Search Engine Optimisation algorithms continue to change as the industry gets more competitive. They become more intelligent in spotting and combatting the worst SEO practices marketing agencies use to manipulate their rankings.
Staying updated with the latest practices can propel your business towards success. On the other hand, continuously using outdated tactics will harm your website’s ranking and render your marketing strategy.
As Brisbane’s most reliable marketing agency, we put together 12 old-fashioned SEO tactics to retire ASAP.
1. Risking Quality for Quantity
Creating high-quality content is crucial to your SEO strategy because it will appeal to your target audience and improve your rankings. Most website owners used to concentrate on publishing several yet low-quality content, which hurts your SEO rankings.
2. Misusing Keywords
Keywords are essential for filtering your content. While marketing agencies previously urged people to use the right keywords for their content, too many keywords to deliver your message can confuse readers and hurt your rankings.
3. Placing Anchor Texts on Irrelevant Internal Links
Many marketing agencies and website owners used the exact words as their content’s anchor text to attract customer attention. However, this practice can harm your website’s rankings because modern search engines can now penalise websites with the exact-match word variations on your website.
4. Varying Keywords
When creating content for your website, marketing agencies don’t recommend repeatedly using different or similar keywords sparingly because the algorithm will label your content as redundant.
5. Neglecting User Experience
Search engines strongly recommend providing users with the best online experiences by enhancing page loading speed and reducing bounce rates. You must also optimise your content to improve your ranking. Otherwise, your website won’t gain visibility.
6. Article Spinning
Some marketing agencies and website owners use this lousy practice for their website’s new content by using software to replace the original article’s existing words. However, as search engines advance, this practice could be costly because they’ll label the content low-quality, making your website rank lower. You can combat this by generating high-quality content.
7. Manipulating Links
Although links can help refer your visitors on your website to another site for other essential information, they can harm your ranking if you don’t use them properly.
Search engines have evolved to detect and penalise websites that use links solely for monetary or ranking benefits and other unethical link schemes.
8. Heavily Relying on Link Building
When marketing agencies and website owners find their sites landing in the middle ranks, they usually resort to link building to push themselves to the top. While it may have been helpful in the past, using this practice today can do more harm than good. On the other hand, improving content quality and optimising the site can help create a better user experience.
9. Sneaky Redirects
Several website owners and marketing agencies previously used sneaky redirects, a feature that redirects users to a different page they didn’t plan to visit. However, modern search engines will consider these as black hat tactics, which can lower your rankings or even lead to the termination of your website.
10. Buying Links
Sneaky marketing agencies used to buy backlinks because they can impact your rankings.
It’s best to retire from this practice immediately because modern search engines need you to gain backlinks organically. You can improve your ranking by linking your site to a high-ranking website and reaching out to other businesses for guest blogging opportunities.
11. Using Keyword Planners or Adwords
Most reputable marketing agencies consider using keyword planners or Google Adwords as an old-fashioned tactic because it hides potentially relevant keywords. It also lacks ranking difficulty and click-through rate percentages. We recommend investing in paid tools instead to improve your rankings.
12. Focusing Solely on Keyword Density
Lastly, you’ll keep hurting your rankings if you only concentrate on keyword density without considering the quality of your content. It’s also because modern Google algorithms no longer rely on keyword density to rank your content.
Keeping Up with the Best Practices
Business owners must familiarise themselves with current and outdated tactics to help them rank higher in search engine results. Consult a reliable marketing agency to ensure you use the right SEO practices.
Hurricane Digital is a business-focused marketing agency based in Brisbane, offering affordable SEO services. Our goal is to help our clients across Australia gain more leads. Contact us now and enjoy a more successful business!