A lot of times, SEO professionals think that every activity they have been doing is a White hat or at least Grey hat. All of us know that we should absolutely avoid Black hat techniques, but did you know there are white hat techniques that you should stay away from since they can hurt your SEO performance in the long run.
The simple reason they can hurt your performance is they are “too easy to be good”. Whenever we try to take the easy way, our performance suffers.
Let’s have a look at the 6 SEO strategies you should avoid:
- Assembly line SEO strategy.
- Blaming Google Updates For Performance Drops.
- Copying location page copy.
- Paid links.
- Not asking Questions At The Right Time.
#1 Assembly Line SEO Strategy
Consider a scenario where an agency uses the same SEO strategy for every client they handle. This is known as assembly line SEO strategy. Most of the big agencies are known to use a strategy similar to this.
Mostly, you’ll notice them using the same strategies or activities for every type of client, regardless of their field of work, once the on-page optimisation is done on their website. These activities can include writing blogs for them or getting paid links. But just because these activities are easy and worked for one of their clients doesn’t always mean it’ll be good for others as well.
Unless these clients have no competitors, doing activities this way might show progress in the beginning but eventually will stop benefiting them. There won’t be any growth anymore.
What Should You Do Instead?
Unless you are getting paid for just doing the number of tasks, you should stop doing the same thing. Instead, find unique ways you can utilise on their website that might benefit the audience better. Look around and find what your competitors are working on, or what’s on their website that’s ranking on the top of the first page. Find out how they are using their content and find how you can curate better content that’ll beat theirs.
Instead of trying to impress Google, create your content in such a way that’ll benefit your audience on every step until they get converted. You might think that creating unique & new content from time to time will take a lot of time, but in the end, the result will be better than what you would expect.
#2 Blaming Google Updates For Performance Drops
When you look at organic results, nothing is concrete there. Google keeps introducing its algorithm updates for its search engine every once in a while, that changes a lot of results. Depending on the website, there might be performance drops after google introduces a new algorithm update.
And recently Google has been firing updates at us so frequently that people have nothing to do except blame google for their performance drops. Which sometimes is true, but mostly its something else.
Here are some reason why organic results show low performance after an update:
- Changes in Content that are substantial
- Changes in Competitor Sites
- Manual Action
- Recent technical issues with the website
Keep an eye on these reasons and check if any of these are the reason why your website stopped performing like it used to do. Also, right after an update don’t make any significant changes, have patience and analyse the algorithm changes for some time.
What Should You Do Instead?
There are a lot of resources on the web if you want to know how you can bounce back to your previous performance in detail. For now, let’s have a look at some quick tips:
Changes in Content that are substantial:
This is one of the top reasons why your site performance might have dropped recently. Sites, like eCommerce, are known for changing their content frequently. If you haven’t made any changes to the content for some time, but still saw drops in ranking, then you should check whether your client or some other admin of the site made any changes.
Here are some ways you can check changes done to your site recently:
- Use the Wayback Machine Tool to look for any changes that you might not recognise doing yourself.
- You can install an activity log plugin that’ll monitor your site changes.
- Look around in google analytics and analyse the pages that were affected the most recently.
Changes in Competitor Sites
Changes in a competitor’s strategy might be one of the reasons why you are looking at a significant drop in your site’s rankings. Though there won’t be any sudden drops, you’ll see your rankings drop steadily over time.
Manual Action
Have a look at your search console and check if there are any manual actions required. This has decreased over time though.
Recent technical issues with the website
Having a technical issue in your site has been one of the reasons why you might be facing some issues with dop in performance. Look around in Google search console and other tools that might help find a technical error.
#3 Copying Location Page Copy
When you are developing location pages for a big client that has multiple locations, creating different pages for every location is a good move instead of using the same copy for all locations. Though it can be a time-consuming and hefty thing to do, creating a unique copy for every location can help you with local ranking performance.
#4 Paid Links
Though this article is for the white hat techniques that you should avoid, there’s one grey hat technique used in almost every marketing agency for link building purpose that guarantees you a backlink. You can pay for a number of links you want to the companies who build links, and they’ll give you that specific number in return. Though this is a great way of giving links to a client every month, however, the quality of the links and the relevancy is never up to the par.
What Should You Do Instead?
Consider link building like a snowball effect. If you have been building high-quality links on well-known publications, other people will find you and link your content in their articles as well, giving you more backlinks.
But this is very rare if you build small DA backlinks. The best suggestion we could give you is to find some good PR partners who’ll help you create good content and feature you on high-quality publications.
These big publication have higher chances of growing your backlinks organically with the help of the snowball effect.
#5 Not Asking Questions At The Right Time
No matter what time it is, if you have a doubt, you can just search on google and get your answers. But even google won’t give you an exact answer when it comes to finding a good strategy for specific issues.
That’s the right time to reach out to your peers and ask a question they might know the answer of. Even known brands do that from time to time on social media with polls. You should never feel ashamed of that. No respectable person will make fun of you for not knowing something.
