As the saying goes, out with the old and in with the new.
In an emerging industry like content marketing, embracing this fully would mean turning one's back on proven SEO tactics and putting all of your eggs into the proverbial content basket. With rumors running rampant about the demise of SEO while others suggest that SEO simply boils down to site crawability and quality content, it might be tempting to buy into the hype and start reallocating those "eggs".
But myths, as we know, have historically been used to explain things that are confusing, complex and generally misunderstood. Mythology among both executives and practitioners of inbound and content marketing is no different. Here are five such SEO myths that deserve to be fact-checked and laid to rest.
Content by itself is a good start, but not nearly enough to drive significant traffic and leads from organic search. Your content must not only be relevant and helpful, but it must be so relevant and helpful people choose to pay attention to it and share it with their friends and colleagues.
Then there's distribution. If your target audience doesn't see your content, consume it and share it, it will drown in a vast sea of ignored blog posts, eBooks and social media updates.
Your content must be highly "crawlable" by the search engines and all of the on-page factors need to be optimized. Period. You want Google to pay attention to your content and elevate its visibility? You have to do the basics first.
SEO is highly complex. Google alone has more than 200 ranking factors, and the playing field is constantly changing with regular Penguin, Panda and Hummingbird algorithm updates, and who knows what's coming next. It's not just about keywords and rankings these days. You need to understand semantic search and buyer personas to fully optimize your search strategy.
Again, SEO is a highly complex discipline in itself and should not be treated as an also-ran in your online marketing strategy. As Rand Fishkin puts it so well: SEO is not a fire-and-forget process. It's ongoing, and you need to be constantly updating your website, content marketing and demand generation efforts to stay ahead of your competitors. It's tempting to assign SEO to your brand journalists, since they touch most of your content. Or maybe your web developers or marketing technologists should handle SEO since they handle your website page creation, CMS and nps marketing automation platforms. There are two problems with either approach.
First, SEO takes a lot of research and careful consideration to get it right, and it's constantly changing. How will writers and developers have time to do that well?
Second, it's complicated. You need real expertise to do SEO well and beat the competition.
Each company should have at least one expert overseeing the strategy and working with content and development teams to implement and update your SEO strategy. Bigger companies with large or multiple sites are going to need an SEO team to do things the right way. And don't forget about local and mobile search, each of which takes specialized knowledge and planning.
This isn't ture either, but you do have to be careful who you hire if in-house SEO isn't viable for your company. Do your homework before you hire an SEO company, or any other marketing agency for that matter. You want to avoid vendors that promise high rankings in a few months because, chances are, they are using blackhat tactics to get results. As a starter, review some of the more common blackhat tactics you want to avoid.
Don't just outsource SEO. You need to integrate whomever you hire into your online strategy by requiring they work with your content producers, developers and strategists on a regular basis in a highly collaborative environment. Otherwise, they may be working at cross purposes.
SEO has gotten a bad rap over the past few years because of the false promises by blackhat SEO companies, the ever-changing requirements of Google and other search engines and the mythology imposed by people who don't understand SEO. The bottom line is that SEO is still one of the top three drivers of traffic, leads and customers across nearly all industries. If you ignore it or treat it casually, you risk losing revenue, market share and business viability.
