When you’re a white-label digital marketing agency like us, you receive a lot of enquiries about the importance of search engine optimisation (SEO) from businesses. You could say a majority of our enquiries are concerned with the impact of SEO on a business’ performance.
Having provided services in SEO outsourcing Australia-, New Zealand- and US-wide, we know a thing or two about how to make SEO work for you. However, we also recognise that its implementation takes a careful and strategic approach. Otherwise, SEO can cause more harm than good.
Before you begin your next marketing campaign, consider the points below and how SEO can fit into the plan for your company.
Top SEO No-nos
If you’ve mastered the basics of SEO, you may want to skip this section, but they’re always important to recall.
Just as there are tips to follow when optimising your website, there are plenty more to avoid in order to improve your performance.
Some are harmful to performance because search engines don’t like them, while others are sure to irk the users who have found themselves on your website. Be sure to understand the difference and work to appease both parties.
Broken links
If ever SEO has been bad for business, it’s when broken links lead humans and robots astray.
These can either be external backlinks that land on broken pages of yours, or links from your own site that lead to broken pages outside your own.
Whichever the case, it’s a bad look for your brand and the currency of your website.
Bad content
As we said, SEO is increasingly about creating content for humans and allowing “the robots” to recognise that it is valued.
By writing good content with new and useful information, users will spend more time on your pages and traffic will create traffic.
“Bad content”, on the other hand, would include things like keyword stuffing, misleading headlines, spelling mistakes, unoriginal information and a lack of complementary imagery.
Set and forget
When the former two no-nos collide, we are left with a website that has clearly been designed with no intention to maintain its performance.
A website that isn’t maintained will eventually include all kinds of broken links, outdated information and receive a massive reduction in traffic.
If you’re reading this with the hope that SEO can be done in a way that reduces the amount of maintenance required, you have come to the wrong place.
Google rolls out thousands of updates to its algorithm every year, so a successful set and forget website can never exist for very long at all.
What Makes SEO Hard for Small Businesses?
Small businesses can be greatly susceptible to harmful SEO for a variety of reasons.
As a business owner, you could be short of the time, money, or knowledge that it takes to reap the wonderful rewards of SEO.
Even more unavoidable is the size of the business (small) and the limited splash you can make with your content from day one.
With such vulnerabilities working against you, one would think the average SEO provider would be out there to support you as their client and grow your business in tandem with their own.
Unfortunately, we often hear stories from our new clients that they’ve been duped by greedy “SEO specialists”. These specialists have been known to take old SEO tactics and use them to make quick bucks from unsuspecting businesses without offering so much as a data point of positive performance.
The short-term perspective that these parties bring to SEO can cause great harm to a brand and should be avoided at all costs. Businesses should always approach SEO with long-term goals in mind and should hardly be disheartened when their desired results aren’t delivered in under six months.
Trust Agency Stack
Our proven track record and dedication to our clients underscores our long-term perspective. We work hard to cement relationships with our clients and build successful campaign after campaign. If you need more information on the threats and opportunities of search engine optimisation, get in touch with our team – we have all the information you need to succeed.