SEO Shortcuts: 5 That Work And 5 That Will Destroy a Site

SEO follows the parable of the tortoise and the hare. When you try to go fast (and break the rules), you may win the sprint, but you lose the race. Slow and steady really is the way to go. The trouble is, most people don't have the luxury to spend the time, money, and effort on that slow and steady growth. When you're looking at a business, poking it with a stick and hoping it makes you some money to keep going, it's hard to be told, "Just keep at it; it'll work eventually."

Fortunately, there are a ton of possible shortcuts you can take to success. Some of those shortcuts are unfortunately traps that are based on obsolete information. Sometimes it's just misinformation, or it's an outright scam.

It's also very difficult to tell which is which since so much SEO information is contradictory or is game-of-telephoned into something completely different than it should be. Much of SEO is anecdotal and coorelation doesn't necessarily equal causation.

While I can't cover every SEO strategy here, I've put together five of the biggest on each side of the coin: five strategies you can use that really work and five that could ruin your site if you try them.

Shortcuts that Work #1: Regular, Consistent Posting

Let's start things off with what you probably don't want to hear: one of the most important things you can do is be consistent.

Note that I'm not saying "slow and steady" here, just steady. You don't need to be slow! But, there are two hazards here.

The first is if you try to automate content production at scale. This tends to be low quality since you're focusing on quantity, and it ends up making you look worse. I'll bring this up in greater detail in the bad shortcuts section, too.

The second hazard is trying to bite off more than you can chew. Specifically, I see a lot of small businesses try to start producing daily blog posts or create 5-10 different websites, only to find after a few months that they:

• Can't afford to keep paying writers for that volume of content
• Can't think of enough topics to sustain that many posts
• Run into roadblocks, like image production, technical optimization, or fact-checking
• They don't have enough time and it gets put on the backburner.

A surge of content can be planned and done well, but if you're just trying to pump up the volume and then find you can't keep it up, you're more likely to falter in the future.

Moreover, a lot of brands push for this surge of content, and when they don't see immediate positive results, they stop. They end up going too far in the other direction, posting sporadically and generally don't make it look like anyone cares about the business.

Google wants to promote sites that are regularly providing value to visitors. Whether that's one post a month, one a week, or more often, the key is consistency. You want to be regular and predictable, not sporadic.

Shortcuts that Work #2: Link Earning Via PR Expert Sites

One of the most important elements of SEO is backlinks. Backlinks need to come from quality sites, but more importantly, they need to come from relevant sites. If a supplement site is linking to a plumber, there isn't really much connection or reason to believe the supplement site has a position of authority to recommend a plumber, so that link isn't worth much. It's also important that links be contextual. Links in sidebars, footers, and ad boxes are generally devalued or nulled out.

There are a lot of different ways you can work to earn backlinks. One of my favorites these days is to use the HARO-like sites, such as Qwoted, SourceBottle, and Featured. To use them, you register as an expert source for your area of expertise, and when a reporter, journalist, publisher, or other content creator needs information about your topic, you respond. When they quote and cite you, that link ends up being valuable.

It's a lot of work, but you can also make use of services like mine to do it for you.

Shortcuts that Work #3: Smart Topic Research

Running a good blog means creating content people find useful. You don't always need to have the longest guide, the deepest case study, or the most long-tail keyword around; you just need content that draws a line between the person searching for a topic, the topic they're searching for, and the information they're hoping to receive.

A lot of marketers get caught up in the idea that they need to find unique keywords that no one else has covered before. The problem is, we've had millions of people over the last 30 years doing that, too, so it's all but impossible to find anything that hasn't been covered before, often better than you could.

The key is to find angles to align a topic with user intent. It's not just about the topic, it's about the audience. For example, the post you're reading right now is aimed primarily at business owners and novice marketers who aren't immersed in SEO, and who want to make it as effective as possible without having to spend a ton of money. If I was writing to SEO experts, or to marketers with a serious budget to spend, I'd have different advice to give.

There are a variety of tools available to help you with this, so finding one that works best for you will be key.

Shortcuts that Work #4: Specific Service Pages

This is another variation on user intent, but it primarily focuses on commercial and transactional intent. A lot of people search the internet for information, but just as many search for products or services they can use to accomplish something. The question is, can they find you, based on what they search for?

A landscaping company having a landscaping service page is a good example. It's fine and all, but what about people who want to search for lawn mowing, leaf cleanup, snow plowing, pond digging, French drain installation, garden design, or anything of the sort? If you don't include content about all of the things you can do on your site, people searching for those specific services won't find you.

The key here is moderation. One page for lawn mowing is fine. Maybe you can do two, if you want one for residential and one for commercial. You don't want a bunch of pages for "small lawn mowing," "back yard lawn mowing," "acreage mowing," "grass cutting," and "yard trimming" and all that; that's where you start to run into keyword stuffing issues.

Shortcuts that Work #5: Trust and Authority Building

One of the biggest metrics Google currently uses to rank sites is EEAT. EEAT stands for Expertise, Experience Authority, and Trust. It's their latest attempt to assign some level of trust and authority to both domains and specific people via their authorship and attribution of content.

There are a ton of different ways you can work to improve your EEAT, both as an individual author and as a site owner.

• Solicit and publish customer reviews and testimonials.
• Earn more backlinks from authoritative and relevant sites.
• Add name, address, and phone information where possible.
• Build trust pages like about, privacy policy, and terms pages.
• Build trust signals like social media followings, engagement, and brand partnerships.

All of these can help you stand out from the rest of the pack and boost your site's EEAT.

Shortcuts to Doom #1: AI Spam Content

What about the strategies that end up a shortcut to a failed business, a Google penalty, or a deindexation? Let's talk about five of the strategies you want to avoid.

The first and the single biggest trap people are falling into right now is using AI to generate huge amounts of low-quality, superficial, low-authority content. Generative AI is very good at making a string of words that seem intelligent at a glance, but when you dig deeper, it's often riddled with factual inaccuracies, inconsistencies in tone and voice, and a host of other problems. These problems can all be solved through enough attention to prompts and post-generation editing, but when you're putting that much time into it, the scale of AI generation no longer applies, so it starts to fall flat.

I think a big sea change is coming with regards to AI content, probably in the next 1-2 years, and I think a lot of sites currently exploiting AI are going to realize just how short-term those gains will be.

Shortcuts to Doom #2: Link Building Services

There are hundreds of link-building services out there, and many of them are not going to be very useful to you. Some weaponize blog comment spam and directory submissions, some spam Wikipedia installations, and some resort to spam emails sent to anyone whose site has a contact form or public email, and that's just scratching the surface.

Links are so important that you can't ignore strategies to earn them, but you have to do just that: earn them. Paying a company that creates links for you might just be using a private blog network or a spam strategy to do it, and while you might see a short-term boost from it, you'll end up suffering in the long run.

Shortcuts to Doom #3: Spammy Keyword Variation Pages

This is another one I've already talked about a bit above, but it can get even more ridiculous.

I've seen sites that attempt to build individual pages for keywords such as:

• River Rock Landscaping
• River Stone Landscaping
• Smooth Stone Landscaping
• Stone Landscaping
• Rock Landscaping
• Landscaping with Rocks
• Landscaping with River Rocks

And so on. In reality, this is effectively one keyword and only needs one service page (and maybe a few targeted pieces of content) rather than attempts to spin off different pages for these "variations" of the keyword.

Keyword variations need to be a lot more tangible to be valuable as unique posts. Otherwise, you're splitting your SEO value across multiple pages and making all of them a little worse than the sum of their parts would be. You also can potentially run into problems with keyword stuffing and keyword spam.

You also see this a lot with geographic keywords. A local landscaping business naming the towns and neighborhoods they work in is fine, but if they're making 50 identical pages with place names swapped out, it's going to get you hammered by the algorithm.

Shortcuts to Doom #4: Bad Site Redesigns

There's a strange myth that persists in marketing that sometimes, the only way to get Google to notice you is with a site redesign. Like Google needs to see some dramatic shake-up to decide to reindex you and rank you.

There's a tiny nugget of truth to this, but it's only if your site was terrible beforehand. Things like a bad URL structure, a mess of noindexed pages, problems with duplicate content, bad redirects, and redirect chains; there are all sorts of issues that can crop up over time. They can usually all be fixed, though, and a complete site redesign only works if you essentially need to flatten everything and start over.

It's even worse if you don't actually pay attention to the key elements of technical SEO, like link structure, sitemap, Schema, page speed, and other metrics in your redesign. A redesign is only as good as the finished product, and you can easily end up in the same place you were or worse.

Shortcuts to Doom #5: Stealing Content

There's a line between inspiration and theft, and it can be hard to discern in marketing. Two people can cover the same topic, with the same key points, in similar ways and still be unique pieces of content. But if they line up too closely to one another, then you're stepping into content theft territory. Google keeps an eye out for things like article spinning and penalizes sites that use such strategies.

My recommendation is to always take at least three sources of inspiration and synthesize them into something new. That way, you're never at risk of just copying one page; you're adding and remixing ideas into something unique.

And, of course, if all of this sounds like a ton of work and you really don't want to dedicate yourself to a new profession, you can always hire a skilled marketing agency to do it for you. That's where I come in! At Content Powered, I do my best to help my clients grow, and I have a proven track record of success. If you want similar results, give me a call!