Unlearning SEO: SEO Mirages

Everywhere I look, it seems like there’s a new SEO how-to post. How to get more high-DA backlinks. How to speed up a JavaScript site. Or how to leverage ChatGPT to convince Rand Fishkin to show up at your team happy hour. (Party! 🎉)

SEO how-to posts can be insanely useful because there’s no way any of us would be able to do our jobs without the generous knowledge sharing from others!

But as we progress in trying to build high-performance campaigns, this wealth of knowledge presents an entirely new challenge; figuring out which of the billion recommendations will actually contribute to SEO profitability.

Learning SEO is the job of a beginner, but unlearning SEO is the responsibility of an expert.

You don’t have all the time and money in the world and neither does your company. So it is absolutely critical that you let go of low-yield SEO activities.

Let’s call these activities, “SEO mirages.” 

SEO mirages are those skills, best-practices, and projects that you see being regurgitated non-stop, but which don’t actually produce meaningful results in your strategy.

Sadly, a lot of professionals, even experts, never let go of these mirages. Whether it’s due to biases, prolonged feedback loops, or logical fallacies these SEO mirages have powerful, lasting ripple effects throughout the entire SEO industry. 

And these mirages are a really big problem because they lead to client turn-over, they erode peoples’ trust in our industry, and they waste a lot of valuable time and money. 

Our new job as marketers is to find the wasted “ad spend” in our organic campaigns and trim… the… fat!

While there is no one-size-fits-all approach to this, here are a few SEO mirages that I’ve personally had to unlearn and stop relying on too much for growing campaigns. 

Mirage #1: Backlinks

This is the big one, and it’s the one I know I’m going to get the most backlash for, so let’s just get it out of the way first.

The internet has no shortage of “here’s a fancy graph of traffic that I grew because I built links.” The danger with these posts is that they don’t mention what else was involved in growing that traffic. If you’re publishing and indexing more content, then you can’t really isolate links as the catalyst. 

The problem with backlinks isn’t that they don’t work (they do). The problem with backlinks is that this area is that they may not always be the best use of resources. 

If the site you’re working on is small, has a paltry link profile, and if you’ve got budget to allocate in this direction, I say go get those links!

But let’s say that backlinks aren’t your problem. What if your content is so low quality that it’s holding your website back from reaching its full potential? (a case I see more often than not) 

Furthermore, if your link campaign is successful, how do you tie it to profitability?

Although I don’t wish to invalidate others’ success with backlink campaigns, I’ve personally moved on from believing that backlinks as a bandaid solution to all SEO problems. I’m still going to recommend it to some clients, but I will do so with far more caution now that I’ve experimented with quite a lot of link budget and achieved stronger results in other areas of SEO.

Mirage #2: Technical Audits

When I was transitioning from agency SEO to affiliate & in-house SEO, audits were a really big part of my workflow. 

I think most agencies today still operate on the basis of building technical audits and then hucking recommendations at client dev teams to hope that their clients’ campaigns will grow through an overwhelming list of Dev team “to-dos.”

This presents a similar challenge that we discussed in terms of backlinks. Although technical SEO audits can, and often do, expose mission-critical flaws on clients’ websites, nowadays websites are becoming much less reliant on technical audits to get their pages crawled, indexed, and rendered. 

Plus, there’s a lot of technical best practices out there that aren’t 100% necessary for driving a high-performance website.

There was a time when I thought alt tags had to be optimized because I had read about alt tag optimization in an SEO book… turns out, spending a bunch of time tweaking my alt tags was a total waste of my time.

So if we’re still overdoing our technical audits and burdening devs with low-impact technical recommendations, that’s not going to be good for anyone. 

Focus mainly on the big 3… crawling, indexing, and rendering content.

Mirage #3: Page Speed & Core Web Vitals

This could just as easily get categorized with the previous recommendation, but I’m a firm believer that Core Web Vitals gets way too much attention, and that’s turning a lot of teams into chasing CWV scores as an SEO mirage.

I think Google is partly to blame here. The way that Google and tech media have handled their big announcements about CWV as new ranking factors was really clever, but it duped a lot of companies into wasting precious resources trying to do the thing that Google wants for Google’s own self-interest as opposed to paying attention to whether or not those CWV projects yielded positive growth.

If your website is failing CWV scores, I definitely believe that you could be getting held back by page speed, but if your website is like most… getting imperfect but still reasonably okay scores, then chances are that a large project to improve your technical scores is not going to grow your rankings.

And I also want to mention that I do believe you should do the small, easy things within your control to keep your website running fast. Compressing images and speed optimization plugins like NitroPack are usually worth doing because they don’t really eat into your resources all that much. It’s mainly the really big dev tickets that you need to be careful of.

Mirage #4: Data Analysis

Raise your right hand if you’ve spent way too much time in spreadsheets. 🙋🏻‍♂️

I think we’ve all been there before. Especially when the boss asks us for an analysis and we feel like we’ve really got to get it exactly right and perfectly presentable so that we can wow our team.

But the reality is oftentimes, speed is more important than perfection here.

The hardcore data scientists don’t like to hear it, but once again this comes back to our limited resources and time. 

More often than not, our boss would rather have the report in their hands quickly than have it be perfect. 

Once your data is presentable enough, try to end the project and move on to the work that will impact your website growth.

Mirage #5: Tools

Oh man, I am a sucker for fun SEO tools.

I still am… I just love tools and technology and I’m in constant awe of the cool things that tools can empower us to do.

That said, my love for SEO tools often gives me “shiny-object syndrome.” I sometimes think my SEO tech stack needs to be bigger than it really needs to be, which of course wastes time and budget.

Some tools are so powerful that I can’t fathom getting rid of them in my stack, but other tools really are more “shiny-object” than “SEO must-have.”

Figure out the difference and get rid of tools that aren’t producing measurable impact.

Mirage #6: Scale

Man, we love scale, don’t we?

Scale this. Scale that. Scale, scale, scale!!!

But scale often comes with hidden costs. If we toss a ton of AI copy out onto thousands of URLs, now we’ve got a large footprint with sub-par content that becomes really difficult to manage and re-optimize. 

Sometimes that hidden cost can even be tanked rankings during a core update.

I’ve been there when a website gets penalized for scaling up with low-quality content and the only way it could address that penalty was to remove the entire set of programmatic pages that led to its original penalty. 

Traffic dropped substantially, and business was really impacted in a negative way.

Scale is good, but scale with quality, not just sheer quantity.

Mirage #7: Dev-Dependent Projects

So many times in my career, I blamed others for my lack of progress. My projects were always waiting on a dev team, or some other stakeholder in the organization.

It was maddening, infuriating, and unpleasant for anyone who had to hear my complaints.

This still happens, and it’s still maddening from time to time, but I’m getting much better at letting go of these projects.

My new role as I see it is to find other levers that I can pull to get results whenever I’ve got a stalled project. This is harder on some websites than others, which also means that I will even go so far as to find a new company to work for if / when I find myself in such a position where I can’t make an impact.


Let go of dev-dependant projects and move onto working on the elements within your control.

Mirage #8: Draining Requests from Senior Leaders

Sometimes smart people ask dumb questions.

That’s not just true of junior professionals. It’s also true of our leaders, and it’s true of US!

I admit it. I am equally dumb sometimes.

Knowing that our leaders often don’t have all the answers, and knowing that their expertise is often less deep than our expertise, we are bound to get project requests that become SEO mirages.

They might ask things like, “hey can you SEO this video for me?” Or, “can you add more keywords to this PR release?”

Our leaders are human, which is why they’ve hired us. But if we don’t push back against poorly-thought-out projects, we’re doing them a disservice.

Now I try to be on the lookout for draining requests and push back when it’s obvious enough that the request is going to be a drain on our time and resources.

Summary


What can you do to unlearn some of the bad habits you might have picked up over the course of your career?

I hope these SEO mirages have given you some inspiration about how to fine-tune your strategy and let go of the time-wasters that could be slowing you down.

And I’m sure these aren’t the only mirages out there, so if I’ve missed any, I’d love to hear what yours are. Reach out to me and let me know which SEO mirages you’ve run into in your career so that we can share those with others!