Welcome to Part I of Edition No. 81 of my weekly newsletter, providing practical analysis in the world of digital content strategy.
SEO – specifically Google-related – has been a hot content strategy topic this summer.
First there were the disastrous AI Overview results. (Here are five revelations you can use.)
Then the massive algorithm API leak. It sent SEOs scrambling to update their organic search strategy.
I have some refreshing news, though. While you should certainly pay attention to new changes, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel.
Many of the best practices that worked a couple years ago still work today.
That’s why I’m going to share with you four myths about SEO and some practical takeaways related to each.
The ideas for this post came from an episode of Lenny’s Podcast with guest Ethan Smith, Graphite CEO. Lenny also has a Substack newsletter.
4 Myths About SEO
1. Technical SEO Audits are the Most Important Part of Your Strategy
Myth: Many people believe that technical SEO audits are the most critical aspect of SEO.
Reality: While technical audits are important, they are just one piece of the puzzle. Overemphasis on technical SEO can lead to neglecting editorial and programmatic SEO.
"We have people reaching out saying we want a tech audit,” Smith said. “And essentially, what that is is ‘give me a list of bugs to fix,’ which is different from ‘help me grow.’"
I agree with Smith here. Technical SEO is an important foundation for the rest of your strategy, but it’s not the star. Especially, as he said, if you need more traffic, and therefore, more readers/clients.
"Technical SEO is mostly internal link architecture and a few other things and bugs, but that's not how you grow," he added.
That being said, technical SEO lays a great foundation for an on-page strategy (what Smith refers to as editorial SEO) and is often a logical place to start.
If you’re using http URLs, have a long list of 404s and your site loads extremely slow (to name a few examples of technical SEO issues), that’s going to prevent even the best editorial content in the world from climbing the SERPs.
Otherwise, once you have the most important errors fixed, creating the right content in the right way takes priority.
2. SEO Strategies Should Be Keyword-Focused
Myth: Content should be planned around specific, individual keywords
Reality: While keywords are important, you should build content on topics that encompass various related keywords. Google's algorithms are sophisticated enough to understand topics rather than just individual keywords.
"When I started in SEO, you would have a category page for every single keyword. And so I was at a shopping site, and we had 10,000,000-plus pages. So every single way that you could possibly search for a product had its own page, and that worked really well," Smith said.
But as he points out on the podcast, not only is that no longer necessary, but it can also hurt you.
"The algorithm has improved, and it has a semantic understanding. So the algorithm is targeting topics," he said.
How do you know which keywords (or clusters) filter up into the same topic?
Search related keywords and analyze the first 10 results on Google
If you see a lot of the same pages in the top 10 for different keywords, you can probably group those keywords together under the same topic (i.e. the same piece of content)
Counterpoint: If you see a lot of similar pages for two different keywords that aren’t too similar – like, I don’t know, “apple recipes” and “apple picking” – it may mean there’s no quality content for one of those two keywords, which would be an opportunity to quickly rank high with a more focused piece of content
3. SEO is a One-Time Fix
Myth: Once your website is optimized for SEO, you don't need to worry about it anymore.
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