SEO Strategies as Pointless as My Weetasaw

You’ve probably not heard of the “Weetasaw”, but, trust me, it’s a bit of a marvel. Designed with precision-ground, plastic reinforced blades and a safety holder for the flip out blade, it’s so clever it ought to win an award, its one and only job is to saw a single Weetabix biscuit cleanly in half. No more hand cracked Weetabix, less shattered flakes making a right mess all over the worktop, and no more fighting over who has the most in their bowl at breakfast time. Just two perfect, bisected halves, all ready for your spoon!

Sounds cracking, doesn’t it? A solution to a problem so blindingly specific, so incredibly niche, that you probably never even knew it existed. And therein lies the problem…

Because while the Weetasaw represents peak ingenuity in one very particular, very unnecessary area, it also serves as a perfectly daft metaphor for certain SEO strategies. Strategies that, despite all their hard work and meticulous planning, might just be as utterly pointless as my beloved, yet ultimately redundant, breakfast gizmo.

The silver bullet of SEO!

Many businesses become hooked by the latest SEO trend or technique, convinced that implementing a single, particular tactic will unlock untold organic traffic.

They pore over data, faff about with keywords, and churn out endless content, only to find their search rankings stubbornly don’t move an inch, their conversions flatlining like a Sunday afternoon in Stevenage. They’ve gone and built an SEO Weetasaw: An overly complex, time-consuming contraption designed to sort out a problem that either isn’t really there or simply doesn’t move the needle where it truly matters.

So, let’s put down our imaginary Weetasaws for a bit and have a look at some common SEO blunders that might be soaking up your precious resources without delivering any real bang for your buck. And more importantly, how to ditch these digital dead ends and cook up an SEO strategy that actually works.

Common SEO Blunders

1. Chasing Every Single Trending Keyword

Imagine the Weetasaw, painstakingly crafted to slice precisely along the grain of a Weetabix. Now picture an SEO team frantically chasing after every single trending keyword, no matter how tenuous its connection to their core business. “Unicorn socks for armadillos!” “Retro-futuristic teacups!” “The existential dread of a single breadcrumb!” You get the picture.

While keyword research is fundamental for any successful SEO strategy, an obsession with fleeting trends or highly irrelevant, low-volume terms can be a colossal waste of time. Tools might show you thousands of keywords, but not all keywords are created equal. Some might have bags of search volume but absolutely zero commercial intent. Others are so niche that only three people in the whole wide world will ever search for them, and two of those are probably you and your competitors.

The Weetasaw Effect: You spend hours researching, crafting content optimised for these terms, and building pages that nobody truly needs or wants to find. You might even rank for them, but what’s the point if those searches don’t turn into leads, sales, or meaningful engagement? It’s like having a perfectly bisected Weetabix, but you don’t even fancy a bowl of cereal.

The Fix: Shift your focus from quantity to quality and intent.

• Prioritise long-tail keywords with commercial intent: These might have lower search volume, but searchers using them are often further down the sales funnel. Think “best noise-cancelling headphones for home office” instead of just “headphones.”
• Focus on topics, not just keywords: Google’s algorithms are getting incredibly clever, understanding topical authority. Create comprehensive, valuable content clusters centred on core themes relevant to your audience, rather than cramming individual pages with random keywords.
• Analyse searcher intent: Before optimising for a keyword, ask yourself: What is the user really looking for when they tap this into Google? Are they researching? Comparing? Ready to buy? Tailor your content to match that intent.

2. Obsessing Over Minor Algorithm Updates

Remember the great Google Panda update? Or Penguin? Or Hummingbird? Or Medic? Or the one about helpful content? SEO pros can get incredibly good at tracking Google’s every murmur, every whispered change to its algorithm. This is useful, up to a point. However, some take it to extremes, tearing apart their entire website architecture and content strategy based on speculative interpretations of minor tremors.

The Weetasaw Effect: You spend countless hours, and potentially thousands of pounds, re-optimising your site for a perceived algorithm shift that might not even significantly impact your specific niche. You prune perfectly decent content, disavow harmless links, and rewrite meta descriptions for the tenth time, all based on a ripple in the data pond. Meanwhile, your competitors who focused on delivering a cracking user experience valuable content, delivering a great service and gathering 5* reviews keep on outranking you. It’s like frantically re-sharpening your Weetasaw blades every time a new breakfast cereal rolls off the production line.

The Fix: Take a long-term, user-centric view.

• Focus on Google’s main goals: Google’s primary aim is to dish out the most relevant, highest-quality results to its users. By consistently providing value, a great user experience, and a technically sound website, you’ll naturally fall in line with Google’s evolving guidelines.
• Don’t react to every “SEO earthquake”: Major updates are important, no doubt, but minor tweaks and unconfirmed whispers shouldn’t derail your core strategy. Wait for official announcements and review the actual impact on your ranking data before making drastic changes.
• Prioritise technical SEO hygiene: A fast, mobile-friendly, secure website with clear navigation and accurate schema markup will always be rewarded, regardless of minor algorithm changes. These are the building blocks, not the fleeting trends.
• Supply an Exceptional Service and User Experience: No SEO strategy will outrank word of mouth and great online reviews. Poor reviews point to a bad company, and good companies win business without trying too hard because news travels fast.

3. Generating Tons  of Thin, Low-Quality Content

In the good old days of SEO, the mantra was “content is king,” which was often interpreted as “more content is better.”, or “put the same keywords all over the place!”. This led to an explosion of articles churned out by content mills, which were barely readable and offered absolutely zero unique value. These days, Google’s far more switched on, but the temptation to simply add “more pages” still lingers.

The Weetasaw Effect: You’ve got an impressive number of blog posts, articles, and landing pages. Each one is “optimised” for a keyword, but collectively, they offer little depth, lack authority, and completely fail to engage your audience. It’s like having a hundred perfectly bisected Weetabix halves, but they’re all stale and nobody fancies eating them. You’ve chucked time and money into producing a high volume of low-impact assets. This waters down your site’s authority, makes it harder for search engines to grasp your true value proposition, and ultimately drives your users potty.

The Fix: Embrace quality, depth, and user engagement.

• Prioritise “helpful content”: Google’s recent updates heavily focus on content that is genuinely helpful, authoritative, and written by experts. Focus on creating comprehensive, in-depth articles that thoroughly answer user queries and sort out their problems, ideally write the best there is online about any given subject.
• Conduct content audits: Regularly review your existing content. Identify thin, outdated, or underperforming pages. Either update and improve them, consolidate them into more robust pieces, or think about removing them.
• Vary content formats: Don’t just stick to text. Add images, videos, infographics, interactive tools, and podcasts to engage users and provide information in diverse ways, some of which also work on multiple platforms (e.g. YouTube). Longer dwell times and lower bounce rates signal to Google that your content is worth its salt.

4. Focusing on Social Media Posting Without Adding Relevant Engaging Content on Your Website

It’s an undeniable truth that a strong social media presence is crucial for building a brand, engaging with the community, and driving traffic. However, some businesses fall into the trap of pouring all their content creation energy into social platforms, neglecting their owned media assets, in particular their own website.

The Weetasaw Effect: You’re a social media superstar! Your posts are racking up the likes, shares, and comments. You’re fluent in TikTok trends, crafting witty tweets, and designing eye-catching Instagram stories. But when someone clicks through to your website from these platforms, they find a barren wasteland. No new blog posts, no detailed guides, no in-depth resources that turn interest into action. Your social media acts like a digital megaphone, shouting into the void, with no valuable destination for the intrigued listener. It’s like enthusiastically demonstrating your Weetasaw to a crowd but then having no Weetabix for them to saw into themselves. All the engagement happens off-site, on platforms you don’t control, and the organic search value for your own website domain remains stagnant. You’re building someone else’s empire, not your own.

The Fix: Weave your social media and website strategies together for overall growth.

• Social media as a content distribution channel: Use social platforms to tease, promote, and drive traffic back to valuable, in-depth content on your website. Share snippets, compelling headlines, and direct calls to action that lead users to your blog posts, landing pages, and resource hubs.
• Create “evergreen” content on your website: While social media thrives on here-today-gone-tomorrow trends, your website should house evergreen content that stays relevant and valuable for months or even years. These are the assets that will continuously attract organic search traffic.
• Repurpose content across platforms: Don’t just create content for social media. Create robust content for your website (e.g. a detailed guide), then chop it up into bite-sized, engaging formats for your social channels. This ensures consistency and makes sure your core message reaches as far as possible. For instance, a detailed blog post on “The Ultimate Guide to Sustainable Gardening” can be broken down into Instagram carousels, TikTok tips, and LinkedIn discussion prompts, all of which link back to the original blog article.
• Encourage website visits from social: Clearly link to your website in your social media bios, post descriptions, and direct messages. Make it incredibly easy for interested followers to explore your offerings in more detail.

Fixing Your SEO Strategy: From Weetasaw to Winning Machine

So, how do we transform our Weetasaw-prone SEO strategies into finely tuned engines of organic growth? It all boils down to a few core principles:

1. Understand Your Audience (Properly): Before you even think about keywords or content, get a deep understanding of who your target audience is, what problems they’re grappling with, and what solutions they’re after. This fundamental understanding will guide all your SEO efforts. What problems do they have? What are their bugbears? What questions do they ask? What kind of language do they use? Answer these, and your SEO strategy will naturally click with user needs.
2. Focus on User Experience (UX): Google is increasingly prioritising websites that offer a slick and seamless user experience. This includes:
   • Page Speed: A sluggish website is a conversion killer. Optimise images, leverage caching, and minimise code.
   • Mobile-Friendliness: With most searches happening on mobile phones, your site must be responsive and easy to navigate on smaller screens, ensure things like emails and phone numbers are clickable too.
   • Clear Navigation: Users (and search engine crawlers) should be able to easily find what they’re looking for. Logical site structure and intuitive menus are crucial, ideally include an HTML sitemap as well as an XML one.
   • Core Web Vitals: Pay attention to Google’s metrics for real-world user experience: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) are critical speed factors to monitor.
3. Create Authoritative, Valuable Content: This is the beating heart of modern SEO.
   • Answer questions thoroughly: Be the definitive resource for your niche, this not only shows you know what are talking about but can also help land your content in AI overviews at the top of the SERP.
   • Demonstrate expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (EEAT): Show Google and your users that you really know your onions. This means having proper experts create content, citing sources, and maintaining a tip-top online reputation.
   • Regularly update and refresh content: Keep your information current and comprehensive, rewrite or cull any old content that’s not getting clicks.
   • Vary content types: Don’t just bang out blog posts. Explore videos, infographics, podcasts, case studies, and interactive tools to drive user engagement.
4. Build Strategic, High-Quality Backlinks:Backlinks remain a critical ranking factor. However, the emphasis is firmly on quality over quantity.
   • Earn links through great content: If your content is genuinely exceptional, others will naturally want to link to it.
   • Outreach to relevant, authoritative sites: Identify websites in your business niche that could benefit from linking to your valuable resources.
   • Guest posting (strategically): Contribute valuable articles to other reputable sites in your industry, including a link back to your website where appropriate.
   • Avoid “link schemes”: Steer clear of buying cheap backlinks, participating in link farms, or other dodgy tactics that can potentially land you with Google penalties and won’t necessarily help your domain authority.
5. Master Technical SEO Fundamentals: While less glamorous, a solid technical foundation is essential.
   • Crawlability and Indexability: Ensure search engines can easily access and understand your content.
   • XML Sitemaps: Help search engines discover all your important pages.
   • Robots.txt: Guide crawlers on what to index and what to ignore.
   • Schema Markup: Use structured data to help search engines understand the context of your content (e.g., reviews, recipes, events, FAQs).
   • HTTPS: It should go without saying that a secure website is an absolute must.

The humour in the Weetasaw lies in its ridiculously precise nature, its dedication to solving a non-existent problem. In the world of SEO, we often fall prey to similar habits. becoming fixated on micro-optimisations that we have a gut-feel will work, while completely missing the bigger picture, or looking at the actual data.

True SEO success isn’t about chasing every fleeting trend or applying every obscure tactic. It’s about building a robust, user-centric online presence that Google can easily understand and confidently recommend. It’s about creating genuine value for your audience, providing an exceptional user experience, and establishing yourself as an authority in your field.

So, take a moment to size up your current SEO strategy. Are you meticulously polishing a Weetasaw, or are you investing in the core components that will truly drive long-term organic growth?

Put down the unnecessary tools and gadgets, focus on what really matters to your customers, and watch your rankings (and your business) finally start to slice through the competition. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll lend you my Weetasaw for your next 1.5 Weetabix breakfast. Only joking, it’s my pride and joy!

If you need SEO Help or Advice

If you need any help or advice with your business website SEO, infomation on content strategies, on-site and offsite SEO, or even paid ads that work alongside your SEO then contact Wiser IT and we would be delighted to help.

We can help you devise an online strategy, analyse your competition or identify keywords, topics, products or niches that can help your business grow.