5 Ways to Ensure an SEO Campaign Fails

Obviously no one sets out to create an SEO campaign, or any other kind of business initiative, that fails. However, along the way certain mistakes can be made that will inevitably result in campaign failure. Sometimes the mistake can seem innocent enough, but really SEO is about gaining momentum as time goes on. A mistake that is made early in the process can hinder every effort that follows. Therefore, when implementing an SEO campaign be sure to avoid the following common mistakes:

1. Optimizing for a Bad Website

SEO is a long term process that takes time and resources. The goal of an SEO campaign is to increase website traffic to improve conversion rates. SEO efforts will help to get more visitors to the site, but then the rest of the work is up to the website itself. If it looks bad, has a confusing navigation, or doesn’t have clear call to actions it’s a problem. Before starting an SEO campaign you need to determine whether your website is worth the effort. If it’s not, concentrate on improving that first.

2. Not Conducting Keyword Research

Many website owners make the mistake of assuming that they know how their target audience is searching. In most cases, they are wrong. Keyword research needs to be conducted for every page of the website, since each page serves a different purpose and can be an entry point to a website. Using the wrong keywords can result in getting the wrong kind of visitors that won’t convert. Traffic is good, but sales and leads from qualified visitors are much better.

3. Greedy Link Building

Links are a huge part of SEO. The search engine spiders crawl links to determine website relevancy and trust. It’s tempting to get greedy when it comes to link building. After all there are plenty of advertisements for thousands of links at a low price. But are those links really valuable? Not at all. It’s the quality of a link that really matters, not the quantity.

4. Creating Poor Content

Without content, there is nothing to optimize and publish online, whether it is on site or on other web properties. Content is what ranks in the search engines and helps build links. However, in order to do so the content needs to be good! Publishing lots of low quality content that is only vaguely related to the industry just to get some links will backfire. Focus on the needs of the target audience and create content with that in mind.

5. Not Using Social Media

Social media and SEO continue to converge online. One strategy should not be implemented without the other in mind now that the search engines incorporate social signals into the ranking algorithms.

Google Walks Its Talk and Penalizes Itself

If you haven’t been following the news lately, this week there was a heated discussion about a marketing campaign that Google carried out to promote its Chrome browser. Basically Google hired a marketing company to promote some web videos, and that company in turn hired bloggers to post the videos (obviously paying them). The problem emerged with some SEOs noticed the campaign and found a couple of those bloggers using dofollow links to the Chrome homepage, which in theory if a violation of Google’s guidelines.

The whole story can be found on this Search Engine Land post: Google’s Jaw-Dropping Sponsored Post Campaign For Chrome.

Anyway after the controversy was out there many people started asking (some demanding…) whether or not Google would penalize its own website for the sponsored link violation.

Guess what? Google did it.

The Chrome homepage used to be the first or second result for the term “browser”, but if you search for it now you probably won’t find it anywhere on the first page. Here’s Google’s statement about the case:

We’ve investigated and are taking manual action to demote www.google.com/chrome and lower the site’s PageRank for a period of at least 60 days.
We strive to enforce Google’s webmaster guidelines consistently in order to provide better search results for users.

While Google did not authorize this campaign, and we can find no remaining violations of our webmaster guidelines, we believe Google should be held to a higher standard, so we have taken stricter action than we would against a typical site.

In my opinion Google is actually coming out stronger out of the whole debacle. For one thing it’s giving out a signal that no one is special when it comes to search rankings and penalties, and that it’s willing to walk its talk.