Feb 11 2009
Common Search Marketing Mistakes Made By Businesses
Yesterday I attended SMX West 2009, SMX stands for Search Marketing Expo. I try to attend a few of these conferences every year for the networking benefits and to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to search marketing. I always return to my office with a few new tricks and insights.
Here is a list from one of the sessions that discussed the 12 most common strategic mistakes that companies or businesses make in their SEO and paid search initiatives. I am going to list them not go into detail.
- Set measurable goals for a campaign
- Failing to assign a dollar value to every “conversion action” available on your site.
- Assessing the success of Search Marketing using solely a Direct Marketing model.
- Treating SEO as a project NOT as an ongoing process.
- Making a #1 ranking as your most important objective when it maybe costing you business.
- Focusing on the big keywords and forgetting about the long-tail keywords.
- Engaging in Paid or Natural (Organic) Search Engine Marketing but not both.
- Using YOUR language for search terms and not that of your customers.
- Optimizing only your web pages and not your other digital assets.
- Treating your search marketing and other channels of marketing separately.
- Failing to bid on the search terms that your site ranks highly with in the organic search results
- Bidding solely on the “branded terms” and ignoring “non-branded terms”.
Let me know if you have questions or experience with any of these. If you are new to search and interested in search engine optimization (SEO) for your website, you may want to attend one of these conferences. The expo is usually free if you pre-register. Session passes are much more expensive.
