Do-it-Yourself search engine optimization is dooming hundreds of new and small businesses just like yours to lackluster revenues and months of struggling.
Where are they all going wrong?
Many entrepreneurs and small business owners on tight budgets have taken it upon themselves to become one man bands on the Internet superhighway. Trying to learn and master all aspects of online marketing while attempting to turn their winning ideas into profitable ventures can be a real challenge.
Recent stats show 98% of businesses failing within the first few years while the media highlights new overnight success stories every day. So why are some pulling in masses of traffic and customers online while the rest burn their working capital and the midnight oil 7 days a week trying to get a handful of leads from the web?
There is a lot that solo entrepreneurs and business owners can do to improve their search engine rankings themselves and it can be an exciting and fun new adventure to go on. Unfortunately most are simply duped by the wrong SEO advice.
There is enough bad SEO information out there to keep you reading for the next 90 years. If you’re lucky you may find a few great golden nuggets but much of the information online is simply outdated. Did you know Google changes the way it ranks sites more than 500 times a year? That’s more than one a day. Besides this there is a ton of junk out there and certainly a good amount of information purposely meant to mislead competitors like you.
Perhaps the biggest threat to those attempting their own search engine optimization is poor keyword selection. If you’ve got the wrong keywords you are done before you get started and all of your marketing money is just going down the drain.
Good keyword selection software involves a lot more than a search using Google Adwords. You have to know how to use it. Going after the phrases with the most monthly search volume isn’t always the answer. You need keywords you can really afford to compete with and those which bring real customers who will buy. Put yourself in your prospects shoes, think ‘long-tail’, and watch for sweet spots among trends. If you want local foot traffic, you had better optimize by location too.
For all of the 4 Hour Work Week fans and offshore outsourcing experimenters out there, if you haven’t already, you will soon find out that even if you set up your own small army of data entry clones the management can be a killer. Stop and think about the real bottom line for a minute. Where is your time best spent and how much are you wasting on marketing versus doing what you are best at? Why do you think trends are coming full circle and U.S. businesses are bringing their marketing back onshore and using one stop shops who can handle their SEO and social media for them?
If you are determined to do your own SEO at least consult a pro and make sure you are wired into the daily changes which can affect your rankings, traffic and revenues or even get you banned by the search engines.
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