Breaking 3 Myths About SEO Success for Business Owners

Myth 1: Ranking on Search Engines is the KPI of an Agency or SEO Expert

Business owners often meet SEO experts and agencies whose promises, and projections meet an end at the number of keywords they get the website to rank for. One might have seen the consultation packages based on the number of keywords. For example, $1000 package for 50 keywords in page 1 of Google, $1500 package for 100 keywords in page 1 of Google and so on. Before reading further, please consider answering the following questions

1. Are you determined to focus only on keywords?
2. Are these packages worth considering?
3. Is number of keywords in page 1 of Google the only metrics to be worried about?
4. If not, how to measure the success of your SEO investments?

My answer for the first three questions is a NO. Read further to know the answer for the fourth question.

The first step of success for any SEO efforts is definitely finding your website in one of the top 3 spots in search engines. As you know, the top three spots in Google receives around 50% of the clicks. But relaxing and appreciating the SEO consultant for that would not yield the results that are crucial to the running of the business.

Let us consider the typical B2B and B2C sales processes through Organic Search.

Whatever commitments you receive from some of the SEO experts are limited to box 1, but what you need for the cash box rolling is the visitor to either complete the payment or become a client. Any analysis you perform must consider all the steps in that process. Website optimization doesn’t just mean getting the website ranking but also taking up any optimization that helps you with conversions. Many questions must be answered while analyzing each step of the sales process.

• Possible Reasons for Low CTR
• Possible Reasons for Low Average Time Spent on the Page
• Possible Reasons for Low Pages per Session
• Possible Reasons for the CTA not Receiving Enough Clicks
• Possible Reasons for Lower Conversion

Whoever is responsible for the website optimization must dig deep to understand the reasons behind an underperforming metrics. Here is the list of KPIs to include

• Number of keywords with high search volume ranking in the at least page 1 of search engine
• Number of sessions to the website, are those improving from time to time
• Number of sales or leads

To achieve these KPIs they will find answers to all the above questions.

Myth 2: Your Website Need to be Technically Perfect to Increase Sessions

Many business owners perceive or made to perceive that their website metrics won’t move up unless all the technical issues are fixed. They receive back-to-back audits on several parameters highlighting issues such as Crawled – but currently not indexed, Pages with Redirects, Alternate Page with Proper Canonical Tag and so on. These issues were shown as the reasons why the traffic to the website is not moving up. How true is that?

I totally agree with the fact that the technical issues of the website must be fixed. They do play a key role in the website’s performance. But those issues won’t hinder the metrics moving up north unless there is a major indexing issue such as

• Google is not able to index any pages or some pages of the website due to some issue in Robots.txt
• A malware code injected by a hacker
• Sudden increase in website load time
• Surge in 500 errors
• Sudden increase in mobile usability issues

Most of these issues come out of the blue due to an error in some part of the website. But all the other issues are bound to present on any website. You can take any top website in the world and perform an SEO audit; you will never find 100/100 score. Despite that, they are able to attract millions of visitors daily. For example, an eCommerce website removes old products and adds new ones on a regular basis. The URL of the old product might throw a 404 or a 301 to the new product. Such coverage issues pop-up for eCommerce websites very frequently. I am not against fixing issues, all I am saying is, do not find yourself cornered by an agency or a consultant just because your website is not scoring 100 in the SEO audit. The performance might pause after certain level due to the issues. Your SEO consultant should at least take the performance to that point by taking care of all the other aspects. Whatever minor technical challenges that are hampering the growth can be taken care in parallel.

Myth 3: You Need to Update the Website as per Google Algorithm Changes

I am sure the SEO experts and business owners remember the announcement of major Google updates such as Penguin, Panda and HummingBird. These updates shook the world with many website owners evidencing a sudden drop in the numbers. Such websites had to update the content and links to get back to a better position. On the other hand, the websites which intended to provide better quality content and better use experience were not moved by any of these updates. May be there were happy to see their numbers going up without any effort from their side.

Google never force you to update the website for all its algorithm changes. For example, Google is considering Mobile as predominant device for indexing and ranking. If you have intended to provide better user experience for the visitor, your website must be at its best on all the devices.

Google has released Core Web Vitals update, Google has increased the priority for Website Loading Time, Google has released another Panda update. You don’t have to be concerned about any of these as along as you focus on user experience and following organic practices.

Key takeaways:

1. Worry about user experience rather than Google Updates
2. Focus on the metrics which keep your business prosper
3. Technical issues are not the only things which have to be worked on to increase the website performance.