Blogs,Funeral

Three False SEO Beliefs That Might Cause Your Pages to Under Perform

Fake news. Scams. Unfortunately, these are words that characterized some online content in 2019. It’s not surprising, given this context, that SEO myths continue to abound.

These myths usually aren’t malicious like scams are, though. They’re often the result of people misunderstanding something about search engine optimization and propagating that false or slightly off knowledge across articles, blog posts, and videos about online marketing.

Let’s cut through a few common SEO myths so you can get to the truth of what might work for your funeral home SEO efforts.

1. Keywords don’t matter anymore in title tags.
Some correlation studies looked at page rank and traffic, trying to determine whether they were tied to keyword presence in the page title. According to those studies, there’s no link.

But Google consistently says otherwise. Google messaging is that title tags are important and that they should describe your content; keywords could help you do that.

The real truth behind this one is that keywords in critical SEO locations are still important. But keywords don’t trump quality, and if you can’t write a meaningful title tag with your keywords included, you might make the call to leave them out.

2. Content has to be long to drive organic traffic.
This myth occurs because there’s an increasing push for comprehensive, high-quality content. And that often results in longer content, especially if you’re creating a guide to a complex subject.

But longer content isn’t automatically a winner. You shouldn’t take a topic that could easily be covered fully in 500 words and stretch it to 3,000. The result would be lackluster at best.

The right word count for your pages is the number of words you need to:

  • Answer searcher intent and common questions on the topic
  • Cover the topic comprehensively
  • Engage with the audience in a way that persuades them to act

3. Older content is more likely to rank higher in Google.
You know how the age of your credit accounts is a factor in determining your credit score? This myth assumes that the age of your web pages is a factor in determining where you rank on Google.

The result of this myth is that businesses leave old pages up, even if they’re no longer relevant or are low quality.

Google says older pages don’t automatically get more points with the search engines. However, users may be more inclined to trust your blog content if they see you’ve been publishing regularly for a while.

It’s best to walk a middle ground here. Don’t keep deleting everything and starting from scratch, but do update or delete low-quality or obsolete pages. Those aren’t helping anyone, including your deathcare firm.

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