The biggest SEO mistake you can make is NOT what you think it is

Today, I want to warn everyone who is busy doing SEO or thinking about SEO.

You see, I can tell you from experience (stemming from my own business AND stemming from helping clients) that using spammy/illegal/black hat techniques is NOT the biggest mistake you can make.

Sure, your behind may be banned from Google, but a much costlier mistake is making assumptions about INTENT. Allow me to explain...

1) Being number 1 equals being paid: under normal circumstances, the #1 position in the search results gets between 30-40% of the total number of clicks (depending on the market). What people forget to mention though is that under normal circumstances means that you understand what people are thinking when they search for something and that your article (and thus page title and first paragraph) is the logical next step for what they were thinking. Example: when people type in car insurance, ranking number 1 with the title Car Insurance | Cheap Car Insurance | Insurance for Cars won't do you much good.

I've seen companies rank first for a term with 100,000 searches a month but they only got 30 visits a month. Why? They got the intent wrong. This is why a good SEO'er knows a thing or two about copywriting.

2) Getting the emotional intent right but the buying intent wrong: woohoo! You managed to rank first for a keyword with a title that shows searches you know what they're thinking and thus that you can help. And now, now you're getting thousands of website visitors... but sales remain stable. What the hell!?

Example: it's cool to be able to say that you're ranking 1st, 2nd or 3rd for a term like "online marketing"... but cool doesn't pay the bills my friend. It's much better to rank for a keyword that only gets 100 searches a month where you're practically sure they'll buy ("online marketing workshop") then to rank for one where they might, eventually, sometimes buy. So don't focus on searches a month so damn much. Focus on what would likely make sales the easiest, even if it has a crappy number of searches per month because 1 definite sale is always better than 1,000 possible, might eventually sales (also known as jack sh*t).

3) The value of the buying intent itself: why put all your time and energy in getting traffic for a 50 dollar product when you also have a higher priced product that's about a (slightly) different topic? Getting the highest return on investment means focusing on getting traffic for the more expensive product first.

There is a balance though: if product A is twice as cheap as product B but converts twice as well, there's no difference. But if there's not much difference? You'd be a fool to focus on product A instead of B.

Consequences of not paying attention to this: how does writing 2 pieces of content every week for 1 year plus without anything to show for it sound? Or how about paying for 300 articles without an increase in sales?

I've seen it happen in my own and other people's business, so please... never forget the intent, and never forget return on investment when it comes to SEO because you can have tens of thousands of visitors and still earn only a couple hundred bucks. I've seen it happen. Many times.

So work smarter, not harder.