It’s hard out here for content marketers to attract the right traffic organically. With search engine optimization practices evolving and content competition coming from everywhere, it’s all too easy to get confused.
While watching several SEO presentations at Content Marketing World 2023, including talks by Andy Crestodina, Carlos Meza, and Mike King, I noticed some widely held misconceptions and common mistakes.
Let’s debunk, demystify, and deconstruct six common SEO mistakes and misunderstandings with help from these experts.
1. Misunderstanding: Wanting your website to rank higher
The next time someone asks why your website doesn’t rank better in search, drop this truth bomb courtesy of Andy Crestodina: “Google has never ranked a website. Websites don’t rank in search. Web pages rank in search.”
Why the misunderstanding? Google does seem to consider the authority of the website when ranking individual pages. Most SEO tools assess and consider a site’s authority when interpreting a page’s ranking difficulty for a keyword or phrase.
Each tool approaches authority rankings slightly differently. Moz calls this metric domain authority, Ahrefs and Serpstat call it domain rating, and Semrush calls it authority score. Most consider the quality and quantity of links to your website domain quality matters more than quantity, Andy says.
But if websites don’t rank, why do domain authority ratings matter? Because they provide clues about which key phrases you can successfully target for SEO.
You can compare your website’s domain authority against the domain authority of pages currently ranking for a targeted keyword. If your domain authority is in the same range, your page has a good chance to rank, assuming it includes thorough, helpful content. If your page and domain authority are far below the pages that rank for the given term, your page probably won’t rank, no matter how good the content is.
2. Mistake: Giving up on competitive key phrases
Don’t think SEO is pointless on pages for competitive key phrases. Andy shows why in this example of satellite launch services company Astraius using Moz Pro (the paid version).
Moz shows a website domain authority score of 19 and a page authority score of 22 for Astrauis’s services page, as this screenshot shows:
If Astraius tried to optimize its services page for “space launch services,” it would enter an unwinnable contest. Moz shows a difficulty score of 58 based on the average page authority scores of the links on the first results page, as shown in this screenshot:
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