The Biggest SEO Misconception: What You’re Doing Wrong and How to Fix It

Fabrizio Pepe
4 min readApr 14, 2022

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There are a lot of SEO misconceptions out there

Source

SEO is one of the most complex aspects of any website. Many business owners make the mistake of thinking that SEO is all about backlinks and keywords. While those factors are important, they are not the only things you need to focus on. In this blog post, we will discuss four other factors that are just as important as backlinks and keywords for SEO.

  1. Website structure. Your website needs to be easy to navigate and understand for users and search engines. If your website is difficult to navigate, it will be hard for users to find the information they are looking for, and it will also be hard for search engines to index your site.
  2. Focus on content. Your content needs to be relevant and informative. If your content is not relevant, it will not rank well in search engines.
  3. User experience. Your website should be simple to navigate and visually appealing. If your website is difficult to use, users will leave and never come back.
  4. Mobile friendliness. With over half of all internet traffic coming from mobile devices, your website must be optimized for mobile. If your website is not mobile friendly, you will lose a lot of potential traffic.

Website structure menu

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Have you ever had an LPC error on your website? these errors may occur on the Google search console, for example, because of a popup that doesn’t fit on your mobile and interfere with the user experience, this error can impact your website’s SEO

People often think that SEO is all about stuffing keywords into your content

If you’re like most people, you probably think that SEO is all about using the right keywords on your website and in your content. And while keywords are important, they’re only a small part of the SEO puzzle. In fact, focusing too much on keywords can actually hurt your SEO efforts.

So, what should you do instead? focus on search queries (volume of those searches) and use Google trends to check what users are looking for)

Google’s trends screenshot

Backlinks are the only ranking factor

This is the notion that backlinks are the be-all and end-all of SEO and that if you have enough of them, you’re guaranteed to rank number one.

The reality is that while backlinks are an important ranking factor, they’re far from the only one. In fact, there are more than 200 ranking factors that Google takes into account when determining where your website should rank.

So if you’re focused solely on building backlinks, you’re missing out on a lot of other opportunities to improve your SEO. Not to mention, you could be doing more harm than good if you’re using shady black hat SEO tactics to build links.

Focus on building a well-rounded SEO strategy that takes into account all of the different ranking factors. That way, you’ll be more likely to see sustainable results that will last over time.

You need a large budget to do SEO correctly

This SEO misconception is one of the most common and unfortunately, it’s also one of the biggest SEO myths. Many businesses believe that they need a large budget to do SEO correctly but this simply isn’t true.

You can absolutely do SEO on a shoestring budget. In fact, there are a lot of free SEO tools and resources out there that can help you get started.

The key is to focus on the SEO tactics that will have the biggest impact and don’t try to do everything at once. Start small and scale up as you start to see results. With a little time and effort, you can absolutely do SEO on a shoestring budget.

SEO is too complicated

This SEO myth couldn’t be further from the truth! SEO doesn’t have to be complicated.

If you take the time to educate yourself on the basics of SEO, you’ll be surprised at how quickly you start to understand it. And once you understand the basics, you can start implementing SEO into your website and see results for yourself.

There are a lot of great SEO resources out there, so take advantage of them! Read SEO blog posts, listen to SEO podcasts, and watch SEO webinars. The more you learn about SEO, the easier it will be to understand and implement.

Google penalizes duplicate content, right?

Wrong. Google doesn’t penalize duplicate content. In fact, they actually index and rank it. The problem is that when Google indexes and ranks duplicate content, it can hurt your SEO efforts because it confuses both the search engine and users as to which piece of content is the original or most authoritative.

How do you fix it?

There are a few ways to fix duplicate content issues:

  • Use canonical tags.
  • Set up 301 redirects.
  • Use rel=”canonical” attribute.
  • Noindex tags certain pages.
  • Modify your site’s URL structure.

If you’re not sure which one is right for your website, contact an SEO expert to help you out.

Duplicate content is a common SEO issue that can be fixed with a little bit of effort. By using one or more of the methods above, you can make sure that Google indexes and ranks your content correctly, and that users are able to find the information they’re looking for easily.

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Fabrizio Pepe
Fabrizio Pepe

Written by Fabrizio Pepe

Hi, I’m Fabrizio, freelance writer and founder of BloggingWorkflow, I created this blog to help people develop new technical skills in the SEO industry

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