5 dead SEO strategies

SEO as a whole hasn’t died, but a lot of tactics have. Stick with outdated strategies and the only thing you’ll be seeing are low rankings and potential penalties in your future. We look at a few of the most commonly used, yet outdated, tactics in existence today.

1. Going all-in on link building

Link building is still incredibly important and remains one of Google’s top ranking factors. It used to be true that all you had to do was build as many links as possible to your site and you’d start ranking highly.

But, this is no longer the case. The quality and relevance of your links matter far more than sheer quantity, and thus, spamming your links all over random digital directories no longer has the desired impact.

The takeaway: Find a few authority websites to outreach and make some sort of a deal with them – whether it’d be a guest post or a link round-up. These authority websites tend to get syndicated by “smaller” websites, and thus you’re killing a flock of birds with one stone.

Dead SEO Strategies: Going all out on link building

2. Obsessing over the number one spot

So many websites focus all of their energy on obtaining the number one spot on Google. Yet, ranking number one doesn’t have the strong correlation of increased website traffic it used to have.

Today’s search results are populated with ads, featured snippets, and question boxes. So, ranking number one still means your site might be buried. As a result, modern web surfers understand that they need to scroll a little to get to the organic stuff. With that in mind, instead of obsessing over the number one spot, your focus should be on maximizing your click-through rate.

Your click-through rate can be optimized via a compelling meta description and enticing headlines. If there’s a featured snippet box ranking above you try to improve the structure of your content and directly answer the question posed in the search term; this will increase the likelihood of your content being chosen for the featured snippet box.

The takeaway: Test out different headlines and meta descriptions to use using Facebook ads or Google AdWords.

3. Over-optimizing for your focus keyword

It used to be incredibly important to fully optimize your post or page for the keyword you’re trying to rank for. But as the search engines grow more sophisticated, they have more effective means to determine what your page is about.

Instead of stuffing your opening paragraph (or indeed, your entire article) with a certain keyword — which can hamper user experience with awkwardly phrased headlines and sentences — it’s more important to optimize your content for readability, user experience, and solving the user queries.

Google’s goal is to understand the intent behind the keywords, not simply matching the actual keywords themselves. Posts that will rank in the future will provide the highest quality answers and user experience, not the posts that most expertly optimize for a given keyword. After all, if the content is good, those keywords will flow naturally.

The takeaway: Stop obsessing over keywords – cover the topics in general – and answer the user queries. Your content should be the last content they visit to solve their problems. Don’t sacrifice the whole topics, and the quality of the article just because you’re after high-volume keywords.

4. Creating a vast number of pages and posts

Ah, the good old “the bigger your website is, the better” myth.

It sounds plausible at first, after all, the more you have the better, right? But in reality, Google doesn’t rank website, it ranks individual web pages based on the merits of that one page in relation to the search query or keyword.

So, your focus should be on creating high-quality content that actually helps your visitors, and that often involved diving deep into a topic on one page.

Also, it’s worth noting that your posts can rank for more than a single keyword. In some cases, your lengthy and valuable content can rank for hundreds and thousands of different keywords. So, there’s no need to make a new page or post for the sake of targeting one keyword.

Ahrefs SEO case study

Finally, by focusing on providing valuable content to your readers on one page, you’ll improve important on-page metrics like increasing your time on site and reducing bounce rate. That doesn’t mean your whole website should be on one page, but you don’t need to segment your site into a thousand pieces, either.

5. Focusing on search engines over people

User experience used to come a far second to optimizing your content and website for the search engines. But, as Google has had the time and energy to invest in their search algorithm, the search results now tend to the populated with sites that place a focus on user experience.

The goal of Google is to provide their users (people searching for things) with the most valuable and relevant results possible. This means that your site can benefit greatly by focusing on improving the experience a user has on your site.

Certain user experience indicators you’ll want to improve are the time a person spends on the page, the number of pages they view when accessing your site, and how far they scroll down your page before leaving the site.

The takeaway: I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again, your article should answer the user’s queries and it needs to be better than what’s already out there. Also, check how your site looks like on different devices. Ask yourself, is the font too small? What about the line-height? Is it responsive on IE?