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Want to avoid putting your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) campaign on life support?
It might help to know what can result if you can’t keep up with the rapidly growing industry tools (free and expensive) or can’t set your ego aside. Here are 12 sure-fire ways to legally kill your strategy. The death watch will vary depending on how much you emphasize each:
1. Assume Responsibilities You Can’t Handle
I’ve been working with online marketing since 1997. Believe me, it’s getting tougher to keep up with each facet.
Key team members at Fathom SEO keep my head above water so I can see what’s going on around me.
If you’re new to this (or if you’ve been messing around awhile), take a long look in the mirror and decide if you’re really cut out for search engine optimization. Do you know the tactics and the language of the field? SERPs aren’t drinks. They’re fun to look at, but don’t mean a whole lot until they’re united with more useful data. Natural search engine optimization will fail (or at least fall incredibly short of its potential) if you’re also busy doing paid search, writing an annual report, working on media relations, keeping up with summer re-runs, evaluating web analytics, appeasing clients/co-workers and buying print ads.
2. Resist Holistic Thinking
Turf battles are kind of fun to watch, but being a player isn’t a joy. Website marketers want link love, but they have to give love too. Need to frame this thinking with a mental picture? If you’re old, think Hands Across America (circa 1986). Otherwise, crowd surfing will do (everyone’s a friend).
Share keyword research, traffic data, creative and other information with other folks on your team. You are on the same team, right? For example, the marketing folks running the paid search campaigns can’t lock themselves in a silo while the website development staffers try to get higher natural rankings in their separate silo. Both teams can do better by cooperating.
3. Put ROI Improvements on the Back Burner
Rankings and traffic are just the start. Heck, even web analytics has limits. How sound is your company’s ROI strategy? Is someone really using page views as your Key Performance Indicator (KPI)? I hope that’s not the main KPI.
How well do your natural search engine optimization efforts correspond with your company’s ROI initiatives?
Ultimately, it’s about brand, lead generation, sales and the bottom line. Do you have a compelling message? Is your phone number visible? What fonts are you using? How crowded is your page? How are you tracking leads with technology? Do human beings even ask how a caller found the website? Are you using separate phone numbers to have more precise tracking?
4. Keep Ego in the Clouds. Fail to Lock It in the Closet.
Maybe you know how to do some things, but not others. Admit it and move on. Where can you do the most damage? Keyword selection.
If your website is new, has few pages and no link bait, what do you expect? The results of keyword search volume can be captivating. Mature adults start saying things “Gimme.” Yep, I see it all of the time. When I show someone extensive search data, they skip the longtails they may be in a position to rank for and push only for search terms people use more frequently.
They’re not always interested in whether their website has enough going for it to rank for these highly competitive keywords. “Too competitive” aren’t words anyone wants to hear me say. I’m working on a professional way to say: “YOU DON’T DESERVE THAT KEYWORD.”
Go for less competitive keywords and see how they perform. If you earn a gold sticker for those, you can move to a higher grade. Hint: Include a few extremely competitive keywords in your mix early on so you can see how they perform over time. Invariably, they also can influence the performance of other search terms. Longer search terms get less traffic, but they improve the odds of higher conversions. You’ll never determine your best scenario unless you test.
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