SEO myths vs truths: Lessons from our first marketing analytics masterclass
When I first got into SEO, I thought it was just about picking the right keywords, writing great content, and watching it rank on the result pages.
Simple, right? Turns out that approach is so outdated it might as well be from 2002.
In the SEO analytics session of our recent masterclass, led by global SEO expert Veruska Anconitano, I realized just how much more there is to SEO, especially the analytics and technical aspects.
If you’re new to SEO or still treating it like a content checklist, this reflective piece will help you:
Let’s get into it.
Why marketing analytics is a priority
Everyone says you need to understand marketing analytics. And they’re right. It helps you:
Target the right audience
Deliver relevant and personalized messages to your customers
Identify what’s working for you, what’s not, and where to focus your marketing efforts
Earn stakeholder buy-in for your projects and campaigns
But beyond those talking points, understanding analytics is key to your growth and career longevity. Here’s how I see it now:
1. It expands your skill set
Understanding analytics helps you think strategically. It moves you a step further beyond just creating content or campaigns. You learn how to collect the right data, measure what’s working, and make smarter decisions.
With AI shifting how we work, marketers with specialized, data-informed skills won’t be replaced. They’ll lead.
2. It increases your value as a marketer
When you can tie your work to tangible outcomes like traffic, leads, revenue, you become more valuable to employers or clients. It makes you come off as a more strategic and result-driven marketer.
For instance, if you’re an in-house marketer, you’re able to negotiate better compensation, attract high-paying roles, or even move up in your career. And if you’re a freelance marketer, you stop being “just a content writer” and start being seen as a growth partner.
Brands that understand your worth will gladly pay you for a comprehensive service rather than giving you one-off tasks.
3. Prepares you for the future of work in marketing
Marketing is becoming more data-driven by the day. Whether it’s AI, user behavior, or performance tracking, analytics is at the center. Learning it now means you’ll be prepared for what’s to come.
4 SEO myths we busted at the masterclass
Here’s what I believed versus what I now know to be true.
Myth 1: SEO is keyword research and writing
According to widespread myth, SEO is all about keyword research, scouring the internet to see what people are searching for and creating content around it. This, according to Veruska, is the biggest misconception people have about SEO.
Truth: Writing isn’t SEO; it supports SEO
Writing doesn't equal SEO. As a marketer, you support SEO by doing keyword research, writing, translating, and creating website pages.
Veruska put it clearly:
“SEO is tech and data. Tech— because the foundation of a good website is a solid technical structure. And data— because it provides you with real proof that search engine optimization and ranking work which, in turn, helps you to keep your job.”
I used to think that data was only about traffic, often worrying about questions such as:
Are page views increasing?
Are blog posts performing well?
Are people clicking and engaging?
If you’ve been in this situation, you know how anxiety-inducing it can be.
But real SEO isn’t solely about creating great content. It also involves understanding common metrics— total users, sessions, CTR, event counts, bounce rates, conversions—and how they all connect to your site’s structure. This means taking a holistic view of the website as an entity rather than focusing on individual blog posts or pages.
As Freelance content marketer Blessing Onyegbula shared:
“One takeaway I’m excited to put into practice is rethinking my approach to SEO, to pay more attention to the technical bits to ensure I get the best results from it. I’ve always been fixated on the content aspect, but relearning all the tiny details that impact a site’s searchability and ranking was eye-opening.”
Like I said, it wasn’t just me.
Myth 2: More content equals better SEO
It’s never been easier to create content. Even with AI, assuming that more content automatically leads to more traffic is risky.
Truth: Quality content is only effective if your foundation is solid
Creating high-quality content that meets and even exceeds user expectations is great for your SEO. But that’s not all.
Think of your website like a house. Your content is the beautifully designed interior that makes people want to stay, explore, and return. But without a solid structure or foundation, it doesn’t matter how nice the furniture is.
That’s where technical SEO comes in. It ensures your content is easy to find, fast to load, and accessible to both users and search engines.
Highlighting the importance of a website’s technical structure on its content, Versuska says:
“Even if you produce amazing content and create many landing pages that are super optimized, if your website is not technically excellent, it'll never move from being a normal website to an SEO powerhouse.
The foundation of SEO is technical, so the more technical information you can input into your website, the more data you get, and the better outcomes you'll get from generative AI and search engines.”
Myth 3: Domain authority is a ranking factor
Comparing your DA with bigger, more established brands can trigger unnecessary anxiety. If you’ve never felt bad over your score, then you’re a stronger marketer than I am.
Yet, is DA really a ranking factor?
Truth: Domain Authority is a third-party metric not a Google ranking factor
Domain Authority is not an official SEO ranking factor. It’s a third-party estimate created by Moz. Ahrefs uses Domain Rating while Semrush uses Authority Score. DA predicts how likely a domain is to rank, mostly based on its backlink profiles.
According to Veruska, Google doesn’t use DA in its algorithms but it’s still useful, especially if your website is in its early stages of SEO.
If you're starting, DA gives you a sense of how much authority you need to build in your niche to be considered an authority.
When to care about DA:
To compare your site with competitors
To guide link-building efforts
To target keywords that aren’t dominated by high-DA domains
So don’t obsess over it but don’t ignore it either.
Myth 4: Technical SEO is not for marketers
I’ve heard variations of the expression: “I'm a marketer, not a developer. I don't need to understand technical SEO.”
I’ve never said this out loud, but I’ve thought it too. Many marketers have.
Hand the average content marketer an on-page SEO task and they won’t break a sweat. But mention technical SEO, and many will hesitate or feel out of their depth. The reason is clear: writing is comfortable. Technical SEO isn’t.
Truth: You don’t have to be a technical SEO guru but you do need to understand the basics
If you’re in a marketing team, a good knowledge of technical SEO can help you maintain a healthy website that search engines can crawl easily. And really, there's no point in creating the most thorough, relevant and quality content if your audience can't see it and take your desired action.
Here’s why technical SEO matters:
1. To improve the crawlability and indexability of your website: Google bots can easily discover, crawl, and index your website pages quickly and correctly. This can significantly improve your organic traffic.
2. To boost website speed and performance: If your website is fast and responsive when visitors navigate it, it increases user satisfaction. Conversely, if your website is slow and complicated, visitors will drop off, which will affect your traffic.
3. To optimize for mobile user experience: Over 63% of website traffic comes from mobile devices. To keep up, Google now uses the mobile version of a site for indexing and crawling. So they recommend making your website mobile-friendly and responsive to give visitors a stellar experience.
Core SEO metrics to track
Not all metrics are created equal. Some just feel good but can’t explain important business outcomes like ROI or customer lifetime value.
An example of this is the page views. At one time, I used to obsess over those numbers because I thought that high page views were an indicator of a high-performing website, but that’s not always the case.
Here are the top SEO metrics I focus on now:
1. Indexed pages and crawlability
If Google can't see, crawl or index your website, it won't rank it. So if your website structure is in good shape, it’s easier for search engines to find, understand, and arrange the material on it.
2. Organic traffic
Shows how many users find your website through the search engines. A steady decline in organic traffic over time could signify a technical issue.
3. Click-through rate
At a basic level, CTR measures how compelling your title, meta description are, and whether your content fulfils search intent.
4. Bounce rate
Helps you assess whether your content matches search intent.
5. Keyword rankings and visibility
Tells you how your site is performing in the SERPs. It helps you identify keyword position changes and spot gaps you can explore for better ranking.
6 best marketing analytics tools for SEOs
The following are instructor-recommended tools that can help you identify, diagnose and fix your website’s technical issues that may be killing your content performance.
1. Google Search Console
GSC helps you track impressions, clicks, CTR, position, and indexing issues on your website. It lets you identify low-lift opportunities to optimize content performance.
Pricing: Free
2. Google Analytics
GA4 measures engagement, conversion paths, traffic breakdowns, and insights into user behavior across your platform.
Pricing: Free
3. Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Screaming Frog Spider is a website crawler that helps you assess and improve onsite SEO by auditing for common SEO issues. It allows you to find broken links and duplicate pages, create sitemaps, and visualize your site’s architecture.
Pricing: Free download available. Premium plan is €245/year
4. Ahrefs Webmaster Tools
Beyond providing insights into your brand's visibility, keyword rankings, backlinks, and organic traffic for content SEO, Ahrefs Webmaster Tools provide off-page SEO data.
Its site audit feature can crawl your website (if it’s verified) to find technical SEO issues like broken links, slow-loading pages, and missing tags and gives you suggestions to fix them.
Pricing: Free
5. Semrush
Semrush is an SEO tool suite that helps you improve your SEO efforts. With it, you can conduct keyword research, perform site audits, monitor referring domains and backlinks, compare your domain to your competitors, etc.
Pricing: Free version available. Pro starts at $139/month
6. Hotjar
Uses heatmaps, session recordings, and user feedback to show how visitors interact with your website. It gives you an overview of friction and drop-off points for better optimization.
Pricing: Free version available. Paid plan starts at $49/month
Case study: How I applied my learnings on SEO analytics
Knowing the right tools is one thing; using them in real scenarios is another.
Here's a real scenario I faced a couple of months ago: Our website's organic traffic dropped by 30% in under 3 months. My task was to use data to figure out what happened.
What I did at first: A bunch of things like focusing on publishing more relevant content, refreshing old blog posts, and generally drowning in anxiety. These didn't have as much impact as I expected.
Putting technical SEO knowledge in practice
I’ll be honest; it wasn’t a breeze. It was both exciting and overwhelming. Exciting because I couldn’t wait to weed out the problems that were making our website underperform, and overwhelming because my attention was scattered in different directions.
Luckily, I had access to our SEO instructor’s checklist. That helped me narrow down what I needed to focus on one at a time.
Having got my checklist, I used:
GA4 to check traffic trends and identify the date range of the drop
Google Search Console indexing report plus the Ubersuggest tool to check for sudden de-indexed pages and error pages
GSC to compare metrics: clicks, impressions, average position keyword or snippet changes
Screaming Frog Spider and Ahrefs Webmaster Tools to audit and improve on-site SEO issues
Hotjar's recordings and heatmap to find landing pages where users drop off the most
The results?
Let me mention here that SEO is a long game.
This means that the outcomes of SEO efforts are not readily apparent. And while there’s no hard and fast rule, SEO experts generally agree that it takes up to three to six months for SEO to show results.
While I’m still tracking results, I’ll be publishing a full breakdown soon. Stay tuned.
Our founder, Aisha Owolabi, once said: “As a marketer, your job isn’t to have all the answers. It’s not to have the perfect strategy. Your job is to look at all the available information, make a decision that is as data-driven as much as you can, and then experiment, test, learn and continue to improve.”
She shared why having this mindset is important.
“The first is that it removes that pressure to feel like you need to figure things out immediately, to feel like your content isn’t working, and then you go into a state of panic. It’s fine. It’s okay if your content isn’t performing. It just means that you need to look at the data, experiment with something else. And research some more.
The second thing is that the mindset gives you that willingness and opportunity to keep testing and keep iterating.”
All of this is to say that knowing how to collect, interpret, analyze and experiment with data effectively can transform you from an anxious marketer into a more confident one, allowing you to make decisions that’ll have a real impact on business goals.
Ready to get smarter with SEO analytics?
Want a first-hand understanding of the SEO analytics masterclass? Watch the masterclass video to learn from social media, product, and data reporting experts. You’ll also get:
Templates & checklists
Instructor slide decks
Access to our analytics resource library
