Some Dos and Don’ts of Good SEO Advice

Last Friday afternoon, I found myself aimlessly scrolling LinkedIn when I saw a post of some tips for people with websites who don’t know much about SEO. I won’t reproduce them all here, because I don’t think the specifics of it are important, but I will say that they struck me as generally unhelpful for their target audience. 

As Kevin Indig recently wrote, “In SEO, two opposing ideas are true right now: it’s both, simple and complex.” When a field has this dichotomy of complexity, clear communication between experts and non-experts becomes both increasingly difficult and crucial.

The job of modern SEO is as much communicator as technician. We need buy-in, approval, and cooperation from all kinds of non-technical stakeholders, including clients, developers, and writers. Thus, our ability to communicate complex ideas is just as important as our ability to understand them. 

When speaking to clients, the worst thing we can do is send them in the absolute wrong direction—and, unfortunately, there are many ways to do that. So, let’s go over some “Do’s and Don’ts” of SEO advice, along with some tips for SEO experts to avoid giving bad advice, and help non-experts identify unhelpful recommendations.

DON’T Oversimplify 

One of the tips from the aforementioned LinkedIn post was, “Generate backlinks from high site authority websites.” There are a few flaws with this piece of advice, but I’ll start with something it gets right: It’s true that backlinks are an important aspect of SEO. 

The most glaring flaw in the above tip is that “high-site authority websites” should be the focal point of a backlink strategy. I believe that relevancy is more important than authority. But while reasonable, smart people can debate exactly what factors make a backlink valuable, there’s no world in which topical relevance can be completely ignored.

Here’s one of Indig’s SEO-first principles from the above-linked article: “Search engines use backlinks as a fundamental signal to rank results and discover new sites/pages.” This is a good explanation of a simple foundational truth. Exactly how Google uses backlinks and which backlinks are more valuable, however, is a more complex subject.

Here’s an example for you: If you run a website that sells fertilizer, a link from highly-authoritative Apple.com is going to be less valuable to both search engines and humans than a link from a popular gardening blog.

So, how do you avoid this?

For experts 

Don’t give out generic advice unless it truly applies to every situation. It’s okay to say, “Often, you’ll want to do X, but there are exceptions,” and it’s excellent to respond to questions with, “Well, it depends.” 

The best advice is specific to the circumstance, and the more questions you ask before answering someone, the more likely you’re going to give great advice. That said, there are exceptions to this (see what I did there?), and not every quick question warrants an entire conversation. 

Knowing when a quick, general answer is worthwhile or a more in-depth conversation is required is a hugely important skill.

For non-experts 

If something strikes you as overly generic or a bad solution for your specific problem, it’s quite possible it is. Ask the question, “Why is this helpful for me to do?” 

If there isn’t an obvious answer to “Why is that helpful for me to do?,” that can be another warning sign. For example, “Make sure your content is valuable to your target audience” is solid general advice that is obviously useful. Meanwhile, “Increase your word count” is not.

DO give readily actionable tips

When suggesting an action to a non-expert, it must be something they can reasonably understand how to do. Telling a novice cook to “season the meat properly” is unhelpful, because they almost certainly do not already know the proper way to season anything. But if you gave that same person a recipe for a spice blend (or better yet, a ready-made one) and instructions on how to apply it, you’ve created value.

In SEO, to advise someone “to rank for featured snippets'' is potentially good advice, but it’s useless for a novice who might know what a featured snippet is—but almost certainly does not know how to create content to target them.

A rule of thumb I like is: If your advice isn’t actionable by your audience, it’s probably not helpful advice.

What is and is not actionable will vary wildly depending on who you’re speaking to. Different people and organizations have different knowledge bases, different resources available, different technical or legal constraints, etc. Part of our job as SEO experts is to understand what our clients (or internal teams) are capable of doing so we can recommend the best course of action within those constraints. 

I’m a big fan of Aleyda Solis’s SP2 SEO Audit System for this reason. If you’re not familiar, give it a read. For experts, this system is valuable as a means to evaluate your current process, whereas for non-experts, it will help you understand what you should be getting out of an SEO audit.

DON’T use inaccessible language or jargon

While oversimplifying is problematic, overcomplicating things can be just as bad. It’s important to remember our audience’s level of understanding when whipping out technical terms like “crawl budget” or even “SERP”.

If I was giving pointers to a beginner pianist and said, “If you want to invoke a dreamy feel, you should play in Lydian.” They would likely be even more confused than before I started speaking. 

So, how do you avoid this?

For experts

Use layman’s terms when explaining things to non-experts. If the tip you’re trying to impart can’t be explained in simple, common language, it probably isn’t a beginner-friendly tip. It can be tempting to use flashy terms and concepts in order to show off your hard-earned expertise, but at the end of the day, effective communication is worth more to everyone involved. 

For non-experts

If you’re told something you don’t understand, ask questions like, “What does that mean?” It doesn’t mean the expert you’re talking to is trying to be obtuse; most of the time they’re happy to explain further. If they’re unable to meet you where you’re at, it might be a sign that they’re not a great communicator or, worse, are repeating fancy-sounding terms that they don’t even understand themselves.

DO focus on business goals

Here’s an example from a call I recently had with a prospective client. They’re a B2B service provider that tends to make larger-scale deals with a relatively niche audience.

I was checking out their website before our call, and I noticed they had a lot of well-written, decently-ranking blog content that seemed relevant and helpful with regard to the products and services they offer. I perceived the target audience to be employees that would be implementing, maintaining, and generally working within their solutions.

When we got into the Zoom call, however, I learned that the decision-makers for their purchases tend to be VPs and up. Not the audience that all of their blogs were written for!

There certainly can be value in having content touch-points at multiple levels in a corporate structure that you’re marketing to. If those non-decision-maker touches aren’t translating into sales, though, all the effort that went into creating, publishing, and optimizing that content goes to waste.

In our industry, it’s easy to get caught up in vanity metrics like page views or rankings. Those things can be powerful indicators of whether or not our efforts are working, but we must remember that SEO for SEO’s sake is worthless. SEO is just a tool with which we can drive business growth and, ultimately, success. Any advice (or action) that is not aimed at that north star is worthless.

Someone please teach me how to title concluding sections

SEO is a niche expertise that requires broad organizational buy-in and involvement. In order to successfully complete our work (or even find it in the first place), SEOs must be able to compellingly and effectively communicate their ideas. Hopefully this post will be helpful to you in accomplishing just that. 

I’ll close with a small plug for Tom Critchlow’s “The SEO MBA” series, in which he talks a lot about how to effectively communicate about and advocate for SEO with clients, executives, and other decision makers. It’s a great resource for anyone in the space, and I highly recommend it.

What do y’all think? Did I miss any other important tips? Do you think I’m very smart? Am I way off base? Whatever your opinion, I want to hear it. Leave a comment below, or get in touch with me on Twitter or via email.