Have you ever been scratched by a cat?

You can tell a child a thousand times that it should not pull a cat’s tail. The child will nod in agreement, then do it anyway when you’re not looking. The child will only learn when the cat lashes out and scratches.

There are some things you simply only learn from experience, and this is especially true in the field of SEO. Here are 5 truths about SEO that my experience has taught me and I wish I learned earlier.

Truth #1: A “good enough” approach is often the best approach

You can’t do every little minor thing that may impact your search rankings – you have to focus on what’s most important.

Not too long ago, if there was a contest looking for the best embodiment of the word “perfectionism” in human form, I would have been a good contender. Hell, I used to use it as a selling point.

The thing is, there is a time and place for perfectionism, and the truth many people don’t want to hear is that most of us don’t need it for optimal results. Unless you are a spinal surgeon, an airline pilot or similar, “good enough” is often sufficient.

What I am referring to here is the 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto Principle. It basically means 80% of your results are achieved in 20% of your activities.

I learned this the hard way in SEO by spending countless hours bogged down in details. I didn’t want to miss any keyword and wanted to understand the meaning behind every single page on a website. Turns out this often had the opposite effect, and it had me spending way too much time perfecting low value tasks that often didn’t move the needle much.

“So Bart, are you saying you only use 20% of the agreed time on your clients?”

Absolutely not! I am saying that I have learned to identify what matters most for your website’s SEO and where the biggest wins are, so we can allocate the available time and resources as effectively as possible.

Further Reading: The SEO Pareto Principle: Achieve 80% of SEO Success with 20% Effort.

Truth #2: Backlinks are not the holy grail of SEO

Yeah I said it! I know, this is a controversial statement. I have had heated arguments with other SEOs about this, but I still stand by it.

I admit this one also stems from a personal frustration about the SEO industry in general, where shady SEO agencies abuse naive business owners by selling them overpriced backlink packages full of garbage links which we all know will not help the website rank at all.

All this does is cause frustration to all parties involved and create a bad reputation for SEO.

So now let’s assume you did find a reputable backlink service by people who know what they are doing. Should you still not prioritize it? It depends.

Yes, backlinks are a (very) important piece of the puzzle and can often be the differentiator for the Google algorithm to determine which websites should rank on the 1st page.

But have you considered the costs and ROI? Building up a high quality backlink profile often costs either a lot of time or a lot of money, if not both. It just doesn’t yield the best ROI if you don’t have all your other bases covered first.

My point is that you shouldn’t build a roof until you have the foundation of your house. My advice usually boils down to prioritizing a great website and brand first, with amazing user experience, all on page SEO best practices in place and high quality content.

If your website looks awful, has terrible user experience and boasts outdated content, you can build as many links as you want but it’s still unlikely to rank high. In fact, who would want to link to such a website to begin with?

When you have the foundations of your website and your content nailed, then you can let it sit for a while and see where it lands in the SEO landscape. The data that comes in will help you get a feel for where you stand, and that is when you should evaluate the need for backlinks and what kind of backlink strategy would be best for your specific website.

That is when you’re building backlinks the right way, with a plan.

But please don’t just buy a package of backlinks without knowing what you’re doing, and especially if “first page rankings” are being “guaranteed”.

Truth #3: Third party SEO data tends to be inaccurate

One of my client’s websites consistently gets about 400 organic SEO clicks per month, another one gets about 100,000. Both of these numbers are according to Google Search Console.

Ahrefs, one of the most popular SEO tools out there, estimates the monthly organic traffic of the former to be 98 clicks and the latter to be 73,000 clicks. That is miles off the real numbers!

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not hating on Ahrefs at all, in fact it is one of my favorite SEO tools and I use it all the time. But it is important to understand that Ahrefs is a third party tool with a third party data set, just like SEMrush, Moz and other popular SEO tools.

SEO tools like this are very useful when comparing websites to each other, for example your competitors. There is no way to know their real numbers since you won’t have access to your competitor’s Google Search Console or Google Analytics, but with these tools at least you are comparing apples to apples.

They are also great for identifying keyword opportunities relevant for your website and your audience.

However another thing I learned is to not always trust the keyword data presented by third party tools either. I know examples of keywords that have 0-10 monthly search volume according to Ahrefs, yet are driving hundreds of clicks per month to a client’s website.

This means the actual monthly search volume is much higher than Ahrefs estimates, and you’re leaving serious opportunities on the table if you ignore them.

Which brings me to my next truth…

Truth #4: Content should be written for visitors, not for search engines

This one is a bit of a cliche and often repeated in the SEO world, but it’s one of those that you tend to ignore when starting out in SEO (or at least I did, in hindsight).

I often see an unhealthy focus on stuffing pages and articles full of keywords they are meant to rank for in search engines, or being obsessed by certain word counts. Instructions for writing that gets outsourced to external writers often include things such as “use keyword X exactly 12 times” and “use keywords A, B and C in the last 100 words of your article”.

And I have been guilty of this myself too. Because it used to work, and unfortunately still does in some instances (most notably in other languages than English). But writing articles like this tends to result in unnatural sounding sentences and articles that just don’t flow very well, unless you are working with a talented writer that also understands SEO.

So am I saying to not include relevant keywords to your articles? Definitely not. Especially your page title and header tags should be considered carefully, as the keywords you add to them are important for the Google search algorithm.

Just don’t overdo the keywords inside your article. Google’s algorithm is getting insanely good at semantic search, meaning they will perfectly understand the relevance of your article and match it with the search intent of all kinds of keywords you haven’t even included.

The lesson I learned here is yes, give writers some high level keywords they should take into account, but nothing beyond that. Nowadays I much prefer to have someone who knows the subject write freely about it.

Having said all this, if you have articles that are stuck on the second page, it is worth using a tool like Surfer SEO to compare them to what is ranking on the first page. This may give you some ideas to update and optimize your article further.

Truth #5: Regular website maintenance is the most neglected part of SEO

Remember that one week where suddenly both your washing machine and your fridge broke down and if that wasn’t enough, you got stranded with a flat tire on the way to an important meeting?

Yeah. Things work, until they don’t. The same applies to your website. 

Your best performing article “suddenly” drops off page 1. A web form stops working and your visitors can’t reach you and leave. Worse, the website is not reachable at all because you forgot to extend your web hosting.

One of the biggest mistakes I used to make is to neglect regular website and SEO maintenance. And I see this across the board on client websites too.

The vast majority of small to medium sized businesses create a website once and then just set it and forget it, or they only publish more content but never review and update older and existing pages anymore.

And it’s not that they are not aware of this, it’s just that they don’t have the time for it, don’t prioritize it and keep putting it off. Until it’s too late, something breaks and panic sets in to fix everything ASAP.

Large websites in particular tend to be a mess when I first audit them, and need a serious cleanup. Often there are loads of minor issues that could have easily been prevented or cleaned up early, but now all combined they amount to a major issue.

And that is also the lesson I learned here: prevention is always better than curing. It is absolutely worth your time to do a monthly or biweekly checkup of your website and nipping (potential) issues in the bud when they arise. If you don’t have the time or don’t know what to look for, it’s worth outsourcing this for a relatively small investment.

What are your SEO truths?

I am curious to hear your thoughts. What are some lessons you have learned, and do you wish that cat scratched you earlier?

Feel free to comment below or get in touch.