In talking with a great number of people about their websites and their plans for driving traffic to their site, I’ve noticed a great number of unethical practices in the field of SEO specifically that a number of businesses are falling prey to.
It’s heartbreaking to hear that some company has been paying $1500 a month for an “SEO” campaign by a “well-known expert” and they are looking at their bill 4 months later and they literally have nothing to show for it.
No change made on their website, no new content, no new traffic, nothing. (True story!)
Going into every single one of these unethical practices would probably take me a week, so I thought I would take the time to clear up some of the most common ones and give you a list of Do’s and Don’ts:
If you purchase SEO, you are actually supposed to see results. If someone is saying that they are going to “optimize” your site for more traffic or leads, you should actually be able to see more leads or traffic.
This seems like a no-brainer, but make sure you set up a reporting system that measures the result of your campaign so you can tell whether or not it is working. Otherwise…you don’t know if it’s working.
If you have a reporting system in place, you will be able to see if you are getting real results from your campaign or not. If you are 4 months in and you have no results, you need to drop-kick that company, not wait until your contract is up. For this exact reason, you should also never ever pay upfront for a huge block of time on a campaign.
There is some time needed to see results in SEO, like in any other marketing, but you should be able to see after a month if anything is being done or not. It might start slowly, but a month is a pretty good length of time to judge results and actions by.
Time after time I run into a CEO or businessman who thinks that the thing to do is to spend money on SEO and then fix their website after they get more business from their SEO. What they don’t realize is that the first part of a valid SEO campaign is to get your website up to date and made extremely user-friendly, including optimizing it for use and viewing on phones and tablets. They end up pouring money into their SEO actions only to have visitors leave their site due to poor design. It actually hurts them by driving a large amount of people to a site that presents a bad image for their company.
Your website is the centerpiece of any online campaign. Whether you hire a huge firm to do a multi-channel marketing campaign or you’re just trying to make sure that your word-of-mouth campaign is truly effective, you need to ensure you have a well-built site. A well-built site is like a 24 hours a day, 7 day a week salesperson standing at the front door to your company. All marketing actions will be negatively impacted if that salesperson is hard to understand, deal with or is very unappealing visually, no matter how many people you send to that front door.
Your website is the centerpiece of any online campaign. Whether you hire a huge firm to do a multi-channel marketing campaign or you’re just trying to make sure that your word-of-mouth campaign is truly effective, you need to ensure you have a well-built site. A well-built site is like a 24 hours a day, 7 day a week salesperson standing at the front door to your company. All marketing actions will be negatively impacted if that salesperson is hard to understand, deal with or is very unappealing visually, no matter how many people you send to that front door.
Hopefully this article helps in sorting through the sometimes murky waters of SEO. If you have any further questions, contact us and we’d be happy to clarify any of these concepts and set you on the right path in terms of your online presence and marketing strategy.
