If you have been in the SEO game for a while, you must have realized that SEO requires absolute patience and time. You work dozens of hours every week and continue to do so for at least a month before you see the tiniest impact on your rankings and domain authority.
However, there are some strategies that will never bring you any results, and you might just be utilizing those.
So if you’re using any such unproductive strategies, it is better you do away with them and direct your energies towards those that in fact bring in results.
Stop Checking Your Rankings Frequently
Being an SEO expert, you must realize how slowly progress in this domain occurs regardless of your efforts. So checking your ranking obsessively is fruitless, you don’t need to go over those more than once a week.
On the other hand, you do need to check your traffic via Google Analytics as frequently as once a day or once every couple of days, that’s it. This helps you stay on the pulse of Google Algorithm updates, a traffic hit or decline, etc.
Bottom line: It’s better that you concentrate on the execution of your strategy rather than the metrics. The latter is important, but you can keep up with that without obsessing over it.
Monopolizing Your Attention to Keyword Density
Worrying about where your keyword will be placed in the H1 tag, title tag or meta description or getting anxious about the number of times it would be included in the content, is utterly futile.
In fact that is exactly what may just steal the appeal of the content because when you write content, you must write it for the user, not the algorithm!
The search engines too want you to keep the user at the forefront of your thought process and ensure creation of quality content; in turn, it’ll rank you. So when you write a title, think about how it will appeal to your audience rather than the keyword. When the title holds appeal, it is automatically going to get more CTRs.
Fact is when you’re writing for instance, about Charter Communications internet services, keywords related to the subject such as Charter Communications, TWC Spectrum, Spectrum internet services, etc. are naturally going to show up in the content, and that too without taking away the spontaneous charm of the write-up.
On the other hand, deliberately trying to place keywords in the content will only give it an affected air, that may not necessarily engage the readers.
Building a Profusion of Backlinks
Working towards raising your site authority is well and good, but dedicating your energies on stretching that DA, number by number, is not going to help with your rankings.
There are a number of websites with DA in the 80s and 90s such as the Forbes, entrepreneur, Huffington Post, etc. but you’ll see these sites being outranked by small-time blogs that have DA as low as 20.
Why? Because these blogs are creating content that everyone wants to read, and the search engine takes notice of this ranking them higher than those high DA sites.
Going for Highly Competitive Keywords
These keywords may seem like a goldmine of traffic, but they actually don’t convert that traffic. What’s the use of all that traffic when the end goal is not being fulfilled? Go for keywords that can play a role in upping the conversion rate such as long-tail keywords; surely the traffic might stay low but you will be making the sales.
After all, when someone is searching for calorie intake, it doesn’t necessarily mean they will purchase your diet plan. Rather than quantity, choose quality-based keywords.
Focusing on Desktop
Your mobile site, its user interface, performance, and speed play a humongous role in determining its ranking. So crucial it’s that Google’s BERT update has come up with a mobile-first index.
Though users tend to spend more time on a desktop site, more than 50% of the searches are performed via mobile. If that doesn’t prompt you to pay attention to creating AMPs, you are losing out on a potentially huge volume of traffic and probable conversions.
As a concluding word, we will add there is no reason why you should follow every upcoming SEO trend without hashing out the logic of it and without giving thought to the probable effects of its implementation in any specific niche. Instead it would be highly wise to allow quality of content be the one benchmark around which your SEO strategy is constructed no matter what the nature of business.
