Everyone wants to rank high on Google, and there’s plenty of SEO strategies to get you there. However, not all are equally good. While some strategies may seem like a sensible way to build your rankings, they could be doing more harm than good. Below are just 7 SEO strategies to avoid (and what you should be doing instead).

Stuffing pages full of keywords

There was a time when repeating a keyword as many times as possible on a webpage could make that page rank higher for that search term. However, the Google Panda update in 2011 and a Bing update in 2014, put a stop to this. Nowadays, if you repeat the same keyword too many times on a webpage without it coming across naturally, it can have a negative impact on your rankings on Google and Bing. In other words, you should avoid keyword stuffing at all costs!

Focusing solely on popular keywords

If you’ve just launched a plumbing company, you might assume that it’s best to focus on keywords like ‘emergency plumber’ and ‘plumbing service’ that most people are likely to search when looking for a plumber. However, it could take a lot of work to outrank the bigger and more established plumbing companies that have been targeting these keywords for years. While you shouldn’t ignore these popular keywords, you could find that it’s more effective to focus on more niche keywords where you have a better chance of outranking your big competitors. By hiring a Top Marketing Agency that focuses on plumbing, you can identify these niche keywords. There are also keyword tools that can help you identify the popularity of keywords. 

Churning out rushed content

Constantly creating new content is good for your rankings – but ultimately this content needs to be good quality. There’s so much more that search engine algorithms take into account such as spelling/grammar accuracy, content length and dwell time (how long people stay on a page). If you’re churning out short blog posts full of typos and readers are barely spending a few seconds reading them, it’s not going to do any good for your rankings. Instead, spend time creating posts that are 500 words or more and that are well-researched and carefully proof-read. Readers are more likely to engage with these posts. Ultimately, this will have a better impact on your rankings. 

Accepting any and all guest content

It’s important to keep creating new content, and accepting guest content can prevent you from having to create all this content yourself. However, it’s important that content is high quality and relevant to your website. If you run a landscaping company, all your blog content should ideally be related to landscaping. Accepting posts about carpet cleaning or dental services will make your website look messy. You should also make sure that guests are not sending you content that is poorly written, keyword stuffed or not detailed enough, as this could start to damage your rankings. 

Jumping on temporarily hot blog topics

If everyone is blogging about a certain topic, you may be tempted to get in on the action. And in many cases it can be worth jumping on these hot topics to show that you’re keeping abreast of current events. However, you should be wary of solely blogging about events and trends that are likely to come and go. It takes 2 to 6 months for content to rank in Google’s top 10. If your content does manage to rank in the top 10 for a particular keyword, you want to make sure that people are still regularly searching for that term. This is why it’s good to also cover evergreen topics that people are going to keep searching for. For example, if you run an interior design company, don’t just focus on posts like ‘living room trends to watch out for in 2022’ but also consider posts like ‘10 living room trends that are timeless’. 

Focusing solely on new content

While it’s important to keep creating new content to rank highly on search engines, you shouldn’t neglect your old content. In fact, it’s worth regularly revisiting old content and editing it slightly, as this can give this old content a boost. You should also revisit old content to make sure that there aren’t any dead links that could be harming your rankings, as well as removing information that may no longer be relevant. 

Doing it all yourself

Doing all your own SEO can save you money, but it’s likely it won’t get results. Most people don’t have the time or energy to keep creating content at a pace that will encourage top rankings. External backlinks are also necessary to build rankings, and this involves encouraging third party websites to create content linking back to you. There’s the whole technical side of SEO. All in all, it takes a team of people to create a successful SEO strategy – so know when to hire help. This will help to get you the rankings you deserve. 

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