You’ve been running your small business for a while now, and although you’re admittedly pretty pleased with what you’ve accomplished so far, you know you want more.
This kind of mentality is nothing unfamiliar to the devoted entrepreneur. Cultivating a growth-oriented mindset is what ensures their achievement of various types of successes, not necessarily tied to the business realm exclusively.
There are many ways in which you can grow your business, and with everyone, businessman or not, scouring the Internet for information on how they can make better decisions for their projects, it can be a real challenge discerning what is legitimate and what is unreliable.
Not to say that you can’t use the Internet and online traffic to your advantage, but you can only start to do so once you’ve grown accustomed to spotting and dealing with misinformation.
There’s truth to the fact that the online medium is heavily unregulated, and if we’re being honest, that’s an aspect that most of the time we really like about it. As an average curious user without a serious agenda, you can scroll through webpages after webpages for hours on end mostly unbothered by the amount of misinformation you encounter. Perhaps there are times when you give it an amused pity laugh at best.
Combating SEO misinformation
This entire casual and nonchalant attitude is not, however, the way to go when you’re trying to engage the online medium for entrepreneurial purposes.
More and more individuals nowadays have probably taken at some point a few minutes from their daily grind to see what this SEO thing everybody is talking about means.
You’ve done it too, haven’t you? You clicked around for a bit enticed by a word you’ve heard a lot in smart people’s conversation but realized you knew so little about. You studied a few definitions of the term out of simple curiosity only to then be hooked by the potential that such a concept can bring to your business endeavors.
But then your wide-eyed enthusiasm was cut short by some healthy and, dare we say, pertinent skepticism: just how accurate is the SEO-related knowledge you’ve come across in the past? Would you even be able to recognize misleading information? Are there any ways for you to keep away from unreliable information when putting together your SEO strategy?
Inquiries are good but only when they don’t paralyze you long enough to stop you from taking action. And the Internet is much like any other thing – not all good but also not all bad. So if you want to put together a new plan to improve your SEO strategy, here are 3 tips to avoid falling for untrustworthy information.
1. Be aware of what’s fact and what’s an opinion
To set a strong SEO strategy in place, it is critical that you fact check the information you’re putting out there. This means that you as a marketer have to make use of authoritative sources whenever you link to something to boost the solidity of your materials.
Linking for the sake of linking is a pure waste of time and does nothing to bring the traffic you desire to your piece. On top of that, it’s vital that if you want to state an opinion, you mention so, and if you want to present a fact, then also clarify it for what it is.
This way you avoid explaining facts with opinions, which is something that can otherwise put cracks into your text’s credibility and make potential customers turn away from your content.
2. Always speak in a context
Much can be said about many things, but how relevant is it to the point you’re trying to get across? Doing SEO the right way means you’ve got to focus on delivering content that can stand on its own.
No matter how much you want to include all the great information you’ve gathered about a certain topic in a single batch of content, it’s advisable to stick to just a few bits. Why? Because the ideas presented only become valuable when they are understood in context, and the more notions you incorporate, the less space you have to do them justice.
It’s a quality vs quantity kind of situation, and the choice you make dictates the kind of image you want to project to those interested in your business.
3. Use meaningful data
This point completes the first one having to do with the importance of clearly distinguishing between factual information and opinion-based insights.
It’s no secret that data is all the buzz nowadays, but simply throwing in some barely relevant statistics doesn’t exactly accomplish the sole purpose of presenting numbers in the first place i.e. acting as supporting evidence for the message you want to deliver.
And if you can illustrate your points in a thorough and compact text that happens not to have any numerical bits, don’t rush to sprinkle some irrelevant percentages in just because you might have heard that data attracts traffic.
What attracts traffic is unique and well-researched content that customers can relate to and engage with, and if you think you could use some help with creating that we’re always happy to help.
