3 SEO myths to leave behind
There are many misconceptions surrounding SEO, born from the fact that digital marketing is constantly evolving (even this is an understatement!), so it can be hard to keep track of what really works and what doesn’t. We’ve picked out 3 of the most prevalent and explained why there is another side to the story….
- ‘It’s all about ranking’
It is true that having a high ranking will ensure that people see your site but this does not guarantee that you will secure more click-throughs. For example, you could rank highly for a specific term, get lots of traffic and not manage to get any conversions when you rank well for the wrong keywords.
How to rank well for the right searches:
- Try to use keywords that are closely related to your business – this seems like an obvious piece of advice, but you would be surprised at how many businesses choose tenuous keywords that do not place them centre-stage enough.
- Meta descriptions should be inviting to the user – use compelling language.
- Featured snippets can gain more clicks than number one listings – ensure that your content is ranking on page 1 of Google and is well put together.
- ‘Having a HTTPS encrypted is not important for SEO’
Not true! Some URLs begin with http:// and others with https://”
The ‘S’ stands for ‘secure’ which will only appear if the website has a valid SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate installed which means that your connection to that particular website is encrypted and hackers cannot intercept any of your data.
In September 2016, Google announced that Chrome will flag up HTTP pages as potentially unsafe as part of a plan to mark all of these sites as non-secure– this will be implemented as of January 2017. What better time to update and encrypt your site?
- ‘Keywords are no longer important’
Google updates such as Penguin and Hummingbird stirred questions as to whether a business’s overall SEO strategy had to change because of keywords being replaced by concepts and topics. Another question was whether keyword targeting made sense anymore. Google, amongst other search engines, have changed the way a search is managed – we now have voice recognition and autocomplete search. BUT. This does not take significance away from the implementation and usage of keywords, as search remains a user-based experience. This means that keyword usage and dynamic population of metadata within search engines will still influence click through.
If you would like to know more about the services we offer here at Hooked On, please do not hesitate to contact us.
