First of two parts
By Anastasia Stefanova, AVB Marketing
Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most misunderstood and underutilized marketing tactics available, and yet one of the most important for your business and long-term growth.
Organic traffic (those who find you through a product or service search vs. looking for you directly) is usually the largest traffic channel for your website. If your paid traffic is outweighing your organic channel, this means you are paying a premium for each customer that visits your site.
Not only can you offset your paid costs by improving your visibility online, but you can also grow your market share, find new customers and increase overall revenue through good SEO.
The landscape of SEO is ever-changing due to how frequently Google updates its algorithm and what it looks for. Just posting content online (even if it’s good) will not yield much without having the elements Google uses to serve content to searching customers. Google’s vague descriptions of what it’s looking for leads to many misconceptions about SEO among businesses and even agencies that provide these services.
Related: Understanding SEO
Unlike other agencies, AVB Marketing has a department dedicated entirely to SEO where we test, research, analyze and optimize on a large scale to see what truly works and what doesn’t.
Here, then, are the nine biggest misconceptions about SEO — mistakes made by business owners and marketing agencies alike.
- SEO is Another Form of Advertising
Probably the most prevalent and most dangerous assumption is that SEO works like other forms of advertising. This often leads to significant frustration between what business owners deem to be the main goal of all marketing (getting sales) and what SEO professionals deem to be the way to get there (good content). Understanding that SEO is different from paid tactics is critical; it’s just a different way to get to the same results (more sales).
With paid tactics you are putting dollars behind pushing a particular product or service. Since you are spending money directly behind these efforts, the goal is to convert and a success rate is determined based on how many sales you make from running this advertisement.
As a “top funnel” tactic, the only goal of SEO is to get people to the website by using the terms they are searching for, as opposed to the ones you are trying to push. It’s like casting a wide net and catching all the fish at once, but keeping the best ones for yourself. SEO is about getting the customer to the site, and from there your site filters the ones that are ready to buy further into your catalog. Therefore, SEO’s goal is traffic, not sales. Sales will result naturally from the influx of traffic.
Although paid and organic tactics are two separate marketing strategies, they do work together, and the best combination is to run paid and SEO in tandem. In fact, over time, SEO can even help you to drop your cost-per-click on paid ads, since you already rank for those terms organically, making them cheaper to show up for.
- My Blog is a Sales Tool
Understanding what SEO is and is not, we can now safely say that your blog is not a sales tool, but a means of capturing a user from Google. The truth is, blogs are skimmed. Hard as you may try to craft worthy, robust content featuring only the brands that you want to advertise, the cold truth is that many people will gloss over most of the content and simply read headlines, look at images and maybe find one snippet of information that will lead them further into your site.
In fact, “salesy” content performs poorly and readers are quick to identify an agenda hidden in what they are reading online. To make matters worse, pushing the same products in your content leads to duplicate content on your site, which makes all the articles drop in rank. Unlike paid ads that get served to someone multiple times, once a blog is published on a topic, this blog will always come up for that topic, without the need to generate more content about the same thing.
This makes good SEO critical. By giving readers what they’re looking for while appeasing Google’s algorithm, you maximize your chances of getting a potential customer to your site. However, this may mean abandoning your blog about selling that XYZ brand refrigerator and opting for a more exploratory topic people are looking for, like “How to Fix a Broken Refrigerator” — and really just telling them how to fix it!
- 404 Errors Are Bad
Another major misconception is that “404 errors” are errors. Rather, they’re a status of a page on your site. Receiving 404s is a common occurrence, and an inescapable one in e-commerce. A 404 page itself does not actually hurt your SEO, rankings or performance. However, if you have a page containing a link to a 404 page, this may impact the performance of only that page, because it leads to a poor user experience. Once you remove the 404 link page, performance will improve. However, the vast majority of 404 errors on your site are no cause for concern.
- Meta Titles and Descriptions are Important to SEO
In the infancy stages of the Google algorithm, technical SEO was massively important because this was the only way Google could organize pages. In later years, this algorithm became more intuitive and is now able to determine the nuances of pages and content without the need to nitpick each word in the meta titles. In fact, a couple of years ago, Google made it so it can automatically alter metadata to better fit a user’s search.
This means that Google can change that title you worked on at will, and does so to over 61% of titles! The rule of thumb is that if your titles are relevant to the pages they are on, and you don’t have a ton of duplicate titles, then your meta titles are probably safe. However, even these small updates will make very minimal impact to the overall performance of your site.
Look for Part II of “The Nine Biggest Fallacies About SEO” on Friday, July 21.
Anastasia Stefanova is SEO manager at AVB Marketing, the advertising, e-commerce and digital marketing arm of BrandSource parent and YSN publisher AVB Inc.
