13 Jun Stop Taking So Much SEO Advice

So, how do you discriminate between all the SEO information floating around the web? Endless studies, strategies, and ‘best practices’ can keep you more frustrated and overwhelmed than helped.

And I notice the irony of dispensing advice about avoiding taking advice, but I don’t mean you should ignore all SEO advice. In particular, make sure to do these three things:

1. Double check the facts. Don’t just assume the author knows what he/she is talking about. Do the research to see if other authorities have made similar claims, and how their experiments may have differed.
2. Don’t follow tactics blindly. Make the effort to understand what you’re doing before you follow a step-by-step approach.
3. Try new things for yourself. Dedicate some time to experimenting with new strategies of your own. It may seem riskier than just doing what other people have already done, but there are significant benefits to this experimental approach.

And here’s why.

SEO Isn’t One-Size-Fits-All

For starters, SEO isn’t a one-size-fits-all strategy. What works for one business in one industry isn’t necessarily going to work for someone else. For example:

National and local SEO function on different algorithms.

Local SEO demands a separate set of tactics and strategies, which simply aren’t relevant to you if you’re pursuing national SEO. Fortunately, it’s easy to filter out irrelevant articles in this split, but it’s an example of just how different SEO can be for different companies.

Competition can make or break a strategy.

Next, understand that the level of competition you’re dealing with can make or break a given strategy. If an influencer reports that their homepage moved up three spots for a given keyword term after producing a new video every week, that doesn’t mean you’ll see the same results; if you have far more competition, you might not move at all, and if you have far less competition, you might not need nearly as much effort to see the same results.

SEO has numerous important variables that can’t all be isolated.

SEO is extraordinarily complex; even though we’ve determined several ranking factors, and how much impact they have, it’s still hard to determine exact root causes for each shift in rankings we experience.

SEO can be vague in many ways (since Google doesn’t formally publish exactly how its ranking algorithm works), the nature of the industry changes quickly, and the SEO community is hungry for new information, which many search optimizers are quick to provide.

SEO advice is good, for the most part. It will help you learn more about the industry, come up with better ideas, and might even inspire you to try something new.

If you want to see the best results, you need to take the initiative and do you own independent research. Since most people don’t have the time to commit to SEO learning and comprehension, it can be easier to hire a company to do the heavy lifting for you. Telx Web specializes in SEO, ranking maintenance, and content marketing for companies throughout the United States. See how our SEO experts can give you the ROI that you want for your business. Contact us here.