5 Reasons Your SEO Campaign Sucks
Putting together an effective SEO campaign is a great way to bring traffic to your site - how else would Bob in Milwaukee find out about your great page on Viagra? Here’s a list of five things that will cause your SEO campaign to suck at life.
1. Not realizing SEO is a marathon, not a sprint.
If I had a quarter for every time I had to explain to a client that they’re not going to rank for their first-tier terms after the first week of their campaign…well… I’d be playing a lot of skiball. Listen, optimizing a site for organic search is not a one time thing. It’s a project that takes care, forethought, and a bit of work if you want to rank for anything other than “best little clown shoe store in Boston”. Adjustments will have to be made, strategy may change. In short - don’t get discouraged and throw in the towel too early…. actually, do throw in the towel; it’s just more money for me.
2. Choosing the wrong keywords
This sounds too simple to be true, right? Well the majority of people on the interwebz are retards, including many ‘online marketers’. Please don’t be one of those people; I can only handle so many people on ICQ bugging me about how to improve their keyword lists at once. Your site is most likely new - this means that you don’t have too many pages or inbound links. Going for the most competitive keywords in your niche probly isn’t the smartest thing to do. Make sure that your targetted keyword list has plenty of long tail keywords that are less competitive and throw in some of the higher value ones in there. You’ve got to start somewhere.
3. Neglecting (proper) link building
Listen, building links sucks. It’s a menial and tiresome task but it has to be done. By putting your link building on the back burner you’re just setting yourself up for failure. Any successful SEO campaign will have a good link building strategy that includes content that will attract those links. And remember, linking to your site from your inter-linked network of 200+ PR1 spam blogs isn’t going to help as much as a few good targeted PR4-PR6 links from authoritative sites in your niche.
4. Your content is crap
Shouldn’t this be a no-brainer? Obviously not. If you can’t write above the level of a third grader then hire someone else to write your content. You can find decent writers on boards like WickedFire or even Digital Point for some pretty cheap rates (1-3 cents per word). So stop being a stingy bastard and get some quality content that will not only show search engines that you’re at least attempting to make something that’s not a piece of crap arbitrage site. Stop whining that you don’t think it’s good for usability - there’s plenty of places to include quality content without sacrificing usability.
5. Looking at rankings through beer goggles
This is somewhere that a lot of people just getting into SEO make mistakes. So you pulled a few good rankings on Yahoo!. Did you actually target those terms? Is your ranking for that term going to the best possible page on your site? Are you tracking how much traffic those terms are bringing in and how they’re actually converting. A ranking for any term doesn’t mean anything if it’s not contributing to your bottom line.
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