These are a couple of SEO myths that drive me crazy.
1- Google prefers fresh content.
This is completely query-dependent. In other words, it matters more for some queries than others. Yet, you see people hammering this idea constantly. They want to change their post titles every year to reflect the current year. They update their published dates every few months.
For most queries, this is useless.
If you are wondering if it matters for one of your pages, ask yourself this question: Does the freshness of the content impact its quality?
If you have an article about the top laptops for editing videos, that is going to be much more dependent on recent data. An article published in 2015 is not going to be as useful as compared to one posted in 2021.
On the opposite side of the fence, (pun coming up) an article about how to paint a fence is likely going to be just as relevant if it was published in 2010 versus 2021.
Same goes for articles about how to tie your shoe, how to build a bookcase, or how to put up drywall. These queries are not at all dependent on how recent the content was published.
2- Ranking reports are super important
First, let me say that ranking higher certainly matters. However, I often see website owners and SEOs getting a little too caught up in rankings versus traffic.
I shared the image attached in a private Slack group a couple of months ago as an example. This is data from Search Console on one page of one of my client sites. They received impressions from 400 different search queries on that one page. You cannot see it in this image, but they received clicks from about 200 of those search queries with over 180 of those being single clicks.
In other words, they got far more traffic from all those 1-click keywords combined then they did from the rest of the keywords.
Are we tracking all 400 of these search queries? No, of course not. Not even the 200+ that got clicks.
This is why I avoid providing ranking reports to clients as much as I can, and when I do, I downplay them.
Instead I focus on covering a topic as completely as possible to duplicate these results over and over.
Yes, rankings matter, but don’t let them drive everything you are doing. For years now Google has been shifting more towards understanding topics versus a single search query approach.
More to come next week.
