5 SEO Strategies You Need To Stop Using In 2020

Come on, seriously, SEO (search engine optimisation) has been around for quite some time now. Google is constantly telling us what you shouldn’t be doing, and why, and what you can be doing! However, there are many agencies and so called SEO “experts” that continue to try and use out dated black hat SEO strategies that end up costing their clients a lot of money. Below we have explored some points of some of the strategies you shouldn’t be using anymore.

Read the full article on Forbes.com

1. Duplicating Content On International Websites
   Sometimes when people want to break into another market they just buy a new domain (or put in a sub folder of their website), place all the same content there, set the Geo targeting in their search console accordingly and add a few ahref lang codes to target that region and language. Unfortunately this is probably the worst thing you can do. If you think Google is going to rank you high against a bunch of duplicated content just because you have modified some settings in your search console and one short line of code you must be dreaming. All content must be unique and tailored to your audience. If you do not plan to go through the effort to do this (as it can be expensive and time consuming) then it is best not to try this strategy at all as you will most likely end up losing most your rankings and organic traffic.
2. Link Schemes
   LOL. That is all. I don’t think we really need to get into detail here. If you think SEO is that easy, buy a few cheap irrelevant links and rank on top of the SERPs then think again. There are ways you can acquire links legitimately which we will get into another time. In short, back links and mentions should be earnt and not bought!
3. Your Mobile Website Different to the Desktop Version
   As people are constantly on the go and constantly on their mobile devices is it essential you are providing the same user experience across both mobile and desktop versions of your website design. Now with mobile first indexing, Google will make sure your mobile website adheres to all it’s guidelines or else you wont rank for either. They should resemble each other so that your users don’t feel confused when they re-visit your website on another device and have the same experience as they had before. The user experience is a very important factor when it comes to your website’s trust and credibility on the search engines. After all, you are optimising for the users, your customers.
4. Fake Product Reviews
   Did you know fake product reviews is illegal in some countries? It is also a big NO for the search engine giant. We can understand you may have been impacted by a negative review and want to counter it, however the best way to do this is to find out why the customer wasn’t happy, see what could have been done to prevent such a review and then make small changes within your services to ensure a positive outcome next time. Remember – no business is perfect and is constantly evolving over time. Your customers interests will also change so take it as a learning curve on how to constantly get better!
5. Unoptimised Images
   A lot of people forget this as it is very simple to do. However, the longer the leave this the longer it will take to attend to later. All of the main images on your website need to have a suitable file name as well as an alternate text description to tell Google what the image is and also to help people who use screen readers to know that the image is about which leads to a positive user experience. Do not optimise every single image filename and alternate text as it may lead to over optimisation issues. Also, images files should be compressed as much as possible without sacrificing image quality. There are many plugins on most CMS’ that do this for you.

These are only a few issues with SEO strategies. Google is getting smarter and the algorithm is constantly evolving. It may take longer not to take short cut however SEO is a long term strategy, but if implemented correctly, over time, the results can be better than any other channel. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions.