SEO Myths & Misconceptions

MICHAEL:
Hi guys, Michael here. Do you want a second opinion on your SEO? Head to theseoshow.co and hit the link in the header. We'll take a look under the hood at your SEO, your competitors and your market and tell you how you can improve. All right, let's get into the show.

INTRO: It's time for the SEO show, where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now, here's your hosts, Michael and Arthur.

ARTHUR: Hey everybody, welcome to the SEO show. I'm Arthur and I'm here with Michael. And today we're going to talk about some SEO myths and misconceptions. How are you doing today, Michael?

MICHAEL: I'm doing very well. It feels really weird not to be the one asking that question. I'm like all discombobulated.

ARTHUR: It feels really weird being the one asking the question.

MICHAEL: You absolutely nailed it. I think our listeners will all be writing in to say what a great job you've done there. All 13 of them. According to the stats, there was actually 14. I don't know. Actually, I don't know how many really listen. But anyway, well done. Well done. Thank you. And it's an exciting topic, isn't it?

ARTHUR: Yeah, it's an interesting topic because there are a lot of myths and misconceptions around SEO. Um, so I guess we can just start off with the list that we've compiled.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And this is just based on stuff that we've heard, you know, throughout the years from people, um, on the sidelines of people in the industry or clients or blog prospects, blogs. Yeah. So stuff that gets bandied about, but may not necessarily be true.

ARTHUR: So the main one, the main one, the one that I see pop up every year.

MICHAEL: Every month it feels like there's a different article on SEO being dead.

ARTHUR: SEO is officially dead.

MICHAEL: Here's why SEO is dead. SEO is dead in 2018. Here's what you need to do instead. So on and so forth.

ARTHUR: It's not true though. No, definitely not true. I mean, I've been seeing that headline since I started doing SEO in 2013. So, you know, eight, nine years later.

MICHAEL: Yeah, pretty much every year, someone will write an article about how SEO is dead or it's dying soon or there's some other thing you've got to focus on instead. But every year, SEO keeps generating, you know, the bulk of the traffic that we see for our client sites, right?

ARTHUR: Yeah. Why do you think those articles keep coming out every year?

MICHAEL: There's a range of reasons. I would say first and foremost, a lot of these websites just need content so they'll churn junk out. Probably attracts a lot of attention if they can frame it in a way that is a bit different to every other SEO is dead article. That's it. Just clickbait really, isn't it? Yeah, pretty much clickbait. And SEO gets harder every year, I would say, in some ways. So maybe people that are having a tough time with it or maybe lost a site in an algorithm update or something like that are sort of a bit bitter and saying SEO is dead because of their own personal experience rather than looking at the fact that websites are getting a lot of traffic from Google via organic SEO. So, look, Google do change things, you know, they are stealing organic presence from the search results pages to give Google Ads a lot more visibility or their own properties or sort of, you know, features that, you know, people also ask or, you know, knowledge graph, that sort of stuff, a lot more presence in the search results, which pushes SEO results down and they are squeezing things. Definitely, that's true, but traditional SEO definitely does live, right?

ARTHUR: Exactly. Look, Google is a search engine and as long as it's returning organic results, then SEO lives and SEO is, you know, super important. Like we, we've got a client that we work with now who has switched off his Google ads just because his SEO has gotten to the point where he's selling out of his product and doesn't need to run ads anymore. So, you know, if SEO is dead, obviously he wouldn't be selling anything.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Keep that under wraps if you don't want Google discovering who that is. That is their worst nightmare right there, you know, people's SEO doing really well and people not spending money on Google Ads. So that's why they change things. So it is that cat and mouse game in a way, you know, tactics will work, SEO sort of does really well and then maybe Google will change something and someone will say, oh, SEO is dead, you know, you should be focusing on TikTok or something like that. But really for the last decade, SEO has consistently been an amazing acquisition channel for the clients we work with, for our own business, for websites we run. That's not going to change anytime soon.

ARTHUR: No, I guess a more accurate headline would be SEO evolves. Like everything in life, SEO involves. SEO has changed. Not as exciting. It has changed. And look, the stuff we used to do, you know, eight years ago wouldn't fly anymore. You know, you'd probably get your penalized or like wiped out from the SERPs. But at its core, it's still the same thing. You know, you're hitting the three pillars. You're doing your authority, your content, your technical. You know, if you're doing those things right, if you're doing them right eight years ago, if you're doing them right today, they still work and you'll still see the results. So SEO is well and truly alive in my eyes.

MICHAEL: So SEO is dead, long live SEO. Yeah, it's definitely not dead. So that's the number one myth you see bandied about, just ignore it. Don't focus on TikTok if you're a litigation, commercial litigation lawyer, because your audience isn't there, but chances are they are searching Google and SEO is going to work well for you. Um, what else? So another one we hear is, you know, SEO being this once and done type thing, you know, um, clients, not even clients, but like people might think that, you know, I'm just going to do my SEO in the, you know, one month and then I'll be at the top of Google and get all my traffic. And, um, that'll be great for the next, you know, five years I've done my SEO, but it doesn't really work that way, unfortunately.

ARTHUR: No, it's mainly down to the fact that I don't understand how it works. They feel that they're paying this lump sum of money and they should be getting something, I guess, getting something straight away. Not realizing that it's a long-term strategy that can take months or years depending on the niche that you're in.

MICHAEL: Yeah. It's just not once and done, Mike. No. In any industry, because industries, like what we just spoke about before, right, Google's constantly evolving, changing their algorithms, changing what works, favoring certain factors and discounting other factors and then maybe tweaking that. So if you just, sort of build a site and let it gather dust or cobwebs, so to speak, then Google's going to move on and leave you behind. So yeah, it's never once and done. It is a, it's a, I guess a living, breathing beast in a way. It's not dead. It's a living, breathing beast. There you go. That's the headline.

ARTHUR: Okay. It doesn't help that there's people out there that will be calling up, you know, website owners and telling them they have SEO booster packages for $300 that will get them to position one. So yeah, there's people out there that will have those or make these promises that they obviously can't keep.

MICHAEL: Yeah. I guess on a similar topic, another one that we hear a bit is, you know, I need you to build me an SEO website. Like I need my website SEO'd, you know, so maybe they having a site built and they want SEO done in inverted commas from the start before they actually look at running like a link building campaign or something like that. And look, most of the time, if you're choosing a platform like WordPress, A lot of your SEO considerations can be handled easily. You know, you could even have your site built and then after the fact, a lot of the SEO stuff can be added in. Like, that's not ideal. Obviously, you do want to think about SEO when you're building a site but don't get caught up in the belief that you need to have this sort of war and peace SEO plan in place before you even launch a website because… Yeah. It can just be done via plugins and extensions and after the fact if you need to. And what you really should be focusing on when you're building a website is the conversion rate. What's your copywriting like? Is it really benefit driven? And do you have a good value proposition? And are the call to actions clear? And is your conversion funnel really nice? And is the user experience nice? That's the stuff you should be caring about. Yeah.

ARTHUR: Look, there's nothing wrong with building an SEO friendly website. Like we've done it in the past where, you know, you have optimized page titles, you know, you get the basics right when you launch it, but you can't expect to launch a website from scratch and have it rank, you know, on page one straight away. So.

MICHAEL: Yeah, so where I'm coming from is more people will put off building out, you know, link like they might put off doing a link building campaign, they might put off creating like blog content or even content for their site because they're planning on changing their site and they want to get all of the SEO perfect before they do that. And it's just sort of a bit… I guess it's helpful because SEO takes time and if you're just delaying things, you're just delaying how long it takes before it actually starts working for you. So don't get caught up in that. Like with most things, it's better to sort of ship or build and iterate than it is to sit there planning and sitting on it for ages and trying to perfect every last little thing because SEO, right? You are never going to write the perfect title tag and the perfect copy the first time. I beg to differ. 100% of the time. You beg to differ. I would. Would you? Wow. Gee, you must be much better at SEO than I realize. Because SEO is testing though. It's trial and error in a lot of ways. Like sure, we know the things that work most of the time, but there is a lot of trial and error. You put up a title tag, Listen, pipes versus dashes, right? We had this discussion recently on the team. And what if putting a dash in place of a pipe is some magic skyrocketing element to your SEO? And you started off with whichever one I said was wrong there at the start. You started off with a dash. And you've gone and put a pipe there and your rankings have improved. That's SEO, it's testing things. I'm not making much sense here.

ARTHUR: No, you are. You are making sense. You are. It is true. And going back to the pipes versus dashes, that's a very interesting topic as well. But we can talk about that another day.

MICHAEL: Well, tell me, where do you stand on pipes versus dashes?

ARTHUR: Well, I've always done pipes just because that's how I was basically taught. Sorry, yeah, dashes. I'm getting a little too confused now. Yeah, so I've always done dashes just because my mentor did dashes when I was working back at DGM. We always did dashes and they've worked, you know, all this time. But then, you know, I started reading up and had people kind of critique. that we weren't using dashes, sorry, we weren't using pipes, we were using dashes. And then I started testing that and saw some weird changes in rankings and started questioning myself and my existence and everything.

MICHAEL: You're having an existential meltdown.

ARTHUR: Look, I personally believe there's no difference between a pipe and a dash.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Well, the only difference is the pixels. Like that's true. But like Google are totally rewriting title tags now. Yeah. I've noticed that. So like worrying too much about the number of pixels in your title tag. Meh.

ARTHUR: They said that the pipe separates the entities. So it helps Google understand that the keywords better whether or not that's true, you know, inconclusive at the moment. So. Some will say it is, some will say it isn't.

MICHAEL: This is coming back to the point, I guess, that originally started this. We went a bit off topic there. No, but it's like if you're building the perfect SEO website from the ground up and you've made the cardinal sin of using pipes instead of dashes or dashes instead of pipes, pipes instead of dashes, right? then you want to test something new in the future, that's SEO. It is a bit of trial and error. So it's always better to ship things, get them live. And with the website, focus on your users and conversion rates, call to actions, design, look and feel. SEO features, you know, of course you want the copy on the page, you want an H1 tag, all that sort of good stuff. But outside of that, you're not going to come up with like this glorious master planned, you know, SEO friendly website. For most cases. Definitely agree. Another one that we hear a bit is, you know, while we're on the topic of testing, you know, when an algorithm update happens, people, like let's say from a client's perspective, their website takes a little bit of a hit after an algorithm update. They might say, you're an SEO, how do you fix it? You should know how to fix this. It's sort of what you do, like in the day after an algorithm update happens. And really, anyone that claims to know how to fix a drop in traffic instantly after a big update doesn't because they haven't had time to test and trial and error, look at other websites, look at your site, read articles and guides and jump in different online communities and forums and get a feel for what's going on and understand what's going on with the algorithm update. Exactly. It takes time, doesn't it?

ARTHUR: It takes time. Look, sometimes Google will let you know what the updates are about. Mobile first, you know, Penguin, Panda, whatever they're focusing on, you can kind of drill down to what the problem is on the site. But if it's just a broad core algorithm update, you know, it takes weeks, months, sometimes even longer for people to kind of the community, the SEO community to get out there and start figuring out what that update was targeting, basically.

MICHAEL: So there's one just recently, a link-based one that's been released, where you know, the search results were in a state of upheaval, you know, right after that was released. But sometimes the best course of action is, well, a lot of the time the best course of action is not even changing anything at first. Nothing, yeah. sit on it and just see how the dust settles because sometimes, yeah, you'll plummet and then a week later you bounce back up and it doesn't, unfortunately, like with it, like the old joke in the SEO world, it depends, in inverted commas, is the answer to everything. With algorithm updates, you know, the answer does depend. It depends on all sorts of different factors and it does take time to figure these things out.

ARTHUR: Exactly. And the rollout of an update can take weeks. So, you know, even after the updates rolled out, it can still take weeks for Google to reassess all the pages, everything. So, making wholesale changes on the website without letting the dust settle is a horrible idea. And we've seen that done in the past. We've also seen websites where we've had people panic, you know, I've dropped from position one to position five. Quick, I need help. I need something to change. Whereas, you know, you give them a month or two and they're back in position one without any changes in the site. If we had gone and changed the copy on the page, the page titles, you know, if we started disavowing links, you know, he might've plummeted even further. So.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And think about how much effort goes into acquiring links to begin with and expense. And then you go disavowing them all like in a panic. And then it turns out they weren't even doing anything, you know, bad. And you've lost those links and then you have to like maybe undisavow them. And you know, it's better to sit tight for a little bit after an update like that. Yeah. Definitely. On the topic of links, here's another one. Link building doesn't work. We don't do link building. You know, that's another myth in the SEO world. You know, you know.

ARTHUR: Well, I've worked at agencies where they flat out refuse to do any link building. And I've worked obviously at other agencies which involve a lot of link building. And I guess it comes down to, I guess, the clients that you're working with. So, you know, the agency I used to work at previously, we worked with big global clients that would acquire links nationally. So, you know, there was no need to go out there and kind of do it yourself. But when you're working with, you know, smaller clients where they have no backlink history at all, there's no way you can compete with, you know, competitors that have been doing SEO for years or might not even have been doing SEO for years, but have just accumulated links over the years naturally. Yeah. So link building is definitely very important when it comes to SEO.

MICHAEL: Yeah, and if you read any sort of data-driven study by like the brand deans of the world or Ahrefs and the like, time and time again they just show that links do have a very strong impact on rankings. They directly correlate with better rankings, you know, strong links. If you are investing in SEO maybe with an external party looking after it for you and they don't do link building or they sort of say, you know, look, we'll just make a good site and you'll get the links naturally, because that's the other thing. Most sites, like you said before, big brands will probably get it as a result of you know, huge brand building advertising campaigns that they do and publicity, you know, PR campaigns and the like, they'll pick up links naturally. But a little plumbing website in Perth are not going to be picking up links naturally just because they built a good site or written some good content.

ARTHUR: No way. No.

MICHAEL: So, that is a bit of a myth too, that whole, you build a good site and they will come, the links will come. That doesn't really work in the real world. You got to be promoting your site, you got to be trying to hustle and hunt down those links.

ARTHUR: But that's still link building, isn't it?

MICHAEL: Exactly. Yeah. So link building does work and you need to put effort into doing it. It doesn't just sort of fall out of the sky. You know, those, those links, they might on occasion, but not, not in any way that you can set your watch to and count on reliable growth in your, you know, traffic and revenue and leads and all the stuff that you really want from SEO. All right. Well, what else? Well, maybe let's talk about while we're on the topic of links, quantity over quality, right?

ARTHUR: Yeah, so quality over quantity. So a lot of people don't realize that not every link is built equal. Some links will help move the needles, others won't. And there's a lot of people out there that kind of measure success based on the quantity of links that you build them. So being a transparent agency, every month in our monthly report, we'll report on all the backlinks that we will build a client. Sometimes a client might have two links. Sometimes they might have 10. It depends. It depends. It varies on the client. It varies on the, on the spend and the types of links that we're building. But a lot of people will have this expectation that they should receive, you know, X amount of links per month, not caring where they come from, not caring whether or not they'll actually even work. It's just having that kind of tangible thing they can measure in the report. Agree.

MICHAEL: Yeah, look, I do. I guess I understand that because if you look at what goes into assessing a quality link and all the metrics we look at and research and analysis of the website we do and all the sort of time it's taken, I guess, to develop the skills to do that. Someone that's paying an agency to do that on their behalf doesn't have all that. It's like when you get a house built or something and the builder says to you, you need a drop edge beam here. I'm like, what the hell is a drop edge beam?

ARTHUR: No idea what that is.

MICHAEL: Yeah. But if they're like, you get four drop edge beams with this package, I'll be like, mad, awesome. So it's kind of the same with link building in a way. If it's been framed that way by the agency where they're like quantity over quality, we're going to build you all these links, look how many you get and that's sort of what their expectation has been, like steered towards, I understand. But you know, if you were working with an agency and they were getting you 15 links a month and your traffic went backwards and your site got hurt and you left them, you know, perhaps Then if another agency is saying, look, well, it's not about quantity, it's about the quality and we might only get you five, but they're going to move the needle. Yeah. Then maybe, you know, there's a reason you're not with that old agency and you've moved on. So maybe you want to, I guess, give what they are saying a go and not hold on to that quantity over quality type approach.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Look, I totally, I understand it as well, but. It's, I guess it comes back to educating the client on what a link is, why, why it's important and what makes a good link. And then hopefully they'll understand that, you know. it's better to get two or three really strong relevant links than, you know, 20 garbage links that will probably get them penalized or won't do anything.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So it's all about expectation setting as we always talk about at the start. And then I guess also, you know, the results overall, like if, if they're getting a lot more traffic and sales or leads, they're not necessarily going to care.

ARTHUR: You know, they might care about the volume of links at the start, but you'll be surprised that there are, there are people out there that do care about those things as well. So, You can, you know, 10X their results, but they'll still, you know, run a fine tooth comb over the report and say, oh, you know, why is there one less link this month over last month? And people are like that, you know, it's just, I guess some people are just like that. You can't do anything about it.

MICHAEL: I guess that's tangible and measurable and they're paying for it.

ARTHUR: So there's revenue and traffic.

MICHAEL: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I haven't had that much experience with people being obsessed with the volume of links when if their results are really good on traffic and revenue and the like. I have. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, well, look, I guess the point we're making is although there are people out there like that, it's not necessarily the best thing to focus on with SEO. Maybe the next point to make on this one would be around all SEO is the same. Because if you're wanting 15 links a month because one agency got it and that's what you're judging an agency on, you probably think that all SEO is the same. But not all SEO is the same. It's a bit like landscaping, you know, anyone can say they're a landscaper and just start digging, you know, just turn up to a house and start clearing your block or leveling it off and do a terrible job because they don't know what they're doing. So you do get what you pay for, you know. Are you working with someone that is a fresh landscaper that doesn't know what they're doing? Are you working with someone that has got some sort of formal training and been in the industry for a long time and a track record of really good work behind them? Yeah, definitely. You do need to look into the differences between your options and see that not all SEOs are the same.

ARTHUR: No, and that's because not all websites are the same. So trying to rank a large e-commerce website versus trying to rank a smaller lead generation website is completely different. Requires a completely different skill set, you know, one can be a lot more technical, the other one can be a lot more content focused.

MICHAEL: So, yeah. Some industries you might just be doing link building, others you, yeah, you, they might already have a really strong link profile, but terrible internal content issues. Internal linking or technical. And that comes back, I guess, to package packages, you know, like some agencies, they sell packages, they're going to shoehorn you into one of them. But really, it should be bespoke. should be targeted and tailored to your goals and your business and where your business is positioned as opposed to the competition. Definitely. And I guess, you know, if you look at SEO as a cost rather than an investment in growing your business, the temptation is always going to be to go for cheap SEO and consider all SEO the same, you know, like, well, you're quoting us three grand a month for this, but these guys are doing it for 750 on their, you know, their bronze package. It's like hunting.

ARTHUR: It's like hunting for car insurance.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Yep. So it's not even that, like what would be, it would be like, you know, like buying a car. No, wait, I'm trying to say here.

ARTHUR: I think it is like hunting for car insurance. Cause a lot of the people won't look at the fine print. They'll just go with the lowest price.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Okay. Good point. Yeah. And then they discover that they don't have windscreen protection. Exactly. They get angry and blame the insurance company. Yeah. When really they didn't, you know, look at the different options available. Yeah. Kind of along those lines. I like that one. It's a new one to the bank. You can use that one. Okay. Thank you. What else was a good one? Do you have another myth that you are fond of that you want to cover off here?

ARTHUR: Another myth. What about the Mayanese friend or cousin read about and they can handle it? Oh yeah. That's an interesting one, having someone that thinks that they can handle their SEO for you.

MICHAEL: Yeah, sort of along the line of the point we just made in a way, like with the, you know, it's like me, I do a bit of landscaping in my backyard, I'm going to go start, I did a bit of landscaping, read an article about it, so I can come do it at your house, but it's probably not going to look that good.

ARTHUR: No. You've done a fair bit of landscaping though, so I'd trust you with that.

MICHAEL: Oh jeez, if it's just mowing the lawn, sure. But look, like the temptation can be to give your SEA to someone that you know that's good with computers, in inverted commas, you know, and they're never going to get the same results as someone that specializes it. No. And there's a bit of an old story that I've heard a bit with tradies where, you know, let's say you've got some problem in your house and you can't fix it and you're stressing out, it needs to be fixed. You call a tradie to come and do it and they turn up, look at the job, hit a couple of nails and then charge you for it. And you're like, well, what the hell? That was really easy. But it's the tradies knowledge and experience and training that has gone into them knowing which nails to hit and why they need to hit them that you're actually paying for and the outcome, right? Not how long it takes them or sort of how easy it was for them seemingly. So people that have read one or two articles on SEO and are maybe good with computers or using Netflix or something. They don't necessarily have the knowledge to look at your website and really understand where it's at and look at your competition, figure out your goals, work backwards from your goals and come up with like, you know, a plan to deliver on them and you're just going to waste time and probably, you know, work on it for a year and then probably have to go and engage a proper agency to look after it for you.

ARTHUR: I like the analogy that we're like mechanics, but for your website, because when you go and get a car serviced or when you're going to get a timing chain or timing belt replaced in a car, the actual timing belt costs nothing. It's a couple of hundred bucks, but to get that timing chain replaced can cost thousands because you're paying for the mechanic's time, his expertise, the years of knowledge that he has. And a lot of people don't realize like that applies to SEO, you know, we've been doing this for a long time. We know what works, you're paying for that, you know, the years of our knowledge, the years of the results that we've gotten for our clients, not necessarily the, you know, the three backlinks that we've built.

MICHAEL: And ultimately the outcome. Yeah. The outcome is the most important thing. Like if you are getting the goals that you were looking for and you know, the sales and the leads and the like, then you probably shouldn't care what the SEO is up to or you know, what's gone into it.

ARTHUR: Cool. All right, moving on. Another thing that I come across a fair bit is people wanting blog content ASAP or straight away. So having a content strategy and I guess a content calendar is great. It's a great way to drive additional traffic to your website. Agree? I do agree. I do agree. But a lot of the time people will obsess over writing blog posts and kind of neglect getting their main site ranking. So, I guess, for example, if you're a plumber, you want to rank for some keywords that are going to drive relevant traffic to your site that are going to convert into leads. But you could write blog posts that are relevant to your business, but they might not convert. I guess kind of steering away and focusing too much on the blog and maybe focusing about getting your site ranking before you kind of focus on having that content calendar there. Having it ready, having it set is great, but making it your main priority and using it as one of the, like going back to the link building example, you know, I want four blog posts per month. What difference does it make if it's not driving leads or traffic to the site? Would you rather have four times the traffic to the site or would you rather have four blog posts posted? Exactly.

MICHAEL: And it's funny because you can get better results with your SEO from actually pruning content from your site. So if you have all these blog posts on your site that don't get any traffic, And then you get rid of them and sort of clean it all up and maybe merge posts together or something like that. It can often improve your SEO traffic. So it's not just a matter of blasting out blog posts on random keywords.

ARTHUR: The worst thing as well is just writing, writing blogs for the sake of writing blogs. Like you go, you can go in some of these like smaller, like, uh, let's just say like a plumbing website or electrician website and just go through that blog. You can tell that it's just been written by, Yeah, somewhat overseas just for the sole purpose of having it written.

MICHAEL: Yeah, which comes back to the way some SEO companies will sell their services where, you know, in their package they say you get four 750 word blog posts per month and nine times out of ten they're just going to be nonsense like plumbing, like, you know, I don't know. Best closed back toilets 2021 or something.

ARTHUR: Top 5 plumbing tips of 2021.

MICHAEL: Yeah, they're never going to get traffic. You're never going to outrank like proper home focus big websites. Do you want people getting plumbing tips? Because that suggests a DIYer that's probably going to try and do it themselves rather than you. Exactly. So really, there needs to be a business case behind 100%.

ARTHUR: The other thing I also wanted to point out is a lot of people focus about writing blog posts to drive traffic, not for the actual end user. So I always say to some of my clients who go, don't worry too much about getting the content ranking, write something that will be appealing to the people that come to your site that, you know, the traffic that you're getting now. So informative case studies or things like that, white papers that will give them value rather than a generic post about the top five whatever's that you can do this year.

MICHAEL: Like it's the top five washes to put on your taps.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Top five tap trends.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And so we've had clients where their blog will rank for, you know, like one client had their blog ranking for sports in Australia and the level of participation in the sports. Yeah, I remember. It would drive a lot of visitors to the site.

ARTHUR: Thousands of sessions a month.

MICHAEL: Yeah, but no conversions. No conversions. So then their conversion rate is artificially low because they're getting all this traffic that's just not interested in what they sold. So, do you even want that? Like, it's just using up your server's resources, it might be slowing your site down if lots of these people are on there at the same time. Absolutely. So, traffic's not, you know, traffic for traffic's sake. Not all traffic is the same. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah. Think about what you're trying to achieve at Plumber. You're going to need to be focusing on building your link profile a lot because it's super competitive. You're going to need to focus on the on-site copy around things like, you know, emergency plumber, 24-hour plumber, like all that sort of stuff. And you're going to need to have your service pages, location pages. That's the stuff that's important, not blog posts. No. Horses for courses, as we always like to say. Do we? Well, you know what, I feel I've said it once or twice, so that officially means we always like to say it. I don't think I've ever said it in my life, but give it a go.

ARTHUR: Horses for courses.

MICHAEL: There you go.

ARTHUR: It rolls off the tongue.

MICHAEL: You can use that when you see fit. Thank you. So another thing that we see quite a bit is a bit of an obsessive focus on whatever keyword, like we need to be number one for this keyword. We call it a vanity keyword where business owners or marketing managers, they'll obsess over that, but sort of neglect to look at what's actually going on with the trends of their overall organic traffic and leads and sales and the like. Sort of comes back, I guess, look, keywords are a good indicator of whether your SEO is working. Like, it's awesome to push up a high-value, you know, often-searched keyword into a top spot. Definitely. But, I mean… Sorry, go on. Yeah, go on.

ARTHUR: I was going to say, look, it is like, it is one of the main goals. You want to do that, but I guess going back to what you said, it's not the main goal. It's one of the main goals, but it's not the main goal. I backpedaled there.

MICHAEL: I'll let you continue. Sorry. Look, I know what you're saying because it's one keyword at any given day can be in different spots for different people. Personalization plays into it. You can bounce around. Yes, it's an indicator that things are working and it's great and it's nice to have, it's good for the ego, all that sort of stuff. But obsessing over just one keyword is, I guess, it's like… Can't think of an analogy, we'll have to come back to you on that one, but it's just, it's short-sighted, it's detrimental to your own results in a way, because really you want to be focusing on themes or keyword, you know, traffic to a category page where it might rank for hundreds of keywords and you might be in an average of position three for them, but that's better than being in first spot for whatever this vanity keyword is that a business owner is fixated on.

ARTHUR: Absolutely. And this is the sort of data we used to get back in the day where we had keyword data and Google analytics, because we could see which keywords were converting the highest. So although generally the more generic keywords will drive the most traffic and can, I guess, generate the most leads. You could, there were keywords that we could see that had a higher conversion rate. Yep. So yeah, basically going back to what you said, don't just focus on that one keyword, keyword pools, long tail keywords, and try to drive traffic that way.

MICHAEL: Yeah, and then just looking at where you were when you started, where you are now and how much more growth is left potentially is the important stuff. So, are you getting more traffic? Is that turning into leads and sales? If so, awesome. Sure, you may not be in position one for best marble restoration company, Sydney, but if you're making sales and you're growing your business because SEO is working, then which one do you care more about? It can remove a lot of stress to remove that focus on individual keywords. Yeah, definitely. Look, I think we've pretty much covered off most of the main things I had on my little list here. Was there anything else that is a favorite SEO myth or misconception of yours?

ARTHUR: Look, no, not really. I think we've covered off the main ones that we kind of see pop up here and there.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Alrighty. Well, since you Have done the intro today. You're on your training wheels. You did a really good job there. I'll do the outro. Do you want to give the outro a go? Yeah, let's see. You can do the outro too this week. I'm going to screw it up.

ARTHUR: Come on. All right. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for listening to the SEO show. We'll be back next week talking about, don't even know what at the moment, but we'll be definitely back next week. So tune in.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Well done. See you later. Bye.

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