Six Big SEO Mistakes Marketing Managers Make
- SEO
- April 6, 2021
The year is 2021 and it’s no longer necessary to persuade any major brand to invest in SEO. Organic traffic is a significant part of your website’s success because it usually generates a higher conversion rate than paid campaigns. But while they realize how important optimization is, marketing managers still make quite a few mistakes along the way. Some of these come from a lack of knowledge, while others are a result of outdated concepts or old habits. So, whether you’re launching a new website, kicking off an app or starting an e-commerce platform, here are a few things you shouldn’t miss:
1. SEO From Marketing to Product
Usually, the SEO team works with your Marketing department, as it is tied to the content work done after technical specifications are in place. But kicking off development and even characterization itself – these should include the SEO. The SEO’s recommendations will be meaningful in terms of user intent and design as well as content, of course. The SEO team should be connected not only to the marketing process in hindsight, but during the building of the product. This is even more important when the product itself is a digital platform, and any change in development could delay its launch. From tree structure to UI/UX, headers and home page layout – in all these, input from the SEO team is significant and crucial for success. But above all these, SEO is directly and inherently related to user experience, and the guidelines coming from this team take user intent into account first.
2. Don’t be late to bring in SEO
Moving to a new domain or developing one from scratch? Are you in the first stages of determining your brand strategy? Now’s the time to bring SEO into the picture. Marketing managers often mistakenly think they can move forward with characterization and design, make all the decisions, and bring in the SEO team only at the development stage. But by that point, most of the major decisions have been made, other suppliers (e.g. designers) have worked and important SEO considerations have been neglected. These considerations are not only important to good Google ranking– they are critical to a good user experience. They could also affect your paid campaigns, for instance, the ability to generate feeds (in e-commerce activity) or improve campaign activity on DSA type searches. Involving SEO too late in the process may not only lead to unnecessary costs, it could also create long-term damage by creating an initial web specifications that are not friendly to search engines, or by building strategy that does not take into account your users’ intent.
3. Blogging for the sake of Blogging
We’ve discussed in depth the development of the blog on commercial websites and even on publishers. Marketing often decides the site just has to have a blog, and begins writing away energetically, without taking into account that someone will have to read that content, and what’s more – engage and take action after reading it. It’s not that there’s no room for content on your website – it’s actually really important – but thinking about it has to be part of defining the site’s goals, your marketing KPI’s and what fields of knowledge you want to own. In other words, your work plan, especially in everything related to the number of articles, is derived from your site’s specific needs, and considers a number of things such as demand, technological infrastructure, and more. There’s no point in writing four articles per month just because your GANTT says so, or deciding arbitrarily that one blog post per week is right. How do the posts serve you? Do your articles respond to user intent? What will users do after reading them? These are all questions your SEO team will help ask and answer.
4. Relying excessively on external links
There’s no question off page articles can help you boost your Google ratings. However, without building content that is relevant to user intent and key words, no link can help. As a rule, your site should take user intent into account, or you’ll be missing a lot of traffic – and probably a lot of money. Also, the idea that off-pages can be low in quality as long as they contain the right links is misguided. The content on off-page sites should be of premium quality, designated for users and providing a true response to their needs.
5. Low-quality content
Although we are guided by user intent and key words, the writing on your site and product cannot be dry and technical. Although there are templates to follow, don’t neglect style, language, and the connection to your brand. At the end of the day, even if you are successful in bringing organic traffic to your landing pages, if it isn’t interesting, relevant and engaging, users will abandon it. This is also true of driving traffic to low-quality content sites through paid campaigns– that’s a waste of time and money that will not lead to conversions. In this context, do not be tempted to plant key words / queries artificially in your writing – think about the content as a solar system revolving around a hub that gives your users access to your knowledge in a meaningful way.
6. Expecting immediate success
SEO is not a one-off deal. It requires investigations, data analysis, and a meticulous work plan. True, some changes we recommend could lead quickly to significant results, but we certainly cannot guarantee these and they are not enough on their own. Marketing is often accustomed to the quick results generated by paid campaigns, and expect SEO to generate these same outcomes. What we need to understand is that good SEO work leads to a series of consistent changes over time, and the impact these make is for the long run.