4 SEO Strategies Every Business Must Avoid

Serina Fignole - August 23, 2017

Are you a marketer who relies heavily on SEO? Then this post is a MUST-read before preparing any future SEO strategies to help you avoid or eliminate tactics that were dead and buried years ago.

In no specific order, these are 4 SEO strategies you should not let anyone, even your inner voice, talk you into.

#1 Buying Keyword-Rich Domain Names

At one point, having keywords in your domain could aid a company in ranking well within search engines. Although, it was never the sole factor, marketers saw this strategy as way to make SEO magic and bought as many domains as possible.

If these sites were built out with a great deal of informative content, then the company would have stand-alone sites that could do well on their own and give the company the ability to cross promote its parent brand. However, this was usually not the case. Most companies would have thin duplicate content on these sites to simply drive traffic back to the main site. Today, thin, duplicate content can hurt a company’s chances of ranking well in search engines. Buying a few additional domains for specific marketing and branding purposes can be beneficial, but a smart strategy must be developed first.

 #2 Having a Large Number of Links to Your Site

Back in the day, having a large number of non-relevant links to a company’s website was a desired SEO strategy. However, that day is long gone. This strategy now will likely produce negative impacts on a company’s search engine rankings. With that being said, if your company has ever utilized this strategy you should consider performing an inbound link audit to double check this tactic has been eliminated completely.

#3 Optimizing Content for Keyword Density

To optimize your content for keyword density, in the early days, all a company had to do was make sure the keyword being targeted were mentioned “x” number of times, as it helped the search engines to understand what the main topic of the page was. Since this strategy was easy to understand and fairly easy to follow, it was abused by people writing ridiculously long, repetitive copy simply to increase the number of times the keyword was mentioned.

Search engines today are remarkably good at making connections between content and searcher intent, and looking at more than keywords, such as keyword themes and the context in which keywords appear. Therefore, you will see pages rank for keywords that don’t have the exact key phrase anywhere on the page.

We still recommend you include your target keyword phrase on the page, but rather than worrying only about reaching a specific keyword density, you should worry about site structure, how “on topic” a page’s content is, and how well that page is linked to other related pages.

 #4 Obsessing Over Keyword Rankings

Obsessing over keyword rankings and centering your digital marketing plan around it as if where your company’s site ranks is the only thing that matters is a pitfall some companies have fallen into. However, you still want to monitor the organic traffic the website is getting to the pages that align with your valuable keywords.

The overall point is to look at your company’s site and keywords in terms of topics or themes and ensure you have visibility for those by looking at how you rank for a collection of related keywords and how much organic traffic is coming to pages that relate to those topics.