Following any trend blindly can be an awful decision. Not one size fits all! What might work for others doesn’t guarantee a success for you as well.
Why can’t it work? We are competitors! They are of the same size as we are and in the same field! Why doesn’t the same SEO strategy work for us as well?
Let’s look at the pros and cons of investing in SEO.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) arguably has the highest impact on your business as it brings you all the traffic you need in order to generate business. More so if you are into a B2C segment that is highly dependent on traffic coming to your website organically.
While blindly following SEO trends can sometimes be frustrating and fruitless and feels like a dead investment but that is the strategic error you make but following blindly.
If you surf through the net, you will come across a lot of content on why should you go for SEO and how it is beneficial for the business but very few articles on how can you turn this awesome business generating idea into a total waste of money.
What do you need in order to turn your SEO a profitable idea!
Table of Contents
Know a good developer or its No SEO
For your on-page SEO needs, you will need a great developer/SEO strategist who can provide you an in-depth SEO audit of your website and solving the errors is first to step to meet your SEO goals.
Without a good audit and fixing performance issue, you can no longer achieve your goals with just your off-page SEO efforts.
SEO Budgets
Search engine optimization is data-driven and requires accurate and fresh data that involves spending from the company’s end. Hiring a cheap SEO executive, buying a few reports, copying the trends won’t do any good to your business. In fact, you will start losing on your money and business. When the budget is an issue, invest it into doing SEO for fewer hours a month but that should be a quality SEO practice.
There are companies who have ample SEO budget but they try and shrink their budget and when at the end of the year they have some money left over, they think that they have saved quite some money. But in a true sense, it’s a loss-making avenue. The same money could have been invested either to strengthen their SEO activity or add up with some other digital marketing activity in combination to get the digital marketing strategy right.
There are two parts to any plan knowing what to do and executing the same. If you allocate the entire budget in planning for SEO and what and how to do, you might not be left with enough budgets to implement. Always, divide between how much to spend on analysis and how much on implementation.
Pushing too hard, too early!
Understand that SEO is a long-term process and requires time and efforts to achieve goals which generally varies from three to six months; it doesn’t make any sense expecting a quick result within a month. If you can spare only a month, it is suggested to go for any PPC campaign that can bring you traffic right from the word go, but mind you; it can eat up all your marketing budget if not done right.
Understanding Business Model
It is important that your SEO expert understand your business model well in order to bring right traffic to your website. There are a lot of me too SEO executives providing generalized package but without them taking much interest in understanding your business, all you will do is lose more money and business.
Also, not for all business SEO will work. Sharing your business model will let the expert get you to the right digital marketing practice to bring business to you.
Follow the right Trends
One of the simplest ways in which you can lose money is to presume a trend to be industry-specific and not player specific. First, you invest money into wrong SEO trend and pour in additional money to justify your decision.
The focus should be on generating leads and not just traffic. Pre-planned digital marketing strategy can bring you a lot of business that otherwise you will lose to your competitors.
Long-term horizon
Commit your business to SEO for a longer duration and it will surely deliver you’re the expected results. Sometimes, you start expecting more results and become restless but SEO is more like wine; the older it is, the best value it will bring to your business. Let your links and works be crawled well by search engines and see the magic!
Focusing on unwanted KPI’s
It is important that SEO should not be taken up for meeting petty Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) like
- Keyword density
- PageRank sculpting
- Trust Rank anything
- Phony ranking scheme
None of the above factors contribute significantly to the to your webpage getting ranked better in SERP’s. PageRank is a Google’s internal ranking factor and cannot be determined by anyone unless the person is a Google engineer. It is a vague idea to follow such unwanted KPI’s that has got least to do for improvement in website rankings.
Reverse engineering isn’t a way out here like in most of the cases. The database available at helm is massive and to analyze it entirely to reverse engineers requires much more efforts than doing the task logically to attain your goal. The attempt should be made to improvise of rankings with logically KPI’s that are tractable and thus by improving, it will do a lot of good to the website and bring business.
Conclusion
A poor strategy, a hasty decision, a blind follow strategy, inefficient budgeting is some woe to a successful SEO. Set your aim right and follow a strategy to bring good business to your company. If you follow what other’s do, you are sure to lose your business to the others who do it as it is something that worked well for them but might not work for you.
Azin is a SEO master at Marketing Mantra, focusing on business development to extend deals online through increased traffic and conversions. He even likes to share his insight through many articles with Digital Marketing.