At Livelong Digital, we want to see you succeed, and this is why we want you to ditch these seven outdated SEO strategies and breathe new life into your marketing campaign. Despite Google’s evolution, people still market using these strategies; we want to help you excel by avoiding the following ineffective techniques:

1 – Erratically Posting Content

  • Posting your content consistently on a set schedule is key to feeding Google to increase your ranking and drive traffic. One survey of 13,500 agencies and marketers showed that people who posted 16 times per month or more had roughly 3.5 times more traffic than agencies and marketers who only posted 0 to 4 times. The sweet spot will be to post 2 blogs per month.

2 – Keyword Stuffing & Using an Outdated Style

  • When keywords first gained traction, it was common for websites to have three or four pieces of content centred around the same keyword or phrase. Doing this today is bad because it ignores semantic searches. Semantic searches look at a page’s topic rather than keywords, and having too much content around similar keywords can drop your rankings.

3 – Focusing on Quantity Over Quality

  • Google prioritises content quality over quantity, so it’s better to have a few well-written pieces instead of a lot of poorly-written content with grammar and spelling errors. Your website’s content should demonstrate a high level of authoritativeness, expertise and trustworthiness while achieving its intended purpose.

4 – Featuring Only Thin and Short Content

  • Short and thin content may have a place somewhere, but we know that it’s not in SEO. After an analysis of more than a million articles, it was found that the content that got the most shares and that were Google’s top posts varied in length from 1,900 to 2,000 words.

5 – Buying Links

  • Google views the links on your website as a vote of confidence, and it harshly penalises sites for buying them. Essentially, it sees this as you rigging an election, and it’s a direct violation of Google’s Webmaster guidelines.

6 – Duplicated or Plagiarised Content

  • Of a study of over 100,000 websites, duplicated or plagiarised content is the most common bad SEO strategy. The goal is to create original content that is better than the first five results on a Google search for your selected keyword. To prevent duplication, run it through Copyscape to ensure originality and try for a 0% match.

7 – Forgetting the Power of Reviews

  • 81% of people check reviews before buying a product or service, and forgetting about this key information can be disastrous. Routinely check sites like Yelp, Google and Amazon for reviews. Also, make a point to ask happy customers to leave a review to boost your site’s reputation.