When SEO = Setting Expectations Objectively

One of the frustrations that many companies have when they decide to get all SEO’d is the slow response time in seeing site traffic and conversions increase. Online and offline marketing are expected to operate in the same way – so if publishing a newspaper ad immediately creates phone calls, why don’t SEO efforts create an immediate ROI?

Here are 10 major reasons.

1. Your keywords are wrong.

One of the trickiest parts of creating websites isn’t technical – it’s keyword research. There’s little point to creating a slick, professional site if it’s built around keywords that have little traffic or are too broad to compete with established sites. There’s no magic formula for finding the right keyword phrases, but there are some great tools that help narrow them down and give you the best chance for success.

For example, if you are a veterinarian in New York, you would struggle to gain first-page placement for the phrase “vet New York”. But if you determined that the most popular breed of dog among your clients was a Maltese, or a certain medical procedure was common for a particular animal, using these in your keyword mix would make it easy to reach the first page.

Specific, popular phrases that reflect your specialties are essential to finding quality traffic.

2. Your website is SEO-unfriendly.

It’s remarkable how many $50,000 sites developed by web professionals have practically non-existent SEO features. By “SEO-unfriendly”, I’m referring to the overuse of Flash, too much Ajax, poor and inconsistent navigation, missing title and description metatags, missing ALT text, bad URLs, cloaking links in JavaScript and so forth. To do SEO well, it needs to be designed in from the beginning, and just because a site may look good in a browser window to a human doesn’t mean it will rank well in search engines.

If you have the opportunity to build from scratch, call the SEO experts at the same time as the design experts, since retrofitting the site later will be considerably more difficult.

3. There’s little or no content.

The days of having a website consisting of 5 pages, 500 words and a handful of pictures are over – sites like these are impossible in the SEO business, simply because there’s nothing there for a search engine (or visitor). Your site is much more than a marketing leaflet moved online, and you need to have regularly-refreshed content to make visitors feel there’s value.

“What could I possibly write about?” is a question I get asked all the time by customers, but it’s surprisingly easy to develop a program for building articles to attract visitors. While you can hire a web-copy professional easily, it’s generally better to develop in-house because you understand your business better than anyone else, and your voice is important in creating an authentic online presence.

If you’re stumped for ideas, think about what advice you give people at social events that has the most positive reaction – everyone has a point-of-view on their field of expertise that has value.  While a plumber may not think that plunging a garbage disposal is complicated or worth writing about, somebody Googling to plunge a blocked garbage disposal will find the content invaluable.

4. You have duplicate content.

Duplicate content is a real problem – both when it happens intentionally and unintentionally. Google’s concept of “duplicate content” doesn’t mean a word-for-word copy – it means “substantially the same”, so changing a few words doesn’t solve the problem. There are several areas that hurt websites, often without their knowledge:

• Several URLs resolve to the same page – such as http://www.mycompany.com, http://mycompany.com, http://mycompany.com/index.html and https://mycompany.com. Unwittingly, if you don’t define canonical names and redirects properly, your SEO suffers.
• You use product descriptions from manufacturers: cutting and pasting their descriptions causes the same problem, since other vendors do exactly the same thing.
• You have a review site for products based upon user-generated content (UGC) and your members cross-post to similar sites.
• Spam-bots steal your site’s page content and replicate it on another site with ads – there are tools to help locate these, and .htaccess methods to help block the problem (stopping this illegal copying once it’s happened is not easy, however).
• You use session IDs extensively, which create many multiple URLs pointing to the same content.

5. You may be over-optimizing your pages.

Personally, I believe that ‘keyword density’ is overdone as an SEO topic: the concept of repeating phrases to account for 3-5% of web-copy has been touted as a science and there’s very little to prove it (see how IMDB and Amazon and almost every major site all rank highly without doing this). Unfortunately, there’s also a belief that more is better, so webcopy develops into:

John Smith Sports Shoes and Clothing prides itself on supplying Sports Shoes and Clothing to the Midwest made exclusively by John Smith and his Sports Shoes and Clothing team. Do you need Sports Shoes and Clothing? If so, you’ll love our Sports Shoes and Clothing, made by……

6. Nobody links to you.

Inbound links – those where other people point to your site’s page – are the number one determinant in your site’s relevance and ranking. Inbound links are effectively votes for the quality of your site.  Designing a great site is only the start, and you need to find other sites that will refer you, such as:

• Trade associations, industry partners, vendors, customers and other firms you naturally deal with.
• Review sites (Yelp, TripAdvisor, Amazon, etc.)
• Bloggers and content sites (such as About.com).
• Government and educational sites, where possible, due to the disproportionate influence their

Link farms and other fake mechanisms should be avoided: these will hurt your SEO. Inbound links from quality sites share part of their PageRank (relevance) with you, whereas thousands of links from link farms detract from your score.

7. You’re not promoting your site.

Unlike in Field of Dreams, if you build it, they won’t come – at least not if you don’t tell them. A poorly-promoted site is like a store with no exterior signage, and you need to use every available channel to funnel visitors towards you:

• Use offline methods: is your site on your invoices, brochures, business cards, POS receipts and flyers?
• Are you using social media to direct customers who might be looking for your services?
• Are you looking at how your competitors get traffic and where they are prominent online?
• Are you using search engine marketing – Google, Yahoo, Bing, StumbleUpon, Facebook and affiliate programs?

8. You’re being unrealistic.

Just as we don’t all grow up to be astronauts, so too not all sites can be a runaway viral success. The truth is that a good portion of businesses lack the sexiness that allows their elevation to Digg superstardom. You can do everything ‘right’ and still find traffic is slow – it does happen, and that’s ok, as long as you still receive quality traffic. While the market for pet taxidermy may be very small, an well-optimized site will still attract visitors that are really interested in the subject, and will have a great conversion rate.

9. You’re a spammer.

But you’re not, are you? You might find that you are, because you could be using a cheap hosting solution with shared IPs that are abused by other customers, or you bought a really great domain name that came with historical baggage you weren’t aware of. There are plenty of ways that legitimate sites can be caught in the spam net, and it’s a good idea to check this out.

There are ways to get around these problems: find a quality host, change your domain name or alert the search engines to a change of ownership. But it’s surprising how many times this is a problem for sites that never engage in anything particularly questionable.

10. You paid $99 to get a guaranteed #1 Google listing.

The Internet is the Wild West for SEO – and everything else – and if it sounds too good to be true, I guarantee you it is. Whereas most often you will simply lose your $99, some companies engage in blackhat SEO, which means using unscrupulous methods to improve rankings. Many of these work wonders in the short term, resulting in a near-overnight domination of the engines, but you will always – always – get caught out in the end.

The problem with this is that once you get blacklisted for taking advantage of Google (which is obviously against their Terms of Service), Google can and will punish your site by denying a listing for months, years and maybe forever. Blackhat SEO is an extremely poor strategy given the growing sophistication of their algorithm.

The truth is that good SEO is a long, hard and complicated process that stops all your competitors from doing exactly the same thing – if you work hard at it, you can reach page one for your chosen topics. Ultimately, your success on the engines will reflect your success with visitors, and there aren’t any one-stop shortcuts.

James Beswick is the Founder of One Uproar and loves everything to do with SEO, SEM and SMO.

Blog post published by Social Media Today.