The SEO industry is ever- changing, and it’s important for business owners to keep up so that you maintain your high rankings. Struggling with how to get featured on the first page and don’t know what you’re doing wrong? Check out these 5 helpful SEO blog posts that were released this month and see what you can learn!

1. 20 Reasons Your Business is Failing at SEO, and How to Fix

This blog post from Forbes focuses on the variety of reasons why your business may be struggling with SEO; it also gives helpful tips on how to fix each common mistake. One reason it’s helpful is because the topic itself is very relevant for a lot of small business owners. It’s not uncommon for entrepreneurs to be spending a ton of time and effort into increasing their SEO rankings, only to find themselves stuck on page 2 every day while their competitors are thriving.

The article discusses SEO no-no’s like expecting results too quickly, not incorporating social media, targeting keywords that are too competitive, not checking for broken links, and not consulting analytic software. They go in depth into 20 different tips, so chances are you’ll be able to identify with at least one or two. Even if you’re not making these mistakes with your business, you still might be able to learn a thing or two from the numerous tips they suggest, including: increasing the length of your content, optimizing long-tail keywords, incorporating more outbound links, and customizing sitelinks. Lastly, the article links to a variety of other helpful articles within each category to give you more points of reference with which to consult.

2. 15 #MarketingNerds Episodes to Accompany Our New SEO Guide

Search Engine Journal released this blog post to go along with a new SEO guide they collaborated on with industry experts for 2016. The actual guide is pretty lengthy, and so in this article they listed various SEO podcast episodes that users can listen to when they’re on the move. They’re not meant to take the place of reading the guide, but more to supplement the information present in the guide in a more user-friendly manner. It’s definitely easier to throw on a short podcast when you’re driving around running errands as opposed to finding a chunk of time to block off and devote to reading. The podcasts themselves are broken up into these categories: SEO Basics, Strategic Thinking and Tactics for SEO, and Getting More Value Out of Your SEO Campaigns, and there are 5 podcasts for each category. Most of the episodes are around 20-25 minutes, with the longest one being 45 minutes, so it’s definitely reasonable to expect to get through a couple each day, thus increasing your knowledge of SEO!

3. SEJ Survey: What SEO Project are Your Working On?

Search Engine Journal also put out another blog post stemming from a recent survey they conducted asking users what types of SEO projects they’re currently working on. The post itself discusses why they created the survey (the SEO industry is changing and they felt that users could learn from each other), how exactly they put it together (they sent an email to 215 SEO marketers), and the tremendous results they received. They broke the responses down into several categories, including: Where is the Majority of Your Time Spent?, What SEO Tasks Do You Spend Most of Your Day Working On?, What are Your Biggest SEO Challenges Right Now?, and What are Your Current Aspirations for SEO?, among others.

They included helpful quotes straight from the responses of the marketers, and they linked each person’s name to their Twitter account in case you were interested in following more of their posts. They summarized the data in color pie charts to make it easy to read and understand, and the post ends with a conclusion wrapping up the most important things to take away from the survey (and the article). In all, it’s a win-win for anyone interested in learning more about SEO from their talented colleagues.

4. 5 SEO Techniques You’re Doing All Wrong

Entrepreneur.com is one of my favorite websites (and blogs) for everything business-related, and they didn’t disappoint with this article about 5 techniques business owners might be doing incorrectly when it comes to SEO. They discuss stuffing keywords and targeting the wrong words, how anchor text can get you in trouble, the importance of captions to go along with images, link strategy, and the best way to engage with users on social media. Because they only discuss 5 tips, they go into each one in depth, explaining exactly what entrepreneurs do that is incorrect, why it’s wrong, and how to correct the mistakes. The article links to a ton of other helpful websites and posts as well in case you’re interested in reading more on a particular topic, or in case you identify something you are doing incorrectly and want more information on how to fix it. Even if you don’t think there’s anything wrong with your SEO strategy, you might be able to pick up a few helpful tips from this article that you didn’t even know you needed. Definitely worth a read.

5. Weird, Crazy Myths About Link Building in SEO You Should Probably Ignore – Whiteboard Friday

This article from Moz.com details myths regarding link building and SEO that people believe but shouldn’t, because they’re myths. This post is from their “Whiteboard Friday” series where the actual content is actually put into a video and narrated by the author while he writes key information on a whiteboard. If you’re like me though and not really into watching videos, you’re in luck; underneath the video is the entire transcription, as well as a summary of everything that spoken about, so you’re free to read instead of watch without missing out on any valuable details (though you will miss the color-coordinated markers and the visualization present in the video). The article talks mostly about where you shouldn’t get links from (directories and sites with a lower domain authority than your own) as well as why you shouldn’t get links too quickly, link to other sites, or ask for a link directly (among others). They explain why these are SEO faux pas and what steps you can take instead. There are 8 tips total and all are worth reading about (or watching) if link building is a source of struggle for your SEO campaign.

Now that you’re up to date with what’s going on in the SEO industry this week, how are you going to apply these new facts to your marketing campaign? Which article are you going to check out first? Do you know any other good ones that came out this week that aren’t discussed above? Comment in the section below and let us know what you’ve found.