Here are five pieces of SEO advice directly from Google that you should completely ignore. It might seem like Google is the best source of SEO tips. It's their search engine we're trying to rank in, after all.
But of course Google doesn't want you to do SEO. They want you to produce good content. So a lot of the advice that they're giving is not the best, and sometimes they're just outright lying.
So here's five pieces of common advice that you should ignore. And of course I need to maximise viewer retention, so I'm saving the best ones for the end.
The first one is that you should not write content for search engines. Just write helpful content and that's what'll help you rank. This is the worst SEO advice you could take.
If your goal is to get traffic from Google, you need to write for search engines. That's the whole point. You should know what keywords you're trying to rank for before you create the content.
Getting that keyword in the title of your page or the H1 as well as the meta title is absolutely mandatory. Getting it in places like the URL or the first paragraph also helps. If your competitors are doing this and you are not, they will outrank you.
You won't get that traffic.
The second piece of advice Google often gives is don't create content at scale. This is a big one. As Google's trying to fight low quality AI content, however, Google still pretty bad at detecting the quality of a piece of content.
So instead they try to detect low effort content that been created at scale. So what does that mean? It means you shouldn't create content that looks like it's low effort or created at scale, but that doesn't mean you can't create content at scale with fairly low effort.
Now exactly how to do this would require a full course to explain, but with the right work clothes you can do this fairly reliably.
The third one is that you should only use your exact legal business name in direct resistance. In other words, you should not add search terms to your business name when creating a listing in a directory like Google Business Profile. The truth is, unless you're egregiously spamming multiple keywords in your business name, Google pretty much never does anything about this.
And it's so effective. You're really shooting yourself in the foot if you're not doing this. I recommend coming up with one common business name that includes one or two search terms and using that exact name everywhere you create a listing.
So if you're a window tinting company called Elite Auto Shield, your common business name might be Elite Auto Shield Window Tinting. Still sounds like it could be your name. And you get that search term in there, which gives you a huge boost for ranking for terms like window tinting?
No. 4 is a 2 for 1. The truth is, backlinks still matter a lot.
Maybe it'll matter less in large language models, but right now they still make a big difference. And as long as you hire a link builder that knows what they're doing, it's still very easy to build links without Google detecting that you're buying them. Now that being said, good links are expensive and you can often get a lot of good free links, so I always recommend starting there.
And the last one is that you should focus on your core web vitals. These are things like cumulative layout shift and largest contentful paint. Google has convinced a lot of S E 0 s that they should hyperfixate on these stats.
The truth is, as long as technical issues aren't hurting user experience, they almost never have an impact on ranking. So just make sure your website's loading fast enough to not hurt the experience of actual users, and then just focus on your content and your authority. Technical issues are almost never the reason you're not ranking.
