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CLOSEMENU

The root problem of the SEO industry

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So you want to be an SEO? That’s great…just call yourself one! You don’t need to have any qualifications or accreditations to start offering SEO services. You can start a website, regurgitate what others or Google says, get enough followers on Twitter (sorry, X) and now you’re a fully-fledged SEO.

What I’ve often seen is that the SEOs that are prolifically active on a daily basis on social media, are not the best SEOs. Most don’t even have their own websites and don’t practice what they preach. With so much time on social media, when do they ever get any work done? In fact, the best SEOs that I know are the ones that never share a single comment about what they do on any platform.

There was a great example the other day of the sort of bad SEO advice that you see on social media all of the time. A user on Twitter, who classifies himself as a “Technical SEO” suggested that if your web pages load too quickly….you should slow them down! His argument was that increasing a user’s time on page, but making it load slowly, will make Google think that the user is finding the page helpful and therefore increase the rankings of the page.

As bad advice goes, that’s got to be right up there with “grow your website authority with bookmarking links” (yes, this is still offered as a service!).

Nothing beats experience and knowledge backed up by data. We’ve been doing SEO for our own websites and clients’ websites for over 20 years and we continuously invest heavily in R&D. Don’t always believe everything you read online about SEO…unfortunately so much of it is ****.

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