8 Obsolete SEO Strategies to Avoid (and What You Can Do Instead) | Wheelhouse DMG

If there’s one thing we know at Wheelhouse, it’s that the SEO landscape is always changing. That means the tactics, strategies, and best practices that guide our marketing strategies are changing as well, existing in a constant state of flux so they can better suit their environment.

As an agency that prides itself on keeping current with the latest industry trends, we know that these sea changes are just part of the game. In fact, they make our job more interesting: Every time Google tweaks its algorithm or rolls out a new feature, we challenge ourselves to be the first to respond and adapt to the change.

But every so often, there comes a time when a tried-and-true tactic, something you’ve depended on for years, just stops working. And in some cases, it can even start hurting your SEO in lasting and impactful ways.

Needless to say, it’s a big bummer when this happens. What’s worse is that it can be difficult to know exactly when your SEO strategies start to hurt instead of help you.

That’s why we wrote this handy guide to help you identify outdated strategies, as well as lend some insight on what you can do instead. By the end, you should feel confident that your SEO strategy is rock solid, up to date, and ready to deliver meaningful wins.

Without further ado, let’s dive right in!

1. Keyword stuffing

What it is:
Keyword stuffing is when a company/brand packs its webpage with the same keyword over and over again in an effort to rank higher for that term in the search engine.

Why you should leave it:
Back in the day, before search engines got really good at natural language processing, you could stuff a page with keywords to boost their visibility. Now, if a keyword is overused, search engines will catch on and penalize you for it. Instead of ranking higher, search engines will punish that site by ranking them lower, or in some cases may even remove the content from search results completely.

What you should do instead:
Rather than stuff their content with keywords, websites should focus on creating rich, in-depth content that shows search engines that they’re subject matter experts. Keywords can be included appropriately and in moderate use, and long-tail keywords can also be used to strengthen the focal point of the topic. But, as the old saying goes: Write for humans, not for crawlers.

2. Too many keyword-specific pages (keyword cannibalization)

What it is:
Keyword cannibalization is when a website has multiple pages that are ranking for the same or similar keywords. I practice, this leads the website to essentially compete with itself and harms its SEO.

Why you should leave it:
There was a time when SEO marketers would make a new page for every variation of keyword, but that time is no longer. Similar to keyword stuffing, having too many pages that focus on similar keywords causes content duplication, which is a form of low-quality content that dilutes link juice. It also lowers your conversion rate, as Google might not recommend the page you want it to (or might not recommend your page at all).

What you should do instead:
By consolidating all your duplicate content into a pillar page with cluster content, that page’s authority will increase as the backlinks will all direct to one page instead of being split between multiple. SEO marketers should structure their websites to remove all duplicate pages with similar titles and synthesize them into one, supremely authoritative page. Your content should be refined to the point that no information is repeated multiple times throughout your site.

3. Putting too much stock in content length

What it is:
More content isn’t always better. The ideal content length for a description, blog post, and article all differ. They should be long enough to provide an adequate amount of information and answer the question without overloading or becoming cumbersome.

Why you should leave it:
When content is overly long, keyword stuffing and low-quality content can both be become a problem, even if they aren’t intended. That means it’s important to keep content concise but still offer as much detail as possible.
While longer content usually does rank higher, it isn’t because of the length — it’s because it’s more in-depth. On the flip side, shorter content can rank high as well if it’s topical, well written, and closely matches search intent.

What you should do instead:
Search intent should always be a major factor when deciding on the length of content: It should be proportional to the task the user is trying to accomplish (bigger tasks = longer content). If there’s more information you can provide on a topic, link to longer articles or pieces that can speak to that information more directly.

4. Optimizing for keywords but not SERPs

What it is:
All too often, SEO marketers optimize for a word or phrase instead of the key action the searcher is looking to perform. In reality, Google displays results based on what tasks users are looking to accomplish and will reward sites that help searchers accomplish those tasks.

Why you should leave it:
If a website doesn’t consider why a user is searching for their content or the value behind the information, it’s more difficult for marketers to create great content that’s relevant to what they need. “Search intent,” a term referring to the purpose of a user’s search, can be used to understand what level the user is at in the funnel and how you can help them out.

What you should do instead:
Focus on asking yourself, “why would a person search for this?” and optimize your content from there. Look into SERPs to see what actions users are looking to perform when searching for keywords associated with your website — do they want to buy something? Research something? Go somewhere? By finding the search intent behind a query, the content you create can be much more relevant and have more value to users.
Here’s a whole blog post on the topic of using SERPs to optimize for search intent.

5. Focus too much on traffic as a standalone KPI

What it is:
SEO marketers often fall into the trap of focusing too much on traffic as an indication of success. But there are other, often more important metrics we should be mindful of when evaluating SEO campaigns.
Determining the right KPI for a campaign should be based on the business goal. More traffic doesn’t necessarily mean success when the campaign is for a new product on an e-commerce site. Rather, the right kind of traffic that increases conversion rate may be a better measure of the success of a campaign.

Why you should leave it:
Choosing the wrong KPI means you won’t be able to accurately measure the success of your campaign, and judging whether it had a positive impact or not will be next to impossible.

What you should do instead:
We should measure KPI’s that are in line with the company or website’s business goals. The metrics should report on whether the campaigns are worth continuing and if the results are applicable to each channel. Some channels may need to be measured differently to be accurate.

6. Meta keyword tags

What it is:
Meta keywords are a type of meta tag in the HTML source code that tells search engines what the topic of the page is.

Why you should leave it:
Meta keyword tags are no longer used by search engines to evaluate a website. This is mainly because many websites abused it in the past, using it to keyword stuff and draw users in on topics that weren’t relevant to the query. As we hope you know, it isn’t useful to pull in traffic on popular keywords if users won’t be able to find the information they need on your site.

What you should do instead:
Instead, you should focus on title tags and meta descriptions that are relevant to your high-quality content.

7. Paying for links

What it is:
Paying for links (also known as link farming) is when a company or brand pays an outside source for backlinks to their domain in an effort to increase their search rankings.

Why you should leave it:
Paying for links has always been incredibly shady, and these days Google is really good at sniffing it out and penalizing websites for it. It’s a clear violation of their Webmaster Guidelines, they’ll punish you by de-indexing your site, making it invisible to organic search.

What you should do instead:
Google prefers links to websites that have occurred naturally. That means you should be accruing links because you’re consistently publishing high-quality content that delivers value to readers. Additionally, it’s important to make sure your backlinks are from reputable websites that are also in good standing with Google.

8. Low-quality content

What it is:
Low-quality content can take many forms. The information provided can lack depth, not have a purpose, or be highly repetitive (read as: boring). Often low-quality content is a consequence of older SEO tactics we’ve already discussed, such as building out a page for every keyword variation.

Why you should leave it:
When you have high-quality content, search engines’ algorithms will reward you by ranking you higher, but low-quality content negatively impacts your website and reduces traffic. What’s more, low-quality content quality doesn’t actively serve your readers and usually doesn’t answer their questions. Generally, if your site has a lot of this kind of content, it leaves visitors with a bad taste in their mouth, not especially eager to come back.

What you should do instead:
Your content should always be trustworthy, authoritative, and offer expert knowledge. Titles should be reflective of content (in a non-exaggerated way) and ads shouldn’t be distracting. Above all, content should be insightful, original, and bookmark-worthy.
If you don’t have the bandwidth to give high-quality content the attention it deserves, consider hiring a professional writer or otherwise devoting more resources to content production.

Final thoughts

As an SEO marketer, one of the most important things you can do is routinely hold your strategies up to the light to make sure they’re still doing everything you need them to.

The list we’ve compiled above is thorough, but it’s important to note that Google’s search algorithms are changing all the time, and you have to be vigilant and stay alert for tactics that are on their way out. Keeping a close eye on sites like Moz and Hubspot is a great way to make sure you’re staying abreast on our ever-changing industry practices.

For further reading on content strategy and SEO tactics, we recommend you check out our recent blog posts on striking distance keywords, user tests, and evergreen content. They’ll all make a great addition to your growing foundation of SEO knowledge.

Wheelhouse can help!

Whether you’re looking for a quick fix to a lingering SEO problem or a complete ground-up site restructuring, we can help. Our strategists are adept at finding potential value for your site and converting it into real, tangible revenue. What’s more, we can work within any budget to find creative solutions that deliver results without breaking the bank.

Have a question that wasn’t answered here, or want to dig more deeply into a topic covered above? Give us a call, use our online form to reach out, or request a video meeting to get in touch with one of our specialists. We’d love to hear from you.