4 Things People Are Still Confused About With SEO

SEO is a technical field. Not many people understand it. As a result, many businesses fail to get it right.

You will be surprised to see how much misinformation is out there regarding SEO. With each passing day, SEO is becoming more and more important. Businesses hunt free organic traffic and potential customers everyday. And proper SEO helps businesses get it.

In this post, we identify 4 things that most people and online business owners fail to understand about SEO and get confused about.

Let’s clear some misconceptions.

1. Head vs. Long-Tail Keywords

Over the past few years — as the SEO world became more competitive — there has been a lot of discussion regarding head vs. long-tail keywords. Unfortunately, there are still so many people that fail to grasp this contest.

Size does matter — at least for keywords.

You may want to optimise a website for the term “shoes”, but the harsh reality is that you wont see any success doing that. It is just far too competitive. And unless you accept that fact, you can’t properly make your website search-engine friendly.

In an ideal world, you would have been able to rank for the keyword “shoes”, but now you can’t. A simple Google search for “shoes” bring results from popular websites and brands, such as Asos, New Look, Office and Debenhams.

Do you really think you have enough resources and SEO power to overtake those brands?

If not, then you need to tweak your strategy a bit and target long-tail keywords instead, e.g., “Red Running Shoes for Men”.

2. Total Number of Core Keywords

The more keywords you are ranking for, the better it is. It is true, without a single doubt. But, again, it is not always possible in the practical SEO world.

The fact is that you can still be successful if you are only targeting a few important core keywords. And that’s absolutely fine. As a matter of fact, we’d recommend you to start with that approach. It puts less pressure on you, your business, and gives you the best opportunity to create a good SEO foundation for your website.

Try to identify a few important keywords for which you also have a realistic chance to rank for, and then work hard to optimise your webpages for those keywords. Traffic will start rolling in, and with increased exposure, Google love, social media shares, you will be able to achieve more with other keywords as well.

3. Early Adoption

Search engines, like Google, are notorious for releasing technologies and search engine algorithms every now and then. It is up to the SEO experts to keep up with those changes.

Early adoption of such technologies give you a distinct advantage over your competitors. But so many business owners simply let these opportunities go to waste as they sit relaxed and do nothing.

For instance, Accelerate Mobile Pages (AMPs) is something that improves user-experience. Search engines love that. Similarly, migration from HTTP to HTTPs has also become an important search engine ranking factor. If you want to rank higher, you need to adopt these technologies as soon as they come.

4. The Essence of Content Marketing

“Content marketing is king”

You must have heard it, right?

Well, guess what. Everybody else has heard it, too. And that’s why the world of content marketing has become extremely competitive now.

And don’t forget that content marketing is very important and crucial for long-term SEO. You need a good combination of technical SEO and content marketing if you want to rank higher.

So what do you do?

The essence of content marketing in today’s digital marketing arena is to be the best there is. There are no other options.

Forget about quantity. Instead, focus on quality. When you pick a topic to create content for, always aim to write the best blog post there is on that topic. Brian Dean from Backlinko successfully used this strategy to generate over 150,000 unique visits with just 33 blog posts.

Final Words

Understanding SEO is important before you use it to rank higher, reel in traffic, and increase customers. More often than not, we make it more complicated than it has to be.

Hopefully, this blog post would have made some important things clearer for you regarding SEO.