One of the most significant nuances of SEO is over-optimizing your website. One of the best analogies I can think of is a horse race. When somebody wins the horse race, they usually win by a hair. You have a photo finish. When the horses are right at the finish line, they’re not far apart from each other. And one of the greatest mistakes that people can make when optimizing websites is not paying attention to the proximity of their competition in terms of SEO skill level. And being far ahead of them appears unnatural to the search engines.
Search engines want natural selection to determine the best results, and they hate SEO. Search engines seek to penalize websites that overtly practice SEO techniques. Google understands that people are going to optimize their websites, but they can rank how much better you are at it than your competitors. They want to prevent an unfair advantage that artificially props up one site over another.
To show up in search results, you should target a 1-2% lead over your competition. Someone who shows up too far ahead is going to end up getting penalized. If you’ve got a contractor’s website, for example, you’ve got an industry of people who are not usually computer savvy. When somebody comes along with a perfect site, the other companies that have been in the industry already for 20 years that don’t know about SEO probably have websites that are 10 or 15 years old and are not maintaining them. So to come in with a brand new site that has outperformed all the others significantly actually triggers several things with search engines that say that this person is trying too hard, the difference is noticeable.
The best practice is to take a close look at the competition, and you have to assess what they’ve done, how they’ve optimized their sites, so make notes of the things that they’re doing. Make notes of the things that they are not doing and then target being just a couple of steps ahead of them in your efforts to have greater success.
I’ve seen a lot of sites that colleagues launch, and they will show up in the number one position almost immediately, which is what you want. But because they’ve been over-optimized, it only takes a few more days before they end up on page five of the search results. Then they can’t figure out what happened. It’s because they have triggered red flags with the search engines. The red flags are that they have over-optimized the site. They’ve done too much.
Over-optimizing is a dance between SEO and search engines. It’s an art form and a careful balance. It’s a nuance that’s difficult for people to understand that you only want to be a little bit better than the competition.