Search engine optimization or SEO is the most exploited topic yet at times quite a misunderstood marketing practice. From keywords to algorithms, understanding SEO is a detailed, complicated and time taking practice for marketers to get it correct. Questions such as what the keywords are, how many links to be used and many such doubts will pop up. The bottom line is SEO is all about the efforts you implement for your content to reach the right people, seen and read.

Here’s listing out some of the common mistakes social media managers and marketers commit:

Misconstrue the dynamics between SEO and social

Though Google states social signals do not impact rankings, yet it is natural to draw a correlation between the best rated social content and top performing content on the social media with the common factor being superiority of content. Content shared on social media that garners multiple shares, likes and comments will probably get the same engagement metrics that is shared on Google’s authority signals and in return better your ranking on web.

Social media marketers do not create their plan with the only intend of betterment of their rankings. Instead, it should be clearly recognized that SEO and social media work in sync as a part of the larger complete marketing plan to boost engagement with prospects and improve their reach.

A robust social media presence along with the precious content and building followers work in conjugation and contribute towards raising brand awareness, gaining website traction and achieve better social customer service.

Failure to share strategic content

There is a deeper connect between social media and SEO content that is pivotal to the success of marketing, social media marketers should adopt a strategic approach towards the type of content shared.

Sharing a new content will not suffice, a pre-requisite analysis of the past work performance and acknowledging what is the key driving factor of traffic to your website is a must.

What type of content is responsible to drive traffic to your site and what kind of content is being shared by people often and what are the trending topics and themes your audience prefer engaging with?

It is vital that these questions are answered by social media marketers before they consider sharing the content on various online channels.

As Zak Ramdani, Hootsuite’s resident SEO expert says, “Pick the consistently winning horse instead of a beat-up car that’s never won.”

Develop a repository of your best content work that will always be in demand that can be shared on rotation basis on your social media calendar along with the new content that you keep adding.

There is no overnight success

SEO is one of the best ways to improve your website traffic, but it is not an immediate answer. Marketers generally expect deploying strategies and achieve instant results and when they fail to do so, they give up the plan.

SEO is time consuming effort that fetches results in long term, so impatience will definitely not work in this case.

One of the primary reasons SEO being a long-term strategy and not a quick fix is for the infinite amount of content available on the net. There is a staggering amount of data being shared online every minute. Yours is the not the only content in the industry and you are not alone pushing the content online.

Given the quantum of competition you need to follow SEO best practices, produce and share quality content and analyze the outcome consistently.

Influencers and high-traffic sites are the main forces that effort into building authority and search engines recognize this. Positioning your brand through quality content and best practices SEO cannot be achieved overnight. Marketers must post great content on a regular basis and ensure that there are valuable backlinks that will generate credibility with time.

Once you recognize the time and effort being invested in churning some of the best content, observe that pay off, then the focus can be shifted towards driving the strategy forward.

Not keeping pace with latest SEO tactics

In a decade SEO has come a long way. However, all marketers could not match the pace.

“Many marketers in 2016 don’t get it. They haven’t kept up, or worse, they’re reluctant to running SEO campaigns because they’re attached to tactics of the past,” Ramdani explains.

Keyword stuffing is one of the most commonly implemented wrong practice. A very popular practice at the beginning of SEO’s evolution, keyword stuffing is when content on a web page is “replete” or loaded with keywords. Not only is that an absurd approach but also results in lowering the credibility of your content, it can lead to a backlash of manual or algorithmic suspension, which is hard to undo.

Marketers should update themselves with the latest search engine algorithms such as Panda (which cracks down on keyword stuffing), Penguin (which penalizes low-quality links), and Hummingbird (which enables a deeper understanding of search intent).

With search results becoming more personalized than ever, marketers should correlate their content and target audience. Google periodically their rankings to pick the most appropriate content based on an individual’s search history, which means that authority, keyword matching, freshness, and engagement has become all the more important.

The fast-paced technology means marketers and social media managers must stay on top of the latest advancements in SEO and google algorithms, and accordingly fine-tune their content creation and promotion strategy.