SEO is full of jumpscares, but not all of them actually warrant waking up in a hot sweat every night. In fact, some of them aren’t worth paying any mind to at all, and approaching your strategy with this understanding will enable you to focus on the areas that actually yield value. We’re delving into the smoke and mirrors of some of the most common SEO issues, explaining why they’re not worth the hassle (with a few caveats, here and there).
Backlinks from spammy or ‘toxic’ domains
We’ll set the scene – you’re scrolling through a website audit carried out by your SEO provider of choice, only to be presented with the news that your backlink profile has been diagnosed with a terrible case of ‘high toxicity’. What does it mean? Should you panic? Probably not.
First things first – in the context of backlinks, the phrase ‘toxic’ is nothing more than vocabulary used by a popular SEO tool that shall not be named (it rhymes with TEMbush). This diagnosis has prompted business owners and marketing managers alike to become trigger happy with Google’s disavow tool, or to get hung up on devising a strategy to root out this murky mass of links. This is a huge drain on time and energy though, and the disavow tool can actually be more of a hindrance than a help in this scenario.
Caveat o’clock – sometimes, suspicious backlinks can be a cause for concern. If you’ve tracked a consistent traffic drop against growing spammy links, or if your domain was ever subjected to any paid link schemes, then it’s certainly worthwhile checking in with a comprehensive audit.
Our take? Focus on securing high quality, relevant links to support your organic credibility.
Having red traffic lights on Yoast
If we’re leaving anything in 2023, it’s the traffic light system on Yoast. Many business owners rely on this functionality as a measure of good or bad, but it’s quite simply not the case. This feature is built on best practices that were set in stone way back when, making no space for the way that search, and the users that drive it, have evolved. A green traffic light doesn’t mean you’ve ‘SEO’d’ your site perfectly, in the same way as a red traffic light won’t bury you in the SERPs.
We appreciate that Yoast makes on-page SEO incredibly accessible, but the practices that this nifty plugin is based on don’t reflect the behaviours of the modern user.
Mobile optimisation (controversial, we know)
The devices that live in our back pocket are driving 60% of all online searches this year, but for many businesses, leveraging this fact creates a never-ending battle of mobile optimisation. We’re certainly not advising anybody to down tools here, but we’d suggest taking stock of how the things you’re implementing impact the bigger picture from time to time. Whether it’s intrusive pop-ups or distracting interstitials, some brands that have gone power crazy on the mobile optimisation front – and this only serves to send users to competitors that take a more balanced approach. The complexities of mobile optimisation are also often wrongly interpreted as page speed alone, and performance is compromised as a result.
Seasoned developers (we know a few ourselves) build websites that are designed to be functional and responsive across all devices, so while it’s essential to manage errors, we’d focus on keeping things simple.
Having too many characters in your meta content and headers
We’re staying on the ‘best practices’ page with this one, as meta character count is tied to its own set of ancient rules. Google ‘meta description length’ and you’ll get a featured result of between 120-158 characters (terribly precise!). This is true, but these limits were all devised externally – i.e, team Google didn’t sit down for coffee one day in the early 2000s and decide that a meta description ought to be under 160 characters. The thinking behind these practices is valid, as page titles and meta descriptions that are too long will truncate – but complete compliance doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve got an effective strategy.
To illustrate exactly why this is the case, we’ll focus on meta description content. This snippet of text should be seen as the final piece of encouragement for a user to choose your result over your competitors. A top notch meta description entices a user by giving them a captivating call to action, or showcasing a USP. On the whole, our perspective on this SEO issue is that it boils down to doing what works for a brand, based on some key metrics. We often employ some A/B testing to track the impact on click through rate in particular cases, for example, trialling the efficacy of including seasonal offers/USPs within title content, compared to titles that don’t have these features.
Ranking fluctuations
So, you’ve got a beautifully optimised website with plenty of evergreen content, intent-led landing pages, and a succinct internal link architecture – but your keyword rankings just won’t stay still? Once you commit to a long-term SEO venture, ranking fluctuation becomes part and parcel, unfortunately. We’ve encountered agencies that promise to remedy the ranking movements that have left business owners disheartened, and if there is a secret weapon on this front, then we’re all ears. But for the time being, we’d recommend declassifying ranking fluctuation from an SEO issue to an aspect of making progress. Focus on enhancing the rankings you have secured with targeted content, or through a tactical backlink strategy, and treat it as a constant ‘work in progress’ mission.
There’s no science for sitting in top SERP pages, but there’s a series of approaches that you can weave into your wider SEO and content marketing efforts that’ll support you to make your way up.
Duplicate content
If we challenged you to think of some more long-standing SEO sins, we’re confident that duplicate content would come to mind. In the past, serving users with a ‘dupe’ of a page would confuse crawl agents, and domains would be dealt with a manual action. Nowadays, it’s not as potent a recipe for a penalty as it once was.
Search engines are seriously smart, and they’re more aware of our intentions than we might think. Unless you’re publishing content with the sole purpose of manipulating crawlers or scraping content from other domains, a degree of duplication will go without punishment. Large e-commerce domains are a case study for this – product pages often feature boilerplate text (standardised copy) or branded content such as regulatory/safety information that must be published as a legal requirement. Our takeaway? Stop worrying about penalties, and get friendly with canonical and hreflang tags!
You won’t find organic value by getting caught up in every single audit you export from your go-to SEO tool – but you will find it by developing an opportunity-led strategy that focuses on making impactful improvements, setting a foundation for sustainable growth. Shift your perspective on SEO and identify new ways to grow by booking a discovery call with us today.