The Top Reasons SEO Campaigns Fail

• Targeting the Wrong Keywords

If you don’t include high-, medium-, and low-traffic keywords, your campaign will not be fully successful. The low-hanging fruit for any business is keyphrases that are three words or more. Yes, these will have far smaller amounts of traffic searching for them, but you need to get your keywords to the top of page one of the search results. You do that with long tail keywords that get some traffic (approximately 200+ searches a month) and have low competition.

• Not Having a Complete Plan

You need to have all the steps in place, from exhaustive keyword research and site-friendly design analysis to optimization and tracking implementation. Don’t forget that this war is waged on-page and off-page. Content, links, engagement, and social citations must work together.

• Not Implementing SEO Suggestions/“Code”

Not putting new SEO “code” on your pages or making suggested edits is a far too common reason for poor results. Campaigns need all facets of SEO to be implemented for the full benefits to be obtained.

• Not Tracking and Then Editing Based on Findings

If you don’t analyze your results, you can’t expect to make changes that will take the marketing campaign to the next level. When it comes to keywords, you have the ability to get smarter with your efforts on a daily, weekly, and, especially, on a monthly basis. Take full advantage of that and let visitor behavior (as seen through Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools) tell you what your best keywords are. Why guess when you don’t have to?

• Not Giving Continued Input to the SEO Agency

If you don’t offer input on why you may not be converting on certain keyphrases, your SEO may not be able to discern what keyphrases would be better. Work together using your knowledge of your business and the SEO’s research and implementation skills.

• Giving Up Too Soon Without Making Adjustments

The companies that say “SEO failed” are usually the ones that expected to do it once and then not make further edits to the site. If you track what works and what doesn’t, and make changes to pages that have lots of traffic but few conversions, you can make more out of the traffic you already have. All most people want is more traffic, which should lead to more conversions. But what about the traffic you already have? It can often be easier to make better use of existing customers than to bring in new traffic. This requires that you take a fresh approach to how you are “converting” people on each page. If your conversion rate is terrible, more traffic might not help much, and you can’t blame SEO for that.

Keep in mind that some campaigns bring results in a matter of weeks or months, while others blossom over many months or a year later. Especially with new websites, be aware that rankings can take a while to mature, especially if you have just implemented a links campaign. Google wants to assign your site the right “overall value” to the rest of the web. They can only do that over a considerable amount of time.

Now it’s time to learn more details on link building, which may just be more than half of the reason your site will rank well or not.

Can you think of other reasons that campaigns fail?

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