Top Growth Hacking Ideas for SMEs And Common SEO Myths to Avoid in 2020

Sometimes companies spend one year after another just to find that right growth hacking idea that could boost the revenue of the company quicker. That one right growth hacking step taken in the organization may work hundreds or even thousands of times better than all the regular strategy and planning of the company put together.

But generating growth hacking ideas is not the main challenge, producing the right idea at the right time is. With the implementation of the right growth hacking idea as well as optimized SEO content, a company can easily learn to work smarter rather than harder. And with the rise in popularity of growth hacking idea application, there are also some growth hacking and SEO myth that needs to be avoided at any cost. Otherwise, all your great ideas to increase the profit of your company might just be meaningless and ineffective.

Here is an excellent infographic shared in Slideshare by marketingmasala.com that explains the real idea of Growth Hacking Funnel for a startup.

Now let’s find out in a detailed discussion below about the general mindset of Growth Hacking, its common and the SEO myths to be avoided in this century right here.

So let’s dive in.

The Natural Mindset of Growth Hacking

The idea of growth hacking isn’t confined to just one person who is known as a growth hacker in the company. It is created for the whole company and everyone should be involved in it. This is the kind of mindset that should be maintained as a tradition in every department of a company or even for startup companies that want to adapt to this mindset.

Many people confuse the idea of a growth hacking mindset with marketing. Whereas both of them defies a certain different set of mindset. And it is referred to as growth hacking even when:

• An idea improves the efficiency of the overall team by at least 2 times
• A small CTA in emails or blogs increases site traffic or sales substantially
• Any small changes such as changing the hosting service or Internet Service Provider (ISP) improve the overall revenue of the company
• Instant leads are acquired by the developers via other’s API
• The whole team get encouraged to invent new ideas due to rewarding the one who produced the maximum number of growth hacking ideas

Growth Hacking Myths

Being First in the Market Is the Key

Most people out there think, that if you introduce a new type of product or service in the market before anyone else, then you have the best chance of being successful with it. This is not true at all.

Similar concept to Facebook, UBER, Dropbox was launched even before them but none of them lasted and shown a constant decline in customer or user over the years. So being first in the market doesn’t always guarantee you permanent leadership in business and is definitely not the secret key to success.

Great Product Means Better Business Growth

Many believe having a great product would automatically make your business rocket high. The current giants in the business have this mindset. Whereas in reality in today’s time developing a good product having all the updated and latest features of other popular products isn’t that difficult to make.

But this doesn’t ensure improvement in business growth. With all the resources and data available, nowadays a good product can be developed and cloned just within a week not even in years or months. You can even buy a copied product similar to Facebook/Twitter even with better design and features within a few bucks. But those sites have almost zero user base so this proves a great product doesn’t always mean great success.

There Must Be a Secret for Instant Business Success

A bigger chunk of people feels that there must be one magical secret that has turned the fate of company’s like Facebook, Uber, Twitter into gold dust overnight. This is never the case when anyone analyses it deeply.

As a matter of fact, companies had to test and go through hundreds and thousands of growth hacking ideas before they could actually see the face of success. Almost 80% of those experiments fail flat on its face. Even those 20% of successful A/B tests help the company’s growth by a smaller percent only. But at the end of the year, even those combined a small percentage of successful growth hacking tests put together can reflect an enormous overall growth in the business.

Growth Can Be Hacked for Everything

Another very common misconception about growth hacking is that people often think there is a hack for everything. They think simply hire a skilled growth hacker and you are all set to get your business sky-high.

But the reality is far from this idea. In fact, you can’t just hack the growth even for the simplest of things as it doesn’t work that way. For a growth hacking plan to work, you are required to reach & accomplish a certain market fit and popularity first before your growth hacking strategy actually starts to show a positive result.

Being Qualified Is Mandatory to Become a Growth Hacker

Many people have the wrong idea that all growth hacker needs to be certified before they could actually crack the real code of hacking any growth ideas. This is not true either.

Let’s get one thing very clear, anyone with a specific set of minds can become a growth hacker and they don’t need to hold any special growth-related certificate for it. And it is true that only a small percentage of a marketer has that kind of mindset. So it becomes really essential for the company to identify this special quality in their marketer and appoint them accordingly in charge of generating growth hacking ideas.

Growth Hacks Can Be Cracked as a Lone Wolf

Sometimes there is a running idea among people that people can hack the growth of a company alone without the help of anyone else. Now this theory is nothing short of a false concept. For executing a successful campaign, working alone is never a good idea. You need to work with your teammates or business associates being on the same page. This will improve your chance to convert your failure to a success story for your company.

A more practical example can be the idea produced by Spotify of integrating their songs in the Facebook news feed. This was done to compete against that time’s business leader Pandora. They have slowly made a loyal user-base grow through it to make them habituated with the listening habits to Spotify. It was a calculative risk taken by them which really paid off in the end.

Acquiring New Users Is the Sole Objective of Growth Hacking

In a more common scenario, people tend to feel that the main purpose of growth hacking is to obtain new users. It is not only about that. It is also about improving the user experience.

Trying to focus on encouraging the existing user to use the free demo can also improve the revenue by a number of times in just 2-3 months. So even without trying too hard to gain more traffic to acquire more users, you will be able to boost your overall profit. And this can be possible even by improving the user experience by pushing them to try the free-trials of your products or services.

Every Customer Is Your Customer

This one is another very popular myth about growth hacking that refers to thinking everyone out there is their customer. Not every one that interacts with you is interested in your product. This is very true when it comes to producing hacking ideas for business growth.

In order to have steady growth, first of all as a small to the medium-sized business you need to identify your potential customers rather than considering everyone that communicates with you as your customer. And one great way to judge that is by creating an imaginative character of your ideal customer. You will need to form a buyer persona by including its demographic information, interest, buying habit, salary range, job title and other supporting relevant information to orchestrate the best nature of your potential customer in front of you. This is how you can design your best campaign understanding the real nature and buying habits of your potential customer.

SEO Mistakes That Harm Your Site Ranking

The essentiality of optimized Search Engine Optimization is a never-ending ongoing process. It is something that you track and keep improving on a regular basis. But sometimes we tend to make some really rookie SEO mistakes overlooking some of the usual ones very easily. So what are those mistake that is hurting our website’s ranking? Let’s find out:

• Low Quality & Duplicate Content
• Slower site loading speed
• Non-responsive or Not Mobile optimized
• Not following an internal linking format
• Overlooking the alt/title tags, meta descriptions
• Using erratic focus keyword
• Overuse and wrong search intended keywords
• Not SE optimized for local search
• Irrelevant link building
• Not emphasizing on user-experience
• Keeping old & outdated content for too long
• Linking content to below-average sites
• Unfixed broken links
• Using too many similar CTA’s
• Not tracking the results at all

Common SEO Myths to Avoid

There is countless information regarding Search Engine Optimization and its development available online. Those reports and information are all waiting for your attention all the time. Those things are termed as SEO myths and in most cases provide vague info that comes in of no use when it comes to designing the websites. Many people just simply believe those myths blindly and apply in their websites hoping it would improve the SEO of their site or content. But in reality, those SEO tips doesn’t have much impact in ranking those sites.

So what are some of those common SEO myths that need to be avoided for better SEO results? Let’s find out.

No SEO Required When You Have Good-Quality Content

Many people tend to think that high-quality content would just sell itself. And you do not need to make it SEO-friendly based on your site. Now, this is a myth that doesn’t have any valid proof to back it up.

Even though it is true that compared to low-grade content, good quality and resourceful content sometimes play a big role in ranking the site higher in search engines but that is not the only thing responsible for it. It can be termed as an exception when low-quality content with good SEO ranks better in the search engine.

But in reality, a site that ranks higher in the search engine always holds content that is highly useful and solid resource-wise. Those site’s content is also rich with nicely optimized images, headings with focus keywords, a moderate amount of external and internal linking and much more. More effectively, it has some really good and well-tuned on-page search engine optimization. Now executing these things are not that tough to do. It only takes a few minutes more to rightly utilize the focus keyword or optimize the site content. This, in the long run, can prove to be really beneficial for the ranking of the site.

With Quality Content, Backlinks Come Naturally

Now another common myth of SEO refers to its backlinking grid. Many people think that the process of acquiring backlinks must be automatic and it should come naturally with every quality content.

But the truth is far from it. Many sites seem to follow this myth without even checking the background of it. Nobody knows how it got started but when it comes to achieving backlinks, even in 2020 it is still a major factor that decides how well your site will rank and perform in the result of search engine.

Though it is true that due to making the whole process and the algorithm complicated by Google, simply ranking via backlinks in 2020 has become harder than before. But quality backlinks still plays it part into helping to rank a site better in search engine even today. Over time, the effectiveness of poor backlinks has diminished. Now focusing on attaining highest-quality backlinks from the well-ranked site producing quality content is a highly essential thing when it comes to improving the rank of the site in all the popular search engines.

SEO Doesn’t Provide Measurable ROI as Compare to Paid Ads

There is a popular myth that as far as the ROI of a business site is concerned, SEO never provides any in terms of bringing enough return on investment. Now, this is so not true at all. But when the matter of fact is, there are thousands of companies that still believe that SEO is a complete waste of time and money.

Though it is indeed not possible to find out why people tend to believe in this myth. But the truth here is that companies would rather spend thousands of dollars on paid ads than reforming its SEO structure to improve site ranking.

Most people think the ROI from SEO isn’t calculable. And the truth is the ROI from SEO is quite measurable just like the paid ads. But the site owner doesn’t really realize the fact that they are missing out on a great opportunity to improve the ROI of their business putting the same effort for search engine optimization. Though the result might not come instantly but surely after a certain period of time you will start to see its positive effect. More importantly, after a while, it would be trackable just like all your paid ads.

The reason SEO takes a little bit longer time to show its ROI result is that through good search engine optimized content you earn slowly but throughout the year. On the other hand in case of paid ads, once any potential customer clicks on the ads through paid services like Adwords then your invested money is gone forever whether you make a sale or not.

Boost Your Business With the Right SEO and Growth Hacking Strategy

As you can see that there can be a lot of unrealistic and illogical myths in regards to growth hacking and SEO strategy making. So it becomes highly imperative that you don’t just believe anything that other so-called growth hackers and the SEO master claim over online. You need to make your own judgment of what would make sense in terms of utilizing the SEO and growth hacking tricks effectively.

And when it comes to understanding the best possible way to boost your business process then there can be no better way than using the right resources like reading the book like How I Create Growth Hacking Plans by Alladin Happy or join some exclusive online courses that actually discuss real validates its reason for growth hacking and SEO strategy. This would efficiently enable you to learn the real meaning and importance of growth hacking and effective search engine optimization of site and content.

Especially, if you are running an active e-commerce site or an online marketplace like DOKAN. Then optimizing your online store according to the search engine becomes really important. Moreover, you might need to apply a number of growth hacking ideas to boost your online business as well. So this is why identifying an authentic source of such information becomes an obvious necessity. Failing to evoke the right information may just halt your business growth for an indefinite period of time. And we wouldn’t want that now, would we?

What are the growth hacking and SEO myths that you always believed in? Let us know in the comment section below.