitebulb crawl to check for structural changes and crawling trap.
- Run an automated audit in your SEO tool of choice to find any hidden errors.
- Check robots.txt for any new prohibition directives.
- Run fetch and render to see how Google might render your site.
Significant content changes
This is another common reason for significant fluctuations in rankings. Some sites, such as e-commerce, change content frequently.
If your site rarely updates content and has a drop in organic traffic or rankings, you might want to investigate if your clients or other webmasters have made some unexpected changes.
Some of the ways you can investigate site changes include:
- Check out the Change Tool in the Wayback Machine.
- Install the Activity Log plugin to track your site changes.
- Investigate which pages in Google Analytics are most affected and analyze those pages.
seasonal
It’s hard to find sites that aren’t affected by some kind of seasonality.
Whenever a stakeholder comes to you with concerns about site performance degradation, be sure to check your year-over-year benchmarks.
Comparing quarterly trend lines stacked on top of each other so you can show your stakeholders that these declines may not be uncommon.
Also, you should forecast ahead and let them know of any future expected declines based on the previous year’s trend.
The key here is that you are still improving year by year.
Competitor changes
Some traffic changes may occur as competitors improve their organic strategies.
Typically, this will be indicated by a steady decline in organic performance, and it is unusual for this to occur when performance drops sharply.
If you think your competitors are starting to steal your rankings, don’t panic!
I have a python script that lets you Monitor your organic competitors. It will show who is consistently ranking for your topic keywords.
Manual operation
Manual actions aren’t as frequent as they used to be, but they still happen.
If your website traffic drops dramatically, check Google Search Console for any manual actions.
3. Copy location page copy
When developing a location page for a large website with multiple locations, creating a unique copy for each location can be tedious and time-consuming.
Using the same copy for every location page seems like an easy way to go, but I strongly advise against it.
By focusing on a unique copy of each location’s page, you can get better local ranking performance.
look at mine Location page list Learn how to create a final location page.
4. Use automated audit tools to drive strategy
Relying on automated tools may not be the best way to drive an organic strategy.
Many new SEO professionals tend to do their initial Use automated tools for SEO audits And let it guide their global SEO strategy.
What’s wrong with this?
These SEO scoring tools don’t “ask questions.”
The key to any good SEO strategy is to ask questions, including but not limited to:
- Who is my target audience and what information do they need to take action?
- Are there any obstacles for Google to crawl and interpret my site?
- Does my internal link structure help with entity optimization?
How to do
Invest in a tool like Screaming Frog or Sitebulb and learn how to look at a website as a whole.
Use visualization tools to analyze the structure of your website.
Look for Content Gap Opportunities And make sure your technical structure is sound.
When your technical foundation is clean, search engines may easily discover, crawl, and render your pages.
5. Pay for links
Now I know the point of this post is white hat tactics, but there is a grey hat approach to link building where you can Payment Link Building The company that guarantees the link.
This is a great way to guarantee that you get a specific number of backlinks for your clients each month.
However, quality and relevance are almost never up to par.
How to do
Link building tends to have a snowball effect.
If you get a link in a well-known publication, other writers may find you and link to you in their own articles.
However, this is less common for smaller DA backlinks.
I recommend investing in some PR partners to help you produce content and get features in noteworthy publications.
These larger publications tend to increase the velocity of your backlink profile organically through a snowball effect.
6. Too afraid to ask questions
There’s nothing wrong with just searching for answers to your questions.
However, when it comes to strategy or solving a specific problem, Google may not always return you the right answer.
It’s okay to ask your peers for help. Even the best of us are regularly polling and asking for help on Twitter. There is absolutely nothing to be ashamed of.
In fact, it is very encouraging!
No respectable SEO will make fun of you for not knowing.
We all have to learn in some way.
If you are still a little too nervous, please contact Search Engine Journal Ask about SEO Columns answer your anonymous questions publicly. In this way, others may benefit from sharing knowledge.
7. Ignore the other pillars of SEO
Most SEOs consider the three pillars of SEO: content, link buildingand technical.
However, I would like to add “Local“As the fourth pillar because it really uses elements of all three in a unique way.
Neglecting any of these pillars for extended periods of time can delay your ranking improvement or dampen them together.
For example, if your initial review shows that there are a lot of technical issues, you might rush to fix them and spend all your time cleaning them up.
If possible, try to allocate your resources to tackle each pillar of SEO simultaneously.
If you spend all your time troubleshooting technical issues or doing link outreach, but you forget to improve your content, your rankings may not improve as you expect.
final thoughts
Now, I know that some of these SEO strategies might work for some sites for a while.
The point here is that the big picture of SEO is much more complex than these simple techniques capture.
Don’t get distracted by them and focus on driving sustainable, lasting results.
More resources:
Featured image: Montri Thipsorn/Shutterstock
