5 Things an SEO Consultant Won’t Tell You

SEO is as much an art as it is the science of getting traffic to your website organically. Ask any expert and she/he will give you a few guidelines on what constitutes good SEO practices; he/she will tell you to follow Google’s guidelines, to make sure who your target market is, to write great content, and focus on keywords.

There are a number of points that every SEO expert would emphasize on. But, SEO is a vast field of expertise with thousands of companies sprouting up nowadays to help you with subcategories of it. There is only so much they can tell you, but there are a few things that even an SEO agency will not tell if you are looking to hire one.

That knowledge can only come from practical application of the theories or diving deep into the subject.  If you are a newbie or have just hired an SEO agency to promote your website, here are a few things you do not know:

1. Content isn’t everything

Though, you must have heard the terms, ‘content is king’ or ‘content is queen’; it is not the complete picture of the scenario. Great content is always able to pull people to your website because they are interested in what you are writing, but it is not the only parameter that will help your site gain traction or promotion.

There are thousands of examples where the content that seemed ‘good’, was not able to pull any people to the website. One reason for it might be that not many people were able to find that content because SEO techniques weren’t applied properly. As Neil Patel says, write for humans first and then for search engines. Both are of paramount importance.  

Content must be written well and contain the keywords you want to rank on, but it is of no importance if you are not able to promote it properly. SEO agencies connect with other websites, build relationships, get social shares, and use all kinds of techniques to get that content rank on search engines. You will find a guide to article marketing here to help you understand the importance of content along with the need to market it.

Still, content is highly valuable when it comes to attracting visitors; you will need it however comprehensive your SEO strategy is. If you are unable to write on your own, you can seek guidance from experts on websites like ThanksForTheHelp and start dishing out excellent pieces of content.

2. No guarantee with the rankings

No firm or agency can guarantee you top search engine rankings within a specified period of time. They might promise to do their best and get your rankings improved; but, no one can directly come out and say that they would be able to get you top rankings. There are a lot of factors at play and even with the tools in hand; we cannot pinpoint the trends that would be going on tomorrow.

SEO techniques are always evolving, Google itself advises against hiring SEO agency that guarantees a specific ranking. Some SEO agencies do try different methods to push up a ranking fast enough, but those methods do not give you a solid base. Though, there is no guarantee of it; there are some tactics which are essential to increase your rankings on Google.

3. SEO is a complex science/ or maybe not

Spend a few hours on Google for a few days, and you would have got the basics straight. That doesn’t mean you have got the hold of it. No one in their right mind would say they have the complete knowledge of SEO; it is a sea of facts, tricks, and experiments.

It is learnable if one puts their mind to it but no one can be a master of it without years of experience and work on it. Even if you know all the ins-and-outs through Google searches, you cannot replace the work an SEO agency would do for you.

They have been in the industry for years, and know it inside out.  Learning SEO isn’t that hard, but it would be naive to call yourself a professional if you haven’t failed yet and learned from those experiences.

4. Links matter

There is a technique in SEO where backlinks are created on different websites to generate traffic on your own. Many SEO experts do not give it that much importance and nor do people who are new to SEO. But, it is actually really important when it comes to pull up your rankings.

It is essential for any website to focus on link-creation as a technique to promote the business. We find that many companies tend to carry out this method in the wrong style and up creating links that are treated as spam. If used well, this can be a deciding factor in ranking for keywords.  

In this article, it is mentioned how to use backlinks as a strategy to boost up your rankings on Google. The links to be relevant and valuable to the user, so to make him/her click on it and land on your page. If you tread carefully here, you will be boost up your presence on the web.

5. Older content can be new

A recent survey on Hubspot found that 46 percent of the traffic came from 0.5 percent of the blogs. It means a mere 0.5% worth of content was good enough to bring such huge numbers to the website. This shows us the importance of good content or viral ones; though creating viral contents does not have a step-by-step procedure but depends on a lot of variables that are not in anyone’s control.

Still, we should strive to create good content that gets us the traffic we crave for.  We find many websites that have hundreds of posts in their archives; those pieces of content are not optimized for SEO so we can surely use that to rank for keywords. There are websites that help with proofreading and editing works like TopAssignmentExperts who would take up this task and get the older posts optimized.