Warning: Avoid these Top
SEO Blunders
Search engine optimization is a huge opportunity to generate
website traffic and sales for almost any business. But it is seen as a risky
marketing area by many business owners. The SEO industry seems to be in a
constant state of flux, and there are plenty of stories of wasted money and
misguided consultants.
Without knowing what tactics to put in place to see success and
generate ROI, many business owners avoid SEO entirely or make costly mistakes.
That means missed opportunities and lost business.
Make sure your SEO investment goes where it should! These top
blunders are some of the most costly mistakes marketing departments and
businesses owners make when it comes to SEO. And they are still surprisingly
common. Avoid them and you will already be way ahead of your competition.
Flimsy Outsourcing
For most businesses, outsourcing is the way to go when it comes
to SEO. Interns lack the experience they need without experienced leadership,
and hiring a senior SEO marketer gets expensive quickly.
Outsourcing can work great when you do it right. But there are
some pretty big mistakes that can be made. Be sure that you are asking your
agency the right questions, even if they come highly recommended.
You need to know what the firm will do for you and and your business
on a tactical level. If you are involved with an SEO agency that refuses to
tell you what tactics they are using for your campaign, be very concerned. The
reason they may not be sharing this important information is because they are
afraid you will disagree with their tactics or find them to be risky and
potentially harmful for your company.
A reliable SEO firm will not only tell you what they will
accomplish for you and the ROI you can expect, but they will also explain how
it is done. You don’t have to become an expert to understand it, but it is
important to work with an agency that is transparent and willing to show you
how they accomplish goals. You should have a project plan from your SEO agency
and understand roughly what it means.
Good SEO agencies also care a lot about the big picture. They
don’t operate in a vaccuum, doing all their SEO work in a silo. SEO should be
integrated with many different pieces of your business including marketing, PR,
and branding. Sales, content marketing and your online social media presence
all come into play. If your agency is not seeking to coordinate with these
other areas, they are missing a lot of opportunities.
Questionable Link Building
Link building in and of itself is a huge part of search engine
optimization. According to
some studies, link building factors account
for up to 56% of search engine ranking algorithms. A good SEO campaign is not
complete without some facet of link building. However, there is a lot to link
building that has no impact on rankings or can actually harming your SEO
efforts.
One of these harmful tactics is using exact match anchor text
as you build links. Exact match link building happens when you want to rank on
Google for a term like “website design,” so you build links to your site that
says exactly “website design.” This used to work, but I have to be honest - it
does not work anymore! Exact match
anchor links can actually harm your rankings today and will seriously harm your
rankings in the future. There is
a lot to be said about exact match link
building, but let’s keep this simple: Avoid it!
There are other forms of link building that have been harmful
for a long time and are a bit more obvious: Link farms (pages with hundreds of
unrelated links), link exchanges (“link to me and I’ll link to you”), generic
link directories, spamming for links and links in computer generated content.
Avoid it all!
This is another great reason to know what your SEO agency is
doing for you. Many agencies still use these “black hat” link building
strategies without even telling their customers. Even JC Penney and Overstock.com
were penalized (and lost millions) because of the questionable link building
their agencies did on their behalf!
Search engines are looking for natural links. Matt Cutts,
Google’s spam chief, says that “We try to reflect the real-world importance of
things as we see that reflected in the web.” They are looking for websites that
are authentically popular with real people. To that end, you should try to get
people to talk about (and link to) the great content that you are publishing.
Focus on the basics to earn natural links. Update your blog
regularly with in-depth resources, industry studies, guides and how-to’s -- content
that people link to. Find real people that want to read and share this type of
content in your industry. Get to know them, find a way to help them out, and
then (politely) ask for a link.
Bonus link building tip: You probably already have friends,
colleagues, clients or vendors that would be happy to link to you, if you only
asked.
Over Optimization
Another tactic that used to be a standard SEO strategy is
keyword stuffing. Let’s say that you want to rank for “website design” again.
The old theory said that the more you could stuff the words “website design” on
to your page, the better it would rank. Today, search engines easily catch this
“over optimization.” It’s not hard for them to see when a keyword is
unnaturally overused on your website.
Over optimization applies to any attempt to “force” your
website to rank better by manipulating one or multiple SEO tactics. For
effective and future-proof SEO campaigns, it is important to balance the needs
of optimizing your website for search engines and making your site appealing to
real people.
Take keyword stuffing for example. Search engines need to see
keywords on your website to know what your website is about. Search engines
also want to see variations and synonyms of that keyword. But people also need
to read that content and be convinced that you are an expert in your field. The
solution is actually stupid-simple. Write good content on or about your target
keywords. If you hire writers, look for experienced authors in your field and
ask for great content. Including specific keywords should be the afterthought,
not the main focus. Awesome content will go much further than keyword-stuffed
content.
What is the big lesson to learn from all this? You can’t just
throw money at SEO and expect it to work. And you can’t “trick” search engines
anymore, either!
Smart SEO investments can still generate massive returns. A
huge, growing portion of online traffic is being scooped up by well optimized
websites. Make sure your site is earning the traffic it deserves!
Nate Dame is founder and chief strategist at
SEOperks,
a boutique search engine optimization agency. He has led efforts on a wide
variety of SEO campaigns including Sketchers USA and Grasshopper.com. He is also
an author, speaker, trainer and consultant, as well as an avid family man and
active member of multiple non-profits. When not crafting campaigns, he enjoys
relaxing with his wife and two-year-old son at their home in Lake Geneva,
Wisconsin.
