Loading...SEO, or search engine optimisation is something that a lot of businesses manage to get wrong. This is hardly surprising when you look at just how difficult it is to get SEO done right. It doesn’t matter if you are working in a business that has a high end office in London or somewhere like offices in Sunderland, businesses will still manage to get it wrong.
They Don’t Consider It Separate To Offline Marketing
One of the biggest problems that any company looking to dive into the world of SEO for the first time faces is for the offline team to go against the idea of SEO and refuse to co-operate. In a traditional business it has always been the offline side of the company that has brought in all of the business via channels such as television advertising, newspaper advertising and through close contacts in the industry.
Once an online budget comes into the equation a lot of high executive people in charge of the offline campaign start get a bit worried as they feel that an online budget would get in the way of the focus online. Even if a budget can be agreed upon you will often find that the way the campaign is put together is still very much with an “offline” frame of mind, this makes implementation of a successful SEO strategy incredibly difficult.
Ideally you want the offline team to be working in sync with the online team and an SEO company or in-house team. This means that a 12 month road-plan can be put together between all three parties and spikes in traffic on Google Analytics or other tools (Omniture etc) can be easily pinpointed to the correct event.
I have often seen companies worry about why one month is severely down in traffic compared to the previous year, blame the online team when in fact it is because an offline campaign was implemented the previous year and not in the current year.
Working all of the teams together is the real key to success.
They Choose The Cheapest Company
Even big companies with lots of budget to spend will often jump onto the SEO bandwagon without even researching what they are doing. This often results in the decision maker of the company choosing an SEO company that is cheap rather than an SEO company that is more expensive but produces reports and works on an strategy with the company in order to succeed.
Often you will find that cheaper SEO companies will just sit there and automate links to the site, this may be good in the short term but in the long term it will potentially get your site looked at by Google and if you haven’t been using legitimate tactics, you could be removed from the organic search listings.
Do research into the company you are thinking about using and don’t be afraid to contact the owners of the businesses that have allowed case studies to appear, they can offer you some good feedback.
Fail To Listen To Advice & Implement Changes
The point of hiring an SEO company or in-house team is so that you can get the expert advice you need in order to advance your company for the relevant key phrases in the organic SERPs. In order to do this you will find that SEOs have a lot of onsite recommendations that need to be implemented in order for the campaign to succeed.
A lot of businesses seem to have the opinion that it is not up to an SEO to decide on what onsite changes need to be made and will flat out refuse to implement changes that are suggested. Alternatively it could be that once again you have the offline and online team arguing it out and deciding on the change that has been suggested.
A successful campaign will implement any suggestion that an SEO suggests but in a business’s defence, discussion needs to occur on every single point.
They Don’t Have A Content Strategy
This is more of an issue that comes with ecommerce sites than anything else and I cannot tell you how many sites I have come across (not through working with) that simply take the product description from the manufacturer’s site and just stick it on their own site. This might sound like a time saving thing to do but in the long run what it results in is mass duplication across the site, something that search engines don’t take very kindly to.
Working with SEO to not only create a content strategy around removing duplication from the site but also working on linkbait ideas and ensuring the site has regular blog posts is certainly going to do your business some good.
Ensure that your business is doing the right thing by avoiding doing these four things and you will find your overall search strategy starts to fall into place!