The 5 Biggest Mistakes When Doing SEO

Failing to understand Search Engine Objectives
Outsourcing all the work
Failing to understand the actual value of keywords
Expecting not to invest in development work
Expecting your UX to stay the same

Failing to Understand Search Engine Objectives:

First and foremost, do you know what Search Engines like Google and Bing are trying to do? If not, here is a brief explanation and the business-oriented will totally understand, I’m sure!

A company like Google profits from advertising. Their main source of revenue are ads in the search engine results. Every click on those results incurs a ‘cost per click’ which is paid to the search engine by the advertiser.

Every Ad in the search results is labelled as such.

Factors that would discourage a user from clicking on Ads are:

Believing there is a big difference in how their search is satisfied, between ads and organic clicks and thereby forming a negative opinion of one or the other.
Having poor experiences in either ad clicks or organic clicks, i.e., becoming frustrated at the results, or being misinformed, or becoming a victim of fraud etc.

Conversely, factors that would encourage clicks on Ads are the opposite:

Believing there is no significant difference in satisfying intent between Ads and organic results.
Having good experiences, no matter which type of click it was

For these reasons, clicks from search should deliver a user to somewhere where they expect to land. Ideally, they are presented with content that demonstrates Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trust (EEAT). These are the 4 key pillars of quality in the modern search result.

How does ‘EEAT’ drive revenue?

If Google can deliver an equal experience between the ‘EEAT’ features of an Ad click and an Organic Click, then the user becomes accustomed to accepting that the results they see first are OK to click on. People are inherently inclined to take shortcuts, so if the trust in the results is high, then a click is more likely to fall higher in the page.

Yes, we know that many of you do research beyond the top search results and will hunt through several pages for exactly what you want, but the majority of search behaviour is not like that.

The first set of search results in a search page are most often Ads. As many as 4 Ads are ahead of any other results and will often win the bulk of the clicks. By this principle, search engines make more money.

SEO is therefore mostly about ‘EEAT’, as this is the exact factor that drives a user’s trust in the search engine and encourages more Ad clicks and revenue for the search engine owner.

A reminder: search engines are not charities. They do not deliver information for free without considering how that could win revenue in other ways, and how improving on that experience would bring even more revenue.

So, the Failure as mentioned in this section is about not ensuring you have established Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trust in the content your presented on your website and pages that you hope to have shown in search results. This is the CORE principle to which all SEO work should deliver.

The details of speed, tech and links and so on that you might know of as ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ are merely tactics.

Outsourcing all the work:

Any enterprise must realise that they have expertise in their industry. That expertise may have taken years to perfect. With older companies, insights they have may be over a century old.

Recalling the principle of ‘Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trust’ (EEAT) from the previous point, this should remind the reader that it is a CORE factor to SEO success.

It is very unlikely that any outsource marketing or SEO agency has the necessary ‘EEAT’ attributes to truly demonstrate it within your industry and on your behalf. Could they possibly speak to the depth of knowledge you have about your own area of expertise?

They could only probably learn something about it on Google…

For this reason, the in-house team of experts in any enterprise must be the source of the ‘EEAT’. They are the ones who seed the content. They are the ones who say the right words, understand the concepts, lay out the priorities and principles.

From those seeds, a copywriter could then evolve the content into an explanation suitable for comfortable reading while preserving the true meaning of the message.

The work of content creation is therefore ideally done in-house and with tight collaboration between the skill-holder and a content producer.

What can be outsourced?

A simple answer: Tactics.

The length, shape and topics of the content are tactics.
The specific keywords used in the content are a tactic.
The plan of which kinds of content are needed for the future is a tactic.

Other tactics include:

Applying technical SEO to the content, like meta data and tags
Where and how to add the content to a website
How to link to the content.
How to share the content.
How to get the content re-shared.
Etc

Failing to understand the actual value of keywords:

While the CORE of SEO is ‘Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trust’, this concept does not address Demand. It is arguably pointless establishing content that demonstrates ‘EEAT’ on a topic if there is absolutely no demand for it.

The evidence of demand can be proven with Keyword Research tools, and one of the best of such tools for measuring demand in Google search engine is the Google Ads Keyword Tool inside the Google Ads platform.

Yes, I am recommending a Paid Advertising tool to plan an SEO output! Not only that, but I recommend you run paid ads to do so most effectively. The Google Ads platform is in many ways the fastest and easiest way to establish the value of Keywords for your website.

Your objection may be around cost because Google Ads incur a cost per click. Read further to find out why this short-term cost might save you money.

But wait, isn’t volume and competition data enough to determine keyword value?

Well, no.

Volume alone is not proof that the keywords will drive conversion. So picking a set of keywords for SEO just because they occur a lot and ‘seem right’, may not be wise.

Competition data also does not prove conversion capability. Ask any SEM expert what Google tells them to do about allowing broad matched keywords. This creates competition in many keywords where conversion capability is entirely unproven, so competition data from the keyword tool is only meaningful if applied in practice.

There are several other ways to perform keyword research for the initial discovery phase, so this is in no way the one and only recommendation I have but is just one point of discussion for this article.

How to test paid keywords:

If your website is transactional, you probably want to win keyword queries that demonstrate some connection to driving transactions, whether as part of the research phase at top of funnel, or toward the bottom of the funnel at the purchasing phase – you may need to understand the concept of attribution first and have analytics available to you.

Transactional websites are ideally search optimised for a broad range of keywords through a funnel but linked ultimately with sales by attribution through longer user journeys.

If your website is informational, then your objective is probably engagement. In the same way that the transactional top of funnel works, driving clicks from search that demonstrate some broader objectives is necessary to prove value in that keyword.

In both cases, you can run Paid Search Ads to very quickly prove if a keyword or phrase delivers any value to your site. Experts in Google Ads paid search AKA ‘Search Engine Marketing’ (SEM) should be able to assemble an effective campaign to measure your keyword value quickly.

The bonus here is that you should be immediately getting sales or meeting performance objectives – the purpose of your business, without waiting for SEO results.

In smaller markets though, there’s a hitch with testing keywords in a paid channel like Google Ads: Google will not run Ads for keywords that occur lass than 10x per month historically, so opportunities that lie in rarer and (often) longer keyword phrases become challenging.

Why is this so important?

The Failure, as noted by the title of this section, is that if you do not know the real-world value of a keyword and you go about using that keyword in your SEO efforts, only to discover that it delivers no value at all, then you may have lost months (even years) of SEO effort (and the associated investment in fees, hours, agency costs, lost revenue etc) for nothing.

This cost is potentially far greater than the costs you might incur in ‘SEM’ for research and proof of concept. It is not uncommon that a company relies entirely on SEO, only to end up not achieving their goals and even losing their business because revenue streams took too long to start flowing.

This is not to say you should not bother doing SEO. SEO is critical for large scale growth and should be just one part of your overall business plan, in parallel to other tactics.

Expecting not to invest in development work:

As an example: among the many SEO ‘tactics’ is improving the load speed of your web pages.

To achieve speed enhancements, it is extremely likely that you would need to make development changes to the website. Some may be minor, like lazy loading an image, while others might be more significant, like moving your entire website to a better server at some cost.

At the very least, websites these days are expected to be what is commonly referred to as ‘SEO friendly’.

This absolutely does not mean they are search optimised or that Google will like it. It only means that should you chose to do SEO work on the site, it is easier to execute some of the necessary changes without having to be a coder.

But SEO friendliness rarely extends to all the possible improvements you can make or enhancements you could add, which may require fundamental changes in the structure of the site. It may even require that the entire code base (perhaps the CMS itself) be dumped and changed for a much lighter, faster, more efficient, and flexible system.

There is no ‘perfect’ system I would recommend, so don’t ask me. Each system should be judged on how it solves YOUR business objectives.

If you have hired an SEO agency and they are making no changes to your website at the code level, it’s likely they are only working on links which is only a part of SEO. Please remember here that ‘EEAT’ values and the CORE objectives of search engines depend mainly on the content (and code) in your site.

You should expect to have to change your site’s code to some degree.

Expecting your UX to stay the same:

Finally, this list of 5 of the Biggest Mistakes is not necessarily in priority order but rather should all be considered at once. So, while this is the fifth point, perhaps consider that it could be the first point. I will explain shortly.

By now though, you have read a few times that ‘EEAT’ is a CORE factor for SEO work, and that you must deliver content to satisfy that factor.

The content must go somewhere – the logical place is in your website, native to its pages (i.e., within the same domain), since after all, that’s how it will earn you the best SEO value by a long way. Other tactics are possible, so this is not totally prescriptive.

Ideally, it’s content that lives within your website, is shared or linked to, easily accessible, and equally accessible for Users and Search Engines. To achieve that, it’s very likely that you need to re- imagine the entire content structure of your website if you already built it without this new content.

I experience this all the time: Businesses want their website to be SEO optimal, but do not want to change the actual website appearance in any way. That expectation is unreasonable and counter to the CORE Search Engine objectives. It’s therefore unlikely to result in much success.

Changes to your User Experience (UX) and content retrospectively can be somewhat painful. It may force the need to change CMS, or it may require some redevelopment and redesign work to accommodate that new content. It may therefore make a lot more sense to think of this as the FIRST step of SEO: to EXPECT SEO work to determine the shape of your site and the way a user will interact with it.

You may have a protest here in that I noted earlier that you could test the value of Keywords with SEM, but if you haven’t already created your website, you have nothing to land Ad clicks to yet.

Life isn’t simple. Neither is success. If it was easy, everyone would be successful. Expect success to come at some effort and cost.

Your website may need to be built in phases with futureproofing built into the plan.

Launch an MVP version first for SEM testing and drive immediate revenue (or whatever your success metric is). You will be thankful for the quick wins.

And when you have established a content plan, go about evolving it into an SEO weapon, but although you can keep clicks from Ads landing on consistent pathways, expect to have to change the User Experience to adapt to users landed organically.

Also expect that user journeys are most often not direct. There may be many hops in the user journey between first discovering you and finally engaging or converting.

Longer journeys with multiple visits are where your SEO value really comes into its own because organic clicks carry some of the burden away from paid clicks (or not getting those clicks at all).

A quick summary:

Consider all 5 of my points in any order.

I specifically did not go into explaining any SEO tactics, because they are fundamentally not the right starting point. If you are considering tactics to summarise SEO, you may have forgotten more important considerations.

SEO tactics can range from simple and logical, to highly complex, would take many articles to explain, and may have changed by the time you read them all (or by the time I wrote them all).

It is also entirely possible for your site to be successful even if you got some of the SEO tactics wrong, or even missed a bunch (with one or two exceptions). Good tactics can help give you an edge, great tactics can make you a market leader, but crap tactics sometimes annoyingly still work too, until they don’t.

The other reason I didn’t explain any tactics is that they are boring and would make me sound like a nerd, when you probably want to know real world stuff that affects your business and forms part of your business planning. I’ll leave the nerdy stuff for another day. Because I can do nerdy too.

An article by Perry Bernard, owner at RankPower Ltd, a digital marketing technology agency. Perry is an industry leader and has Search Engine Optimisation experience since 2004. He currently specialises in search engine marketing, Google Analytics upgrades to GA4, and is a web insights analyst. Perry helps businesses identify and act on previously unrealised growth opportunities through tactical digital marketing.