SEO is a complicated topic to learn and understand. It’s something that is intimidating to many people, too. The truth is there is a lot that the average small business owner can try to do to greatly improve the chances of their site, its page and blog posts, and products or services ranking well organically in search engine results.

At the same time, there are tons of SEO myths out there. We’ve already discussed whether or not directory listings are good for SEO. More recently, I’ve run into some people (even marketers) who believe some surprising (and confusing) things about what SEO is and is not.

SEO best practices also extend beyond your website and blog, but for the purposes of this post, we’re discussing SEO as it more directly ties to your website.

3 SEO Myths to Stop Believing about your Small Business Site

• SEO Myth #1 – SEO Doesn’t Work Somewhere along the way, an incorrect memo seems to have gone out to some marketers and website owners to make them think “people don’t do that anymore” or that “SEO isn’t still a thing”. Why would SEO have gone away? And when did (basically) everyone stop constantly Googling for information? Searching the internet for information, products and services is something most people do nearly every day. SEO is the missing link between your website or online store’s content and the words or phrases a person is using while searching (or Bing or Yahoo). If you don’t have SEO, it’s going to be pretty darn difficult for a potential customer to discover you (especially when your competition does have SEO on their site).
• SEO Myth #2 – I SEO my Blog Posts because Pages Don’t Rank Much like my response to the first point, this is another SEO myth that makes no sense. A blog post is a website page. A blog post, just like any other page on your website, is a link to your website. When you optimize a website page, you take the same steps as you would for a blog post. If you’ve optimized a blog post and a page on your site, you’ve seen that you have all the same SEO capabilities. So, it’s great that you are optimizing your blog posts for search, but now do your pages, too. Or else you are missing out.
• SEO Myth #3 – Google AdWords is SEO Perhaps this SEO myth somehow grew out of the fact that Google is the top search engine and you see AdWords ads while searching on Google? I’m not sure. But SEO is all about organic, meaning non-paid, search visibility. AdWords is the opposite; Google AdWords is all paid ads. When the money stops, so do your Adwords campaigns and the traffic back to your online store or website. However, SEO can live on forever (along with the organic traffic it brings). 

Your website or online store is your business’ online home base. It is also one of the few or only online presences that you own and control (unlike social media). If you don’t do all that you can to make your website be the best it can be, you are missing out.