“SEO is all about content and backlinks”
Let’s talk about one of the biggest SEO Myths out there that really irritates me and needs debunking!
I see this plastered all over most Agency Founder’s Linkedin Statuses and it’s really disheartening to anyone just starting out or founders with limited knowledge.
In 2018 I rang up around 10 SEO Agencies to discuss where the Industry was heading and what to make of the new direction Google was focusing on with its new updates.
These are massive agencies with famous founders, almost household names, that were the first to start putting out content on SEO which most of us lapped up and all 10 said the same: “It’s all about content and backlinks”.
In the last five years, Google has hired 20000 manual reviewers with an estimated cost just on labour alone of 800 to 900 Million Dollars a year to evaluate all the websites on their search engine.
(And rightly so, I think Google made a genius move in doing it and I believe this will serve to feed into a new AI approach in the future.)
A very expensive exercise that certainly gets a lot of credit or in other words has a lot of influence in terms of rankings.
From late 2018 to 2024, we can definitely say that organic search performance across the board was most influenced by updates that had nothing to do with content or backlinks than by updates with these.
My advice for anyone starting out is, go through the whole site, from top to bottom and look at everything from the eyes of a consumer.
From the second you search on Google until the moment the package reaches your door or the subscription lands in your email, put your customer mask on and evaluate the process.
*The graph in the image below is of one of the best SEO sites out there in terms of backlinks and content.
They have millions of links from every newspaper and magazine imaginable and they have amazing long-form guides on millions of topics but their traffic has fallen off a cliff over the last three years.
#ItsTechEatContentLinks
#InThatExactOrder
If you would like to work with me please contact me through LinkedIn or email me at hello[at]portastudios.com
Much love
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