Most myths are harmless. Gum takes seven years to digest. River water never comes back. Lightning never strikes the same place twice. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for most SEO myths. Most of them are the worst, which lead you to waste precious time, money and resources on things that will never improve SEO. Let’s see some of the famous SEO myths and misconceptions;

01. SEO is scam

Many business owners who don’t have any knowledge or idea on SEO are approached by marketing companies and promise top rankings on search engines like Google. Business owners pay a considerable amount of money expecting that they will be able to rank their website among the top Google search results within a couple of days. But it is not going to happen like that. SEO is not a short term technique. You can’t guarantee that the results will be achieved in this much amount of time. It might take months or even a year.

So people try to achieve results within a couple of days and when they can’t they think that this is a scam. And they don’t stop from there, they share their opinion with a lot of other people and this becomes a common misconception. Therefore, it is very important to educate your client properly on the process and the time frame, without overpromising. Most marketing companies ignore this part and think only about pitching to the client and bringing them onboard.

02. SEO is a  one time thing

Yes, SEO is not something that you have to be hands on 24/7. According to ahrefs it is like going to the gym. It’s okay to miss a workout occasionally. But if you continuously stay at home eating junk food, things soon start to fall apart.

There are so many things that you have to do continuously to maintain your SEO efforts like link building, updating existing content on your website and fixing crawler errors. If you think that all your work is done just after the initial SEO set-up and neglect these, your rankings will soon decline, ultimately resulting in a drop of organic search traffic. This can happen due to many reasons such as competitors overtaking you, you losing backlinks and outdated content on your website.

03. Results occur overnight

People think that SEO will show results overnight. Yes, this is true for many digital marketing techniques like PPC and social media advertising. But this is not the case for SEO. SEO takes months and sometimes even upto a year to measurable results. There are many reasons for this such as competition and the process of accumulation. Therefore, if you expect quick results, you will only be disappointed. You have to be patient until results are achieved.

04. A Good Website = Good SEO

Another common misconception about SEO is that it is all about the website. Yes, your website is a big part of it. You have to make sure you have an optimized website with keyword rich title tags, meta tags, content and other SEO features, mobile-friendly, a high loading speed etc. Your website should be properly structured and user friendly. But this is not all. There are other things outside of your website that you have to do to achieve positive SEO results.

Link building is one of the main off-site SEO activities that will positively impact your search engine rankings. Directory submissions, social signals, local citations, local SEO are some of the other off-site activities that impact SEO.

05. Keyword research is not important

Many people say that you just have to add relevant keywords to your website and don’t have to conduct keyword research. This is a misconception. Just because a certain keyword is relevant to your business, the product or service you offer, it doesn’t guarantee that there is potential to rank using that keyword. You need data to select a keyword. That’s why keyword research is important. To be precise, this is the foundation of a strong SEO strategy. If you select a keyword with a very high competition or a very low search volume, the chances of you getting ranked on search engines is pretty low. You must conduct a comprehensive keyword research before selecting keywords for your website.

06. The more you use your keyword, the better it will rank

This is another very common misconception about SEO. People try to add as many keywords as possible to their web pages expecting this will bring better SEO results. But not many people know that this will negatively impact your rankings. This is known as keyword stuffing and Google considers this as a black-hat SEO technique. Your website may even get penalized by Google for this. Therefore, make sure you don’t unnecessarily add keywords to your content.

07. SEO is all about buying links

This is a very dangerous SEO misconception. People think if you buy a lot of backlinks to your website, your website will quickly rank top on search engines. There are many sources that will promise you backlinks in bulk. But you have little to no control over where the backlinks are placed. This is not a recommended SEO technique and just a way of cheating or misleading Google and other search engines. But not many people know that Google Webmaster Guidelines have strongly recommended not to do this. Your website will get penalized if you get caught and such a penalty will kill your Google rankings.

08. Title tag and meta description don’t matter

Your title tag and meta description are the two main elements that are seen by your audience in the search results. One of the most common SEO myths is that they don’t impact SEO and therefore you don’t need to optimize them. These two are among the main elements that influence your search engine rankings.

Google identifies the keyword to rank for, relevancy of the content mainly using meta tag which comprises the title tag and meta description.If you don’t optimize these elements, Google may not know the keyword to rank for. And also the only objective of SEO is not search rankings, but also organic visitors to your website. Your audience may not know if your page is relevant to their search query, if you haven’t optimized the meta tag

Conclusion

There are a lot of misconceptions floating around out there regarding SEO. It is always changing and keeping up with those changes can be really challenging. I hope after reading this article you got a clear understanding of these myths and misconceptions and will be careful next time when you come across them. If you need any help with your SEO strategy and ranking your website among the top Google rankings, our team at DigiFix is more than happy to help you.