3 Search Engine Optimization goals that will kill your business.

 

You know even great business owners and entrepreneurs can make lofty SEO Goals. How else can you explain why people will repeatedly make the same mistakes while pursuing a number 1 ranking. Some of my customers come to me with unrealistic goals that will literally kill their business.  Here are the three in no random order. First, I have to outrank my competitor no matter what the cost! Second, traffic is king and I need unlimited traffic. Third, I know what keywords to rank for and you don’t!

What to rank for?

So let’s take a look at the first crazy SEO goal of beating out your competitor for that beloved first spot. Many business customers will come to me saying “Brian I want to beat out my competition!”. I say ok, what search term are they ranking for? They then tell me the particular phrase their competition is outranking them for. Usually a low value search term.

I smirk and say let’s take a closer look at their #1 ranking. Here is an example google search: “best places to live in South Florida” and the #1 spot is a website that does fishing tours. They guy that hires me is a property rental manager.

So that everybody is on the same page, I say to him let me get this straight, you are upset that a fishing captain has a blog post ranked #1 for “best places to live in South Florida”? Then I ask him how many properties is he listing on his fishing site? Response from my client, “None”. Then he is clearly NOT your competition because you are not fishing for the same type of internet surfers. Yes, pun intended.

You see website visitors that ended up on that fishing site might read his blog post and be inspired to move there but the fishing captain wants them to book a tour. We can agree anyone that clicks on this blog post looking for rental property is not going to find it on a fishing boat. So in fact, he is not your competition. But some successful business entrepreneurs can be over confident and believe that they need to rank and spend a lot of time and effort trying to out rank competition for these types of keywords that dont merit the effort, time or money in chasing down.

You really need to look at every situation differently to come to a logical conclusion. Sometimes you need someone else’s point of view to see that you don’t need to rank for crazy long tail keyword searches. I personally would have tested out which keywords were worth chasing and then rank for them.

SEO Tactics over best practices

Second crazy search engine optimization goal, is traffic. I have customers that come to me and ask for traffic. Can you guys get my website more traffic because we heard that it will get our website on search engines.

So only part of that statement is true, because Google’s ranking algorithm does take traffic into account when ranking websites. Google views it as a sign of quality and relevance. Here is the problem with that thought. If you start sending a bunch of traffic to your site and the website visitors bounce after being there because they are not finding what they searched for…you site will tank!

Thats right you will be penalized because you are missing the quality portion. So the old saying, “quantity over quality” does not translate to getting website on search engines.

Here is another example, that traffic alone is not the solution to make money online. I took a website to number 1 for 6 months in all of the United States for the search term “buy bargain wholesale”. My traffic to my website grew and grew. The problem was it was not what the web search traffic wanted. When the internet surfers got to my site they quickly bounced! I thought my phone would ring off the hook and orders would be placed online and it was going to be a cash cow. Unfortunately, it ended up being a waste of time, money, energy because all this traffic wanted was cheap merchandise to sell at flea markets or on ebay. Which I was not selling at the time, I was selling wholesale tools and furniture.

Optimizing a website for the wrong Keywords

Third crazy seo goal is ranking for keywords you think will bring you business but doesn’t. This is one of the biggest reasons for success or failure online. Everybody wants to know what the latest web search optimization techniques are. The truth of the matter is you won’t know until you test.

Testing is a marketing concept and is used before the launch of a new product or service. All the big companies do it. So should you! You see if you want to be the best results you need to know there is a market for what you are selling.

Let’s assume you want to rank for Ft. Lauderdale Florist. You hire an seo agency and tell them you know what you are doing and that is the term you want to rank for. A professional seo consultant tells you you are targeting about 75 searches a month. You and the agency come to terms to rank your site for $750 a month and they tell you it will take anywhere between 4 to 6 months to get there. You agree happily.

Let’s take a closer look at what you just did. You are going to spend about 4 months x $750 = $3,000 to get in the top 3. If you look at the graph below provided by WordStream, you will notice your click through rate. The click through rate gives you a % of people that will click on a specific search ranking and based on its search position. If you look at the number 1 position you are going to get somewhere between 22% and 27% of the traffic. So in our example, position 3 gives you about 12.5% of 75 searches. Or a total of 9.375 search visits a month.

Tell me is it worth $3,000 to get 9 clicks a month? Answer maybe as long as you have made more than $3000 in profit over that time period! By month 6, you have spent 6 x $750 = $4500 to get the number 1 position and you are only going to get about 20 clicks per month. Remeber clicks are not phone calls or orders on your website. The clicks are just people looking at your site.

I guarantee you a florist would go broke doing this and you are better off flushing your money down the toilet than paying an seo agency to rank you for keyword terms like this!

 

In conclusion, seo goals are great as long as you avoid the 3 major pitfalls. When you embark on hiring a professional seo consultant agency remember to put your ambition to the side and review all your options before making a decision. The marketing of a website is part art and part science.

In order to get out what you need, be prepared to answer and ask a lot of questions so that a great internet marketing strategy can be put together for your business. Don’t get caught up in the keywords that you believe you need to rank for, you need to focus on which ones will make you money.

You will do better when you give the web surfers what they want not what you think they want.Also remember that not all traffic is created equal.

Good Luck on your journey and if you have any questions feel free to contact:

Brian Bustamante

Nole Marketing

6665 NW 75th Pl

Parkland, FL 33067

754-777-0850

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