7 Habits of Highly Ineffective SEOs

1) Stop reading.
You’re not a farmer (no pun intended). You chose an industry that is continually changing, and the moment you stop paying attention to SEO news, patents and forums is the moment you become irrelevant.

2) Stop testing.
You’ve got your best practices and conference take aways, those are good enough, right? Wrong. Your company or client’s industry is unqiue. What works for others may not work for you. Every site has a unique makeup of code, content, links, social and competition. You have to find out what works for your site. When is the last time you ran an SEO test? Do you even have a domain you can test with?

3) Separate who you are from what you do.
The most effective SEOs are the ones who combine their personal brand with the work that they do. Let me ask you something, “Do you own (yourname).com?” If so, is there a blog on there? If so, do you talk about SEO on there? If you answered “No” to any of the above questions then chances are you are less effective than you could be. Why? Because effective SEOs aren’t just smart, they are credible and transparent. Having a blog and twitter account where you share you opinions make you transparent, and they give other SEOs a chance to praise or correct you. This gives you street cred as well as refines your ideology.

4) Trust the experts.
(Insert SEO Rockstar) said that links from  (insert social platform) will give you #1 rankings for any keyword. Who cares what the experts think. Unless they have stats to back up their claims, they’re likely just making predications based on some limited data set that they’re observing. Why do you think people get second opinions? Because experts don’t always agree on things.  If you’re blindly following another’s opinion, you’re a follower, and not an innovator. Effective SEOs are innovators.

5) Dot every i and cross every t.
I ran across a tweet this morning that read, “SEO tip – Use your .htaccess to add a trailing / after every page url”. Why? Why would adding a / after every page URL improve my rankings? Does Google consider pages that end in / a more relevant then those that end in .html? There are millions of useless “optimization tips” that can waste time. Instead, effective SEO’s focus on 1 to many tactics, lowest hanging fruit, data driven opportunities and measurable actions.

6) Go with your gut.
Your four years of vast experience and intuition tell you that you can rank for X keyword, and that you’ll get an X increase in traffic. Guess what, Google’s algorithm isn’t magically powered by your experience and intuition. If you want to base a decision on your experience, that’s fine, just bring some print outs of last years analytics with you.

7) React, always react.
Effective SEOs don’t create recommendations because they need to deliver weekly recs, or because rankings have dropped. Effective SEOs set goals, and work towards them. If you’re wasting time performing a competitive analysis when your client has 2 inbound links, you’re being ineffective. Set a goal like, “Drive 5,000 additional visitors this month”, and figure out what needs to be done to hit that goal. Competitive research isn’t going to drive any traffic. Don’t get me wrong, competitive research is great to do. You can find opportunities and efficiencies from it, but it doesn’t help you hit your traffic goal. Priortize and execute – don’t get lazy.