As content continues to flood into our inbox at work, the digital marketing industry continues to produce more headlines that are nothing more than mythical nonsense. Here are top 5 favourites that we’ve either read or heard from 1st hand experience (so they must be true!)
SEO is dead . The SEO acronym has stood the test of time over the past 17 years, but what it actually is as a tactic has evolved countless times over the years; so much so that is virtually unrecognisable from the days of cloaking and renting links from your marketing agency. SEO is about making your website and its content technically crawlable and indexable to the best of its ability. Being SEO friendly doesn’t guarantee you ANY traffic from a search engine. SEO isn’t dead it’s just changed a lot and it will continue to evolve as the way we engage with content and devices continues to evolve.
Paid Search doesn’t work anymore. It may not work for you if you’re measuring last click conversions, but paid marketing isn’t just about getting an ad up on Bing or Google and spreading it through their networks. Using techniques like Retargeting, Real Time Bidding (RTB), Audience Profiling and using a wider range of ad extensions and mediums like display and video off the back of your paid campaigns can make a huge difference to your campaigns. The options to use Linked In and Facebook to segment and target your audience groups with pinpoint accuracy can take a brands marketing options to a whole new level.
The more links I have, the better. Even most of the dodgy links building companies have given up trying to convince the most desperate of brand owners that this works. I love the way this industry has tried to monetise ‘link removal’ as the best cure to getting good specific keyword rankings again. How very sad, however there’s an element of truth in it, when anything is poisoned, it needs cleansed to make it better.
Directories bring me good traffic. Most of them are crawled by other dodgy directories that then list you and ask you for money so you can be removed so you can rank well in the search engines. Half of them are owned by the failing link building companies! Avoid most of them like the plague. We gave up on adding our clients to directories in 2006; enough said.
Social Media isn’t measurable. There are two main points here; the social media word is even more undefined than the SEO acronym; so what many people mean by ‘social media’ is as rich and varied as the sources that provide the content. What is true about this statement is the Facebooks of this world have redefined their metrics so many times it’s hard to keep up with what each metric actually means. However; if you understand the business objectives, you can then define the goals, if you understand your goals, you can identify the critical successful factors and key performance indicators that define success through your social channels. Everything is measurable, all you’ve got to do is think it through and be honest with yourself; if you’re out of your depth, call in an expert, don’t blame the channel!
