Stop wasting time on outdated tactics and discover what search engines actually reward. Spoiler: It’s not what your ‘SEO guru’ told you.*
If you’ve been told that stuffing keywords into every corner of your website is the secret to ranking highly on Google, then congratulations – you’ve been lied to. Search Engine Optimization (or from hereon, SEO) is full of outdated advice and outright myths that border on scams. It’s also a lucrative business, considering that agencies charge an eye-watering average of $3,209 per month for SEO.
I can hear you thinking: if my marketing agency was a borderline scam, then why am I getting ROI? As described in Lie #4, Google actually does care about clicks, and ads generate more clicks, which results in better SEO, which results in even more clicks, and therefore even better SEO. Do you get their business model now? Yes, that’s right. Ads give you ROI by design. No guru required.
So if it’s such a shady yet lucrative field, what does SEO actually entail then?
How Search Engines Work
At its core, SEO is highly technical. This is because the very nature of how search engines index the internet is technical itself. In short, search engines employ automated bots called “crawlers” or “spiders” that discover websites. Once discovered, they figure out the structure and content of those websites to “understand” them. Obviously, crawling the entire internet is a massive undertaking that is never complete and takes a lot of computing power and bandwidth. Therefore, crawlers will use various methods to conserve resources.
Google isn’t the only search engine that crawls; there’s also Bing, Yandex, Baidu, and others. Considering that Google has a market dominance of about 90% for Google Search, most of the focus goes towards how Google decides to crawl and index websites.
We mentioned above that crawling takes a vast amount of resources and computing power and briefly explained what a crawl budget is. Simple enough, right? After all, there is no such thing as a free lunch.
Search engines don’t have an infinite number of machines, but your website also doesn’t have an infinite amount of resources. If your site connects or responds slowly, the connection is open for longer which means crawlers waste more resources when crawling your website. It’s not unheard of for crawlers to overload a website, although they generally try not to.
Googlebot will scale back its crawling if it detects that your servers are having trouble responding to crawl requests.
Practically, this affects the way you manage your website in a few ways. Ensuring that your website doesn’t return network errors and regularly updating your sitemap are ways to help ensure that you’re not wasting the resources you’ve been allocated. Additionally, it isn’t unimportant to optimize your website’s loading time as well as its rendering time.
Crawlers will then proceed to try and understand the structure and content of the website by following links they find. They’ll try to determine how high-quality, relevant, popular and fresh the content is to give it a ranking. Those 4 factors largely determine how your content is evaluated by search engines.
Let’s address some interesting misconceptions.
Lie #1: Google Tells the Truth About SEO
Surprise! Google lies about some key SEO factors.
If even one of the so-called largest search “authorities” lie about SEO, then no wonder the industry is so shady. Regarding Google, they’re about as trustworthy as a politician with a lie detector. At least according to a recent leak of the Google search API.
Lie #2: Domain Authority Doesn’t Affect SEO
““We don’t use domain authority at all in our algorithms.””
John Mueller, Google’s Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst
Google isn’t very truthful regarding SEO. One of those lies came to light in the recent API leak where they had previously claimed that they didn’t use “Domain Authority” at all in their rankings.
“Domain Authority” is a metric used to rank how likely a website is to appear in search rankings.
Lie #3: More Backlinks = Better SEO
This is counterintuitive given that Lie #2 explained that Domain Authority is a metric used for SEO. However, the nuance here is that the quality of those links matter. Domain Authority actually accounts for that in its scoring algorithm. A bunch of links to sketchy websites will do more harm than good.
In the world of SEO, you’re guilty by association.
Lie #4: Clicks Don’t Affect SEO
Google had previously claimed that clicks don’t affect rankings, but there’s a whole system revealed in the API leaks called “NavBoost” that shows that they use click data to change search results.
They use data collected from various sources such as Chrome user data too.
Lie #5: SEO Can Be Done in a Day or at Once
Come now, you didn’t really believe this one, did you? If this were true, companies wouldn’t pay an average of $3,209 per month for SEO. At the very least it would be a one-time payment.
Key SEO Takeaways
The truth is that having high quality, relevant content that is useful for users will always be the best long-term tactic. This means it’s important to regularly revisit and update your content. It also means improving the experience of users on your website.
Need help improving user experience on your website or SEO? webwize.studio is always available to help.
