I met SEO back in college and have been part of the Zeo team for a long time since. Over all that time, I've had the chance to meet plenty of people interested in SEO and work with countless brands. I've picked up a lot of experience from the projects I've coordinated or taken part in, and I want to share some of the well-known SEO mistakes I've seen or heard about over the years.
In this post, I'll cover the common SEO mistakes and the myths people tend to believe are true.
1) One-time SEO for a certain period of time is enough.
One common SEO mistake is believing that a single round of work will be enough for a set period. This tends to be believed by people who are new to SEO or haven't built up much long-term experience. There's a common assumption that a handful of steps will directly push the site to rank high. Of course, reality looks quite different. :)
First, your SEO roadmap needs to be set correctly for both short and long-term plans, because every website has its own gaps and needs. Actions need to be prioritized and sequenced properly on any site, once you've properly planned around its specific deficiencies and needs. The outcome of all this work depends on plenty of variables, current SEO performance, the number and strength of competitors, and the industry the site operates in. That's exactly why running the same repetitive SEO playbook across different websites rarely produces the best results. And even when your targeted queries do rank high as a result of solid SEO work, that doesn't mean the work is done, because this equation always includes competitors and Google's algorithms. Once your work starts paying off, holding onto that position becomes the priority.
Measurement is another important piece of SEO. After you've optimized, you need to track the site's performance and review it in detail on a regular basis. For all these reasons, it's genuinely difficult to succeed by working on SEO once, for a limited period, and expect that success to hold. In short, any site that wants to rank high on search engines needs to treat SEO as an ongoing practice throughout its time online.
2) The only purpose of SEO is to achieve high rankings.
Mention SEO to someone, and they'll usually think of ranking first for their queries. I think that's because SEO used to be done in a fairly repetitive way, with some SEO specialists promising customers or brands the number one spot. Even after all these years, plenty of people still equate SEO with ranking first. But SEO is much more than just reaching the top spot in search results.
The real purpose of SEO is to grow a website's presence on search engines and help it reach more relevant visitors. A corporate website might use SEO to build brand awareness, while an e-commerce site uses it to drive sales. Every website has its own search targets to hit, and it may be fairly easy for a site in a niche market to rank high for its queries.
But think about a new website competing against the largest e-commerce sites in Turkey for the same search queries. Could that site realistically rank first with just a little SEO effort? Suppose it could, how meaningful would that actually be? When I bring this up with my own clients, I usually give the same example: say we've worked SEO hard and consistently for our own site for years, and eventually reached our targeted rankings. Would we want a brand-new competitor to knock us out of that position with barely any effort? Wouldn't that feel unfair if it happened?
That's exactly why it's genuinely difficult to rank high quickly in a market where competition is intense and competitors started their SEO work long before you did. But it would be equally unfair to call yourself unsuccessful for not outranking sites that have been in the game far longer than you have. That's why what counts as SEO success, and what SEO is even for, depends on variables like current performance, industry, and the strength and number of your competitors. In short, the goal of SEO isn't to rank first, it's to make your website more visible on search engines and reach the most relevant users possible given your current conditions.
3) Anyone can do SEO.
I've provided consultancy to large businesses and small ones alike. In our meetings, I've heard from most of them that they tried SEO themselves, or some other way, failed, and only then decided to get professional support. I see this more often with businesses working with a limited budget, or ones reluctant to put much of their budget toward SEO. Is time the only thing lost in that process?
Unfortunately, time isn't the only casualty when competition is fierce and competitors have been running SEO consistently. It's fair to say competitors can pull ahead of you fairly easily in that scenario. Even bringing in professional support afterward, the time needed to catch up stretches out. That's exactly why businesses with real targets, and a genuine interest in organic traffic, should hand this process to people whose knowledge and experience they can actually trust. Otherwise, amateur SEO can lead to real setbacks: wasted time and money, falling behind competitors, and even a Google penalty.
4) SEO alone is enough.
Some businesses invest in other channels, whether because of a limited budget or some other reason, and that other channel might be SEO, or something else entirely. Picture a business that invests only in SEO: how far can it realistically go? Does it need other channels to succeed?
Brand awareness is the deciding factor here. If a business hasn't invested in other channels before, its brand awareness is probably limited, and websites with limited awareness are less likely to earn natural backlinks or high rankings. Once you consider that this all feeds into the ranking equation, brand awareness suddenly matters a lot more. It can be genuinely hard for a business whose competitors have strong brand awareness, and the backlinks and rankings that come with it, to get the most out of SEO. So businesses that want good SEO results should build strong brand awareness first, and leaning on other channels to build that awareness will help.
5) Strong brand equity and brand awareness alone are enough.
We sometimes see brands with high awareness start taking digital channels for granted, usually because they consider their current query traffic sufficient thanks to that awareness. This tends to happen with businesses that don't sell a product or service directly through their site, which leads them to underestimate the potential sitting in other search queries across their industry.
As mentioned above, picture a brand that's highly recognized in its industry. Naturally, its website will rank high for queries where users who already know the brand search for its name or related terms. But now consider the users who know the brand yet don't type its name into the query, and the users who don't know the brand at all. In that case, the website may not be able to rank high without any SEO work behind it. Now think about the organic traffic potential lost simply because it didn't rank for those queries. Any industry with a meaningful volume of non-branded search queries needs SEO. Otherwise, as I said, we risk missing out on organic traffic, brand awareness, and possibly more customers. :)
So every business operating in an industry with a substantial volume of search queries should factor SEO into its plans. And if a business already has strong brand awareness, it will likely see more brand searches and natural backlinks too, which feeds back into SEO performance. In short, brands with strong awareness should turn that into an SEO advantage rather than simply relying on it.
Search engine optimization is a field without firm boundaries, where the accuracy of some claims is genuinely disputed and some things only get proven through experience. That's exactly why we hear so many myths about it. To trust what we know, we need to draw on strong sources and get professional SEO support.
I've covered the well-known SEO mistakes in this post, and I hope it helps. See you in other posts. :)
