It takes a well-rounded inbound marketing strategy to make your agency’s website and online marketing successful. While SEO is one part of the overall inbound marketing puzzle, it continues to serve as a focus and hot-button topic in the inbound community. If you’ve hired someone to handle the SEO portion of your inbound marketing strategy, or even if you’re handling it yourself, there are some things you shouldn’t have to worry too much about.

1. Keywords & Rankings
While keyword research is still important, the direction of your SEO strategy shouldn’t focus entirely on keywords. You do want to make sure that you’re targeting the right keywords in your content, whether it is on your website or in your offsite marketing efforts. However, keywords are not the be-all-end-all. You do not want to have keyword stuffed content and marketing messages. This not only turns users off, it turns Google and the other search engines off. While any content you create should be geared toward the ways people are searching for its topic, you need to ensure that you’re still writing high quality, unique, and engaging content for real people.

With the topic of keywords usually comes search engine rankings. Despite what you may have heard or think you know, you do NOT need to worry about search engines rankings. Let me explain. While it is important to make sure Google and the other search engines are indexing and crawling your website and that you are showing up in the search results, tracking your placement (ranking) in the search results for particular keywords will prove to be a fruitless task. Search engine rankings are no longer reliable metrics to track. Search results now look different to everyone. Ranking, both in local and organic results, is never completely accurate due to the personalization of search. Google tailors their search results to its users, making rankings unreliable and not as meaningful. Results appear differently to every search user based on browser settings, geography / location, search preferences, social media activity, and more. You can read more on the metrics you should be tracking here.

2. Being Everywhere All the Time
Regardless of whether your agency has an entire marketing team or one college intern, it’s impossible to be everywhere, giving it 100%, all the time. This is especially true of social media. While it is best practice to represent your agency on all of the major networks (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, and LinkedIn), you want to make sure you’re not sacrificing the quality of your posting and messaging by spreading yourself too thin. It’s better to produce high quality content on a couple of social media networks on a consistent basis than to update all of them sporadically with low quality content that lacks substance. Chances are, you won’t get much engagement on those occasional posts (e.g. likes, shares, +1s, retweets, etc.). If you’re posting on fewer networks, but you’re posting messages of great value and engaging with your audience, you’ll see a bigger return on your efforts.

3. Algorithm Updates & Gaming the System
I know what you’re thinking: how can I have a successful SEO strategy if I’m not keeping up with Google algorithm updates? While it’s true that you should know what the dominant algorithm updates are and what they target, it’s also true that you shouldn’t have to worry about them when considering your website. Google has always been clear on their mission, to provide search users with relevant and valuable results to their queries. Famous updates like Panda and Penguin made it clearer for the entire SEO industry what made a website a relevant and valuable result. As long as your website provides unique content through its pages, fresh and consistently updated content through your blog, and is following all other technical and creative best practices, you shouldn’t have to go running for the hills every time an algorithm update occurs.

Additionally, you shouldn’t ever concern yourself with “gaming the system.” There are no short-cuts or tricks that Google hasn’t or won’t eventually find out about. It never pays to take the work-around. While it’s hard and can take a long time, it will benefit your agency in the end if you’re following the “rules” and best practices and not trying to pull a fast one on Google and the other search engines to gain quick successes.

BONUS: Emails Saying Your Website Isn’t Optimized
Once you have a web presence, your agency will see a number of emails come in from vendors looking to sell you their marketing services. SEO service emails are extremely common; in fact, we even get them at Zywave. How many of you have gotten an email promising top Google rankings for your agency’s website? Or an email saying your website isn’t optimized and to call for help right away? Probably a good number of you. Always remember that SEO is a process, not a transaction. No company can charge you $199 a month and guarantee you quick results, whether it is #1 search rankings or increased website traffic.