SEO is a constantly shifting landscape; a few years ago it was all about keywords density but video formatting was hardly on anyone’s radar. Now your visuals need to be on point and everything optimized for mobile, but keywords are out and spending your SEO budget on the wrong things can crash your rankings. Simply put, it takes continuous monitoring to get SEO right. So, how do you know when to change direction?
Maximizing your ROI by minimizing wasted SEO spending is vital, but it isn’t always easy. If you’re ready to sift through your budget and cut the fat in favor of more valuable spending, be on the lookout for these 3 warning signs. Then, you’ll be on the road to SEO success in no time.
Audit Issues
When working with a limited SEO budget, it’s important to audit your performance and compare it against competing brands – but how can you know what the competition is up to? By using a tool like Serpstat, you can track your keywords, find out what keywords your competitors are using, analyze your current backlinks, and determine if your PPC investments are paying off.
If your keywords aren’t performing well, it’s time to invest more in new content that emphasizes preferred language and pull back from other approaches. Without the right keywords, no one will find your site, so this is an important place to start.
Missing Money
Have you been carefully tracking your SEO expenditures to determine how much you’re spending total – and what those expenditures are bringing in? Many businesses lose track of small expenses because the receipts get lost and are never recorded, and that interferes with proper expense tracking.
Stop misplacing receipts and start categorizing expenses in detail using Billdu’s receipt scanner. A part of their mobile app, Billdu allows you to move client invoices and receipts right from your email and put them into your invoice maker. When you can clearly mark off what’s going to SEO and then compare those expenses to their ROI, you’ll immediately know what’s worth investing in and where your spending needs to change.
An Absent Audience
The primary goal of good SEO should be attracting a core audience and converting them, so if you don’t seem to be attracting key demographics, that means something is going wrong. But there’s also a problem if you’re attracting site views but not making conversions; that’s a waste of SEO money, too.
If your conversion rates are low but SEO spending is high, consider that it might be time to shift priorities and spend more on conversion and less on acquisition. This might also mean changing where you market your services, but the effort and costs involved in making that shift can be more than recuperated by reaching a more desirable audience.
Small businesses can’t afford to waste money on ineffective SEO. Run an audit, look at your ROI, and reassess. Good SEO doesn’t have to cost a fortune, but the return will be pure gold.
