Till Google survive, its army will be continuously commanded by SEO and there are no signs of Google to die in near future, so answer to all the most searched queries on SEO is resolved and it’s better to channelize the time and money on getting best out of SEO.
Change is inevitable so it’s wise to fit in the shoes of change, deleting the old SEO trends, sending them to recycle bin and then empty the recycle bin.
Here are the few SEO habits that you need to ditch to climb the ladder of digital marketing success.
1) Multiple websites- Nothing good, only bad
Adam and his innocence…
Let’s say Adam is an innocent business owner with an urge to generate high traffic to its website. To make his dream possible, he had spent lots of time and money to create several websites and owning multiple domains.
He owns a business of Car Wash and his main website is www.adamcarwash.com but he also has other geo-targeted websites like www.mumbaicarwash.com and www.carwashdelhi.com. Apart from this, he also owns many other domain names which redirect to his main website.
All of this is done to satisfy his hunger for online presence because of his understanding limits to the fact that ‘More the websites more will be the traffic.’
But he is unaware of the bitter truth that all these websites are preparing a deathbed for his online business.
How multiple websites is a deathbed for an online business?
Competition amongst each other- It’s never a good idea to have multiple websites as they will fight with each other to rank higher in the search engine results pages and when two elephants fight, the damage is only to the grass (online business).
Building links through multiple websites were the ways of the past, now the clicks get distributed amongst sites and hence ranking drops, so it’s better to come up with a unique, attractive and consolidated content into a single, user-friendly website.
2) Not switching to mobile-friendly sites
With the increase in the use of mobile devices and decrease in the attention span and patience level of a human, there are higher chances that you miss an opportunity to grab targeted customers with sites that do not respond on mobile devices.
According to SimilarWeb’s State of Mobile Web US 2015 report, approximately 56 percent of consumer traffic to the leading US websites is generated from mobile devices. With more and more traffic generated from mobiles, it is high time for businesses to optimize their website for mobiles.
Google’s recent update…
Google keeps on updating its rules of ranking a page and as per them mobile conversion rates are lower than desktop, so Google came up with a recent announcement that knocks the door of every online business to optimize their mobile websites as soon as possible to rank higher on the search engine result page.
In their recent update, Google announced that ‘Page Speed’ will be a pillar in mobile search ranking, so in this race against time, make sure you run faster than your competitors to sit on the highest throne.
3) Buying Links- Buying is not always profitable
Give and take is a concept which does not fit well in the dictionary of Google when it comes to digital marketing. Exchanging links with other websites for the sake of a backlink or paying for a link will land you in a train of Google which will drop you to the station of penalty.
For instance, you own a vehicle wrapping website and links to a clothing website with an intention to get a backlink from that website. But this strategy will land you nowhere as you have created a worthless link with zero SEO value and moreover you will become a victim of Google penalty.
What should be a wise strategy?
Instead of buying your backlinks or creating worthless links, focus on creating a quality content and links that will benefit users and automatically your online presence will increase.
Google has come up with many updates and announcements in past to avoid buying or exchanging links and instead a unique content has been given top priority for everyone to market their business.
Even Google Trends reveals that it’s time to earn the links and not build the links.
4) Excessive short-tail keywords
Short-tail keywords still hold a strong position in this marketing world but the relevance of long-tail keywords has got stronger with passing time and now 70% of all the web searches include long-tail keywords.
Moreover, with emerging trend of voice searches (Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, and Cortana), the position of long-tail keywords in Google algorithm has got stronger. Even in their latest 2017 Hummingbird update, Google has given an edge to contextual search and long-tail keywords provide context to the content.
A voice-based search query, unlike keyboard based search query, is like a natural conversation between two people, requiring longer keywords. To justify this fact, Google reported that 70 percent of the queries that Google Assistant receives consist of natural language.
5) Keyword Stuffing- Stuff a content with relevance instead of excessive keywords
If you can’t be creative, don’t be an over-smart too because Google is smart enough to detect your over-smartness, eventually which will stigmatize your business online.
Keyword density used to be defined as the ratio of a number of times a keyword was used to other words on the page.
With simple mathematics, you used to get a magical number that was your target. Unfortunately, this was never a scenario to hit the top position in Google search result; instead, it was just faking the Google algorithm to gain higher results. But Google has updated its algorithm and has got strict than ever before.
However, apart from being ignored by Google, Keyword Stuffing also increases the bounce rate for your business because of which you will unable to drive engagement, thereby losing targeted customers.
What should be the best strategy?
Just sit, relax and ask yourself a question, whether the placement of keyword reads naturally? Always make sure that keyword is not stuffed and is usable.
Use keywords in more smarter and focused way with a motive to come up with an engaging content that will inspire visitors to turn into your customers.
“Good SEO work only gets better over time. It’s only search engine tricks that need to keep changing when the ranking algorithms change.” – Jill Whalen
So, always be open to change and be smart enough to incessantly changing your SEO habits as per the demand of Google.