Many of my clients find it challenging to know what exactly to do when trying to get their website ranked in the search engines. We’ve talked about some of the tricks you can use in your blog posts to improve your organic SEO but if you’re wanting to leverage the new(ish) field of Local SEO, keep reading.

Local SEO is a relatively field. As with every new development in the digital marketing sphere, you’ll hear a lot of advice from a lot of experts. Some of the advice will be really good. And some of the local SEO advice will waste your time and precious marketing dollars. So how do you know which expert to listen to and what advice to ignore?

Unfortunately, there isn’t any easy answer. Much of the Local SEO advice you will come across comes with a hefty price tag, and that’s fine. After all, these companies are offering a service that you do not have the time or expertise to master. But Local SEO, and SEO in general, is one of those fields where the strategies and techniques morph as time passes. Furthermore, there’s no certainty that what worked a year ago will work for you today. And there’s a very real chance that using outdated SEO practices will negatively affect your search engine rankings.

Let’s examine 5 outdated SEO practices so you don’t waste any of your digital marketing dollars and efforts on them.

5 Outdated SEO Practices To Skip

  1. Yelp, Yellow Pages and Yext: These companies claim to help raise your local rankings in the search engines. There was a time when each was very valuable in helping your business gain local exposure. With the explosion of Google My Business, you can do what they do for free and avoid the negatives associated with each. Yelp in particular has run into many problems. Many review sites can easily fall from grace so beware.
  2. Search engine submission services: Most search engines, especially Google, prefer to index your pages on their own by crawling them. Instead of spending money on submission services for your blog posts, focus on creating relevant and timely content and share it across your social networks. Doing so os equivalent to what the submission services want to do for you, and more. Your marketing dollars would be better spent on hiring a ghost writer or social media manager.
  3. Spun content: The practice of taking your articles or blog posts and spinning them (automatically submitting the same article with minor variations to various sites and services across the internet) was the basis for the recent Google Penguin update.
  4. Link farms: Creating a ‘links’ page worked well for a long time but have limited success today.
  5. Buying backlinks: The practice of purchasing backlinks is easily discoverable by Google and the penalty is severe: Google will slap your site. Today, getting legitimate backlinks is easier than ever, so why risk the penalty?