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You’re stuck. Traversing the online landscape and getting noticed was harder than you thought at first. But then after you’ve invested a ton of money into an online marketing campaign, you’ve realized that those efforts at lead and conversion generation from SEO aren’t working either. It leaves you confused and wondering where you could have possibly gone wrong. Luckily, there are a number of telltale patterns to unsuccessful SEO efforts.
Correlating Traffic With ROI
55 percent of all visitors will leave that site within 15 seconds. The belief that the more traffic your SEO efforts generate directly translate into a greater ROI is a flawed one. That’s because while SEO can drive traffic to your site, its full value does not manifest unless the user signs up for an account or makes a purchase. For example, if your site got one million hits but not one user bought anything or signed up, the traffic you are getting is essentially useless.
Believing That Paying More for SEO Brings Greater Returns
SEO costs a lot of money, but quantity does not mean quality. Many businesses spend upwards of $1500 to $3000 a month on SEO costs with nothing to show for it at the end of the day. Think about it this way, there are only so many businesses that appear on the first page of a Google search, so all of those other businesses that pay for strategies which don’t get them to the top of the first page are burning through a lot of money.
Investing In SEO Without Understanding It
SEO is defined as a marketing discipline that focuses on growing visibility in organic search engine results. The point of organically growing your visibility is that paying for a top spot on Google or another site is expensive. Users and potential customers view a sponsored result as an “illegitimate” result since it is displayed at the top because of money rather than its relevance to their search. Not grasping the basics of why you are even implementing SEO measures in the first place can cost you dearly in the long run when you don’t know the right time to cut your losses.
Incorrect Timing
Two people can say the exact same joke, but the timing of their delivery determines its impact on an audience. The same thing applies to SEO, except we’re talking about searches rather than jokes. It may be surprising to find out that certain keywords have peaks during different times of the year. For instance, basketball has shown a significant peak during the months of April to May according to Google Trends. If your SEO efforts are timed such that the search volume for your word or phrases is low during a certain time of the year, it can negatively impact your ROI.
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Giving Up When It’s Too Early To Tell
Day trading and managing SEO will be your worst nightmare if you’re a defeatist. There are huge fluctuations in search engine traffic to even the most popular sites. Moz documents that Yahoo search traffic fluctuates between 800,000 to 2,000,000 links to their domain on any given day. If you’re just starting out, calling it quits because your site has a few bad days or is on a downward trend for traffic may cause you to prematurely end your SEO campaign in failure.
Unrealistic Goals
A third of small businesses fail within their first two years according to statistics from the Small Business Administration (SBA) and one of the most popular causes for failure is choosing a business that simply isn’t profitable. What that means is that business is an affair where people commonly sink great amounts of money into creating a product or service for which there is nonexistent demand. It’s easy to fall into the same trap and mindset when it comes to setting goals for your SEO efforts in the sense that you may just be committing to an SEO campaign that never would have produced results.
Not Spending Enough Money
Believe it or not, there is a sweet spot for spending that will result in the optimal results for the money you are spending. If you’re spending less than $100 for “affordable” SEO efforts, then you’re throwing that money straight out the window because there’s no way that a company will be able to generate anything that will boost your rank to the first page for multiple search engines with such low starting capital.
Not Capitalizing On The Influence of Social Media
We commonly think of SEO as dependent on the number of backlinks to a site or some other metric like keyword density – that’s all in the past. Now, a survey by Econsultancy reveals that 74% of companies and 82% of agencies claim that social media is highly integrated into their SEO strategy. That means that search engines are increasingly leaning towards an approach that analyzes social media as a factor in weighing the relevance of web pages and ranking them.