There are four common mistakes business owners make when implementing an SEO strategy. And I talk to these companies every month…
- Hiring anyone who says they do SEO, because they are cheap, or fit within an unrealistic budget.
- Assuming all Search Engine Optimization companies are equal, do the same thing. Or can accomplish the same results.
- Assuming you or your brother in law or any company that built a website once is qualified to do your search engine optimization.
- Not thinking big enough.
So lets discuss each of these scenarios…
There are four common mistakes business owners make when implementing an SEO strategy. And I talk to these companies every month…
- Hiring anyone who says they do SEO, because they are cheap, or fit within an unrealistic budget.
- If you can’t afford someone to do it right, don’t do it yet.
- Assuming all Search Engine Optimization companies are equal, do the same thing. Or can accomplish the same results.
- They can’t and don’t. you should not decide between two seo companies by comparing bullet points, only the results they achieve for important keywords… This is why trust is incredibly important.
- Assuming you or your brother in law or any company that built a website once is qualified to do your search engine optimization.
- They aren’t.
- Not thinking big enough.
- You can dominate the first page of Google for all of your most important keywords. Thinking any smaller than this is leaving a lot of money on the table.
So lets discuss each of these scenarios…
Hiring the cheapest “seo” company to save money.
If your paying peanuts for Search Engine Optimization your not going to get the results you expect.
Getting customers costs time and/or money. If you think you shouldn’t be spending more than 5 bucks to get a new customer worth $5,000 your math is flawed. your going to have a very hard time competing with competitors that do understand the long-term value of a customer.
A lot of companies think they can save a few buck each month by choosing an SEO provider based on their cheap price…
But, that mostly due to not fully understanding all of the facets of what a successful seo program requires. Consumers think that all seo is the same. They think they can spend $400 and get the same results as an $800 program. It simply doesn’t work that way. You wont get half the result for half the price.
Remember, when it comes to getting a #1 ranking. 20-25% are factors on your website, the other 80% is the quality of sites that link to you.
Most companies offering “SEO” are basically telemarketing companies. They have 25 sales people and 2 people actually doing the work. Your going to get shuffled around between account managers and never get anyone on the phone that knows what they are doing.
Most of them only do some of the 20%, the easy stuff, the onsite stuff, and maybe some blogging.
Well, just doing the easy stuff doesn’t get the results your expecting. Even If they do have a link building component, many companies violate Google’s guidelines and can result in penalties down the road.
You must absolutely trust your seo company, and they must understand your business and your customers.
If you are paying peanuts do not expect results.
If you can’t afford to do it right from the beginning, that’s okay… focus on growing your business through grassroots methods until you can.
SEO is all about building your own lead generation machine. It’s a long term strategy. All of your marketing should be driving leads to YOUR website, its your key lead generation platform, it is the center of your marketing universe.
Why would you want to risk compromising your entire website, your entire asset, your lead generation platform to save a few bucks.
Its like your clients who are shocked that they didn’t get $45 of quality lawn service when they were paid your half-price competitor $15 bucks.
Can you deliver the same results to your own clients for half price? NO.
So in the end, paying half price costs more than doing it right from the beginning.
So, If you think that $200 seo program was a good decision you are in for heartache.
An SEO specialist is going to cost you $70 to $80,000 or more a year in salary. How are you going to get any expertise for $200/month? The answer is… your not.
We are in this business for the long term.
The only shortcut is choosing the right marketing agency from the outset.
Another common Mistake companies make is thinking all seo is created equal.
The term “SEO” is meaningless.
You can find someone at any price point you want to pay. In fact, Godaddy offers an SEO upsell for 5 dollars and 99 cents a month.
When you hire someone to do seo, they may only do one or two things like
- Submit the site to search engines or add meta tags.
- Others might do some keyphrase research and some onsite optimization
- Further still, others might include social media integration and “content marketing”
- Some only do blogging.
But if the program doesn’t have an effective monthly link building program your not going to get results.
Are they ranking you for unimportant keywords that customers don’t search for?
Are they a specialist in your industry?
Are they really qualified to link building?
The wrong links will destroy your website, the right links will take it to number one.
You must absolutely trust the seo provider you use.
Here is what typically happens….
You assume all SEO companies are the same… but You don’t get results, so now you think SEO in general doesn’t work and give up completely on internet marketing .
Big mistake.
Or you think all SEO companies are the same… go the cheap route, don’t get results… and think the company you hired for $200/month is lousy, realize that you wasted that money and then try to hire a reputable agency this time around…. except now you have a problem…
Because you hired someone that didn’t know what they are doing or cut corners they destroyed the rankability of your site.
The only thing you can do now is start over from scratch on a new domain or try to undo all the damage the last company made.
Every single month someone calls us, they made the mistake of thinking that everyone offering SEO does the same thing but instead found their site penalized or banned from google.
So rather that make money from choosing the right SEO company, their bad decision is costing them money every month.
All search engine optimization is not created equal.
Another common mistake business owners make is assuming they know all they need to know about search engine optimization.
Business owners that have done a little bit of reading on the topic often shoot themselves in the foot, thinking they know enough to do it themselves.
But You have to go all the way.
You have to master it and stay on top of it every week.
Google updates their algorithm every 17.5 hours. Everyday.
Its not just a matter of changing some tags on your site and suddenly getting the #1 spot for all of your different keywords. Or buying 1000s of links for $5 or stuffing a bunch of keywords your their pages.
If you do that you will quickly watch your website disappear.
You don’t know what you don’t know. And if you don’t live and breathe it, there is a lot you don’t know.
If you think you can read an SEO for dummies book and do it yourself… you have a very simplistic view of SEO.
Much of what many business owners think they know about increasing their website ranking is based on outdated techniques for 10 years ago or spammy techniques that Google has never condoned, has cracked down on and penalizes.
Search engine optimization is not about trying to trick Google. If that’s your strategy you will lose.
It is about following their best practices. Putting your website in the absolute best shape to rank better than all of your competitors. And giving Google exactly what it wants… High quality links and new unique content.
Having your buddy do it or you trying to do it yourself… might get you to the bottom of the first page for one of your cities with little competition. or maybe you set up a Google local profile and that shows up somewhere for one city… so you think that you’ve implemented a successful strategy.
But if you think Position 8 on page one for 1 city/keyword combination is a successful seo strategy. You are missing out on 99% of the business you could be generating, you are literarily giving away 10s of thousands of dollars of business to your competitors in those cities.
You should be on the first page of Google multiple times for all of your most important keywords in all of the cities you service.
Think bigger.
SEO strategy is more than just getting to the first page for 1 or 2 search terms. Its showing up for 100s of different keywords.
You should be on top for all of them.
It’s the same as going fishing with one fishing pole versus using a fishing trawler dragging a huge net. Who is going to catch more fish?
This is a huge opportunity… And most of your competitors don’t understand this stuff. Your goal should be to dominate the first page of Google. If you aren’t, your putting money directly into your competitors pockets.
The further up on the page you are the more leads you get.
And The more times you appear on the first page the more leads you get. That means having multiple lead generating sites or even Combining PPC with SEO is an even more effective strategy.
Think bigger, the possibilities and opportunities online are huge and most companies have not scratched the surface.
We want to own the search results page.
Example in results
So let me illustrate what happens when you do search engine optimization half way… you end up giving competitors YOUR money…
This guy in the number one spot may be getting 30 new clients each month from this one single keyword, this guy at the bottom may be getting 1.
Lets do the math here so it makes sense…
Let’s say a new customer is worth $5000 over 3 years, most of our clients keep their clients from 3 to 5 years, so we are being conservative here.
So your competitor in number 1 could potentially be adding $150000 in new revenue every month. You down here are adding $5000… why? Because you wanted to “save money” , thought your could change a few tags and do it yourself or hired the cheapest company…
Instead of saving a few hundred bucks a month – you gave $145000 in revenue to your competitors.
And we are only talking about 1 search result from 1 keyword.
The companies that invest in SEO strategy understand this math and they think much much bigger.
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