It's tough to admit it, but many of us still practice outdated SEO tactics in the belief that they still have a great deal of positive influence. In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Rand gently sets us straight and offers up a series of replacement activities that will go much farther toward moving the needle. Share your own tips and favorites in the comments!
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Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to go back in time to the prehistoric era and talk about a bunch of "dinosaur" tactics, things that SEOs still do, many of us still do, and we probably shouldn't.
We need to replace and retire a lot of these tactics. So I've got five tactics, but there's a lot more, and in fact I'd loved to hear from some of you on some of yours.
Dino Tactic #1: AdWords/Keyword Planner-based keyword research
But the first one we'll start with is something we've talked about a few times here — AdWords and Keyword Planner-based keyword research. So you know there's a bunch of problems with the metrics in there, but I still see a lot of folks starting their keyword research there and then expanding into other tools.
Replace it with clickstream data-driven tools with Difficulty and CTR %
My suggestion would be start with a broader set if you possibly can. If you have the budget, replace this with something that is driven by clickstream data, like Ahrefs or SEMrush or Keyword Explorer[1]. Even Google Search Suggest and related searches plus Google Trends tend to be better at capturing more of this.