5 SEO practices you need to stop blindly copying!

1-Focusing on the website SEO status instead of the actual business needs when crafting the strategy:

Many SEOs will start their strategy by analyzing the website, running crawls, conducting technical and content audits, etc. The result is an overwhelming presentation with tens of unnecessary SEO issues that the business needs to fix!  But did you ask first what the business is trying to achieve???

SEO Tip:

Understanding business needs first is essential in any successful SEO strategy. You may not need to go after tens of fixes or optimizations, fixing some priority issues may double your performance and achieve the required business goals in a very short time.

Start your analysis by asking the business about their needs, KPIs and priorities. Based on that you will be able to craft the best strategy.

From 700 clicks per day to >2000 clicks per day in 6 months after only implementing one fix, which is SSR - Website was modified according to the technical requirements from the business

2-Rewriting Meta Titles & Meta descriptions / adhering to maximum length. 

Most of the content optimizations will start with rewriting the existing meta data without even looking at the current performance. If you are following the approach where you start prioritizing your meta data optimizations based on the click depth, you are the one I am talking about! 

Maximum length is not important as you think!  Google never said that the maximum length of meta title should be 70 characters / meta description 154 characters. In fact, Google will adjust your title and description to fit to the screen or to fulfill users search, as it rewrites them in 60% of the cases.

SEO Tip:

Analyze the current performance from GSC. If the pages are ranking high for the targeted keywords (taking into account keywords relevance, search volume & competition), leave them as they are.

When optimizing the meta data, keep the length realistic (there is no harm having meta title 80 characters for instance). Keep the primary keywords in the first half and try to make the title attractive for clicks. The same applicable to meta description – with higher focus on your USPs.

No matter how long your title is, Google will adjust it accordingly, to ensure the higher probability of getting a click.

3-Multiple H1? So what is the problem

Google never said that having multiple H1s will impact your SEO, however most of the SEOs still advise to keep only 1 H1 tag.

Google’s John Mueller talked about that in one of #askgooglewebmasters episodes https://searchengineland.com/multiple-h1s-wont-get-in-the-way-of-your-seo-google-says-322909

SEO Tip:

Focus your optimizations efforts on the first H1 as it used mostly by the search engine to rewrite the meta title, which obviously impacts your CTR.

4-Using keywords’ search volume to predict organic traffic

If you are about to forecast your SEO performance and you are using keywords’ search volume to predict the traffic you will get, then you are making a big mistake.

Keywords’ search volume is the indicator of the search popularity, however, to translate this to a traffic / sessions you will need to rank on the first 3 positions for those keywords, not to mention the rest of the other factors like algorithm updates, competition on SERPs, search intent and users’ search history.

SEO Tip:

Use historical data to predict the future performance – even though I still don’t believe in any forecasting model – and set realistic expectations as the SEO is all about influence rankings and traffic.

Check the keywords in GSC & plot the search volumes vs the clicks or impressions, if you get something close to this plot, then your assumption about using search volume to predict the traffic is correct (believe me you will never get this plot)

5-Exaggerating on the page speed score / Useless recommendations

Many SEOs still using Google’s page speed insights score to measure the page speed, sticking to the tool’s categorization of the good page speed (>90).

However, the role of the page speed in determining rankings is not absolute! Everything should be compared to your competitors. This means if your speed score is 50, and all your competitors have <50 speed score, you are already in a good position.

Another issue is related to copying page speed enhancement recommendations and sharing them with the technical team assuming that the developers know what to do. Most of these recommendations are useless, or in best cases too generic to be implemented. These recommendations end up with being ignored.

SEO Tip:

Perform proper competition analysis to identify your position versus your competitors. Focus on enhancing the speed to be ahead of your competition.

Before sharing the recommendations, dig deeper in the code, try to understand what is used and how is used by asking the developers directly. Sometimes the tool can flag unused codes that need to be removed, most of them are actually used by a third-party platforms or used after certain triggers.

Try to understand the structure of the analyzed page, the impact of the current design on the speed and the other plugins that may slow down the page’s load time.