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Over-reliance on SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) effectiveness is highly dependent on the number of pages in your website. A rule of thumb: great SEO can get you ranked for 1 to 1.5 keywords per page, so if you have 100 pages, you may get ranked high in Google for 150 keywords. This is a drop in the bucket compared to the number of useful keywords you need visibility for, which may be in the thousands. |
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Over-dependence on PPC
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) search advertising can be very expensive, and exhaust your online budget before you achieve the results you need. Budget limitations may cause your ads to get turned off mid-day, which dims your visibility even for the small number of keywords you can afford to bid on. Add to this the fact that only 8% of web searchers click on ads today, and the conclusion is clear. PPC probably belongs in your ad portfolio, but reducing your dependence on it is essential. |
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Misuse of the home page
Many companies misuse their website home page because of a false understanding of how people use the web today. As one Best Buy online marketer said, "The home page is dead. Almost no one goes there anymore." Instead, most people use search to find content, which means that almost any page can be a "home" page, in the sense that it can become the first page they land on after searching for something. So relying on the home page to link and route visitors to other pages is a flawed strategy.
In addition, many companies still use their home page as the "landing page" for PPC ads. Because ad clickers expect to find exactly what they are looking for when they click an ad, landing on the home page usually causes confusion and prospect abandonment. Not the desired result if you just paid $7.50 (or $20.00) for that visitor. |
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Invisible catalog pages
Many companies who are engaged in eCommerce use a technology platform that hides rather than exposes its products to the search engines, which consequently cannot find and match your products to searches. Systems that require keyword searches to find products in a catalog, or selection of products from a menu, create insurmountable barriers for the search engines. This means that products are not visible to buyers who are searching for them, a tragic mistake. |
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Router pages encourage abandonment
Many companies try to create a huge "links" page to serve as a router, pointing customers to product pages. The assumption is that this technique can minimize the SEO effort by making it possible to optimize ONE page, which will then rank high and point prospects to the products they are searching for.
Unfortunately, in most cases, the product pages are either un-optimized or hidden from the search engines for various technical reasons, so they fail to magnify the company's web footprint in the search engines. Functionally, when a visitor finds one of these router pages, the long list of links discourages exploration and encourages prospect abandonment. Remember, web searchers expect to find exactly what they are looking for. They don't want it one or two clicks away. |
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Misguided site rebuilds
Some ambitious companies decide to rebuild their entire corporate websites to improve navigation and the visibility of internal web pages to the search engines. This can be a long, expensive ordeal. One client spent over $1,000,000 on such an endeavor, which in the end failed to improve its web footprint in the search engines. Afterward, only a handful of pages ranked in the Top 10 search results for important keywords because the company made several of the other mistakes listed above. |
Swarm Marking, using Swarm Technology from Mosquito Interactive, can help you affordably reverse these mistakes and aggressively magnify your web footprint in search so you don't continue to forfeit sales to your competitors. Learn more.
