Many times, we obsess over every detail, but in reality, not everything in SEO is worth our attention, and there are a few trends that you should not really focus on, because well they’re overrated, and here, we’ll talk about what these trends are, and why you shouldn’t care.

First, is voice search. This is something that people don’t realize is actually overrated. there’s a difference between voice search and voice assistance.  Voice assistance is getting help with something, but voice search is searching for something near you.  it’s overhyped because it’s predicted people will interact with businesses this way. But the truth is, it really doesn’t generate a lot of revenue, and we are still at the beginning of practical voice search, so not worth where you should be putting your time and money.

Then there are duplicated local landing pages. Many people think this works because it’s an old tactic, but it doesn’t work forever, but many pages will try to rank in multiple cities, and they think virtual offices and multiple landing pages work, but it’s actually not as effective, and this is actually a much riskier activity these days. To counter this, many sites are building landing pages with keywords stuffed in, which again is a bad tactic you shouldn’t’ be doing.

they’re overrated for the simple reason of these pages don’t’ account for the experience of the user, and it tends to increase the duplicate content, so if you don’t really need this, don’t use it.

Then there is quantity over quality, and many companies think that they need to have as many location directories as physically possible. There is value listed in specific directories, but quantity doesn’t equal quality, so you should work for only the top 2-30 citations, and then move onto the more industry-specific listings, and this is important for businesses that need authority, such as for example the world of healthcare.

Then there’s obsessive rank tracking.  Keyword tracking is overrated, but not necessarily in every single sense, ti’s tracking every single keyword.  It’s overrated because the reality is that every keyword has a variety of intents on the search, and you won’t give you the best impression of the performance.

The best way to do this as well, to focus on fewer keywords, and you shouldn’t track more than 30 keywords at a time, though this varies, but it’s much easier to manage than over 100 different keywords. Before you track these, do run a manual search on these, and if you’re not producing the results to be expected, don’t use them.

Finally, there’s guest posting.  It holds weight on sites with quality, but don’t just use the same sites all the time. Focus on the outreach strategy that targets industry publications.

These trends, while they may not always be bad necessarily, are still something that you should definitely continue to look at, and something that you should try to consider as well.