3 “Myths” About SEO You Shouldn’t Believe

Have you received a call that your Social Security number has been compromised and the sheriff is coming to your house? How about the one where your computer is infected and the caller wants to gain access to your network to address the problem?

Most people recognize these as untruths from potential scammers intent on stealing your identity or gaining access to your accounts to steal from directly. What many business owners don’t realize is that there are some unfortunate untruths in the online marketing world — and believing them can cost you money or cause damage to your online brand reputation.

Here are three SEO lies to avoid falling for so you can focus on tactics that work.

1. You Can Pay for Priority Submission to Search Engines

There are agencies out there that attempt to sell this one. For a fee, they’ll “submit” your pages into some mythical priority level for indexing. In truth, that doesn’t exist.

Yes, you can submit your pages for indexing to try to bump up the rate at which search engines crawl and evaluate your site. The search engines don’t charge anything for this. But submitting your pages doesn’t guarantee anything, and there’s certainly no special high-priority queue you can buy your way into.

2. It’s Best to Rank for Broad, High-Traffic Keywords

According to Google’s keyword planner tool, “funeral home” is searched 100,000 to a million times a month. If someone told you they could get you on the first page for that keyword, it might sound like a valuable proposition.

But Google’s tool also pegs this as a low-competition keyword, and there’s a reason for that. It’s a waste of time for most funeral homes to chase broad, high-traffic keywords like these. It can be expensive and doesn’t best target your audience.

Instead, you may want to aim for keywords such as “funeral home in (your city)” or “preplanning my funeral.” These phrases help you connect with people who have a search intent more in line with your content and services.

3. Social Engagement Drives Up Page Rank

Google’s John Mueller has said that social signals don’t directly impact page rank.

Studies have shown a potential correlation between social media engagement and SEO performance, but that’s probably because quality content encourages sharing, liking, and commenting. You certainly can’t trick your way into strong page rank by ignoring on-page content and gaming the system by paying for social clicks.