Are these SEO blunders killing your traffic?

These days, where competition is brutal, search engine optimization is truly the most effective way to get your business in front of the right demographic. The major reason your SEO is so vital to your success is that research continues to show, time after time, that people who are out hitting the search engines are nearing the end of their buying cycles. In other words, they are ready to buy and they are just looking for a business like yours who can help them to do just that.

They are ready to pull the trigger but are you driving them to you? If you are finding the traffic isn’t what you are expecting it to be, there may be a blunder of two you are making that is costing you business. Too many business owners tend to blame SEO for their failure to drive traffic when it is one of the most important weapons you have to acquire new business and make sales.

The first thing that probably isn’t working is your content. It is not engaging them anywhere. The traffic that does come to your site wants added value in their lives. They want questions answered and problems solved. Is your content doing that for them in an entertaining and engaging way? What about your video content? Is it being professionally produced and showing your company in its best light?

Another blunder you may be making is that you aren’t measuring the data that is measurable. Knowing and understanding the metrics you should be measuring can save you a ton of time to say nothing of money. You need to know where you are in your SEO marketing efforts or you just might as well be stumbling around in the dark. Without your data, you don’t know what your customers are looking for or even where they are. And, even if they are showing up, where are they going in your site? What are they looking for? What’s your bounce rate? What are your conversion rate metrics?

Have you been keeping up with search technology and algorithm changes? Google is the god of search and what they say goes does, indeed, go. Their spiders and bots are now tens of times faster and smarter than they used to be. If you are still trying to trick the system, if you are still using image heavy slide shows at the top of your home page instead of text, you are going to get quickly left behind. The new bots and spiders are no longer interested in slogging through tons of graphics just to get to text. Also, only those sites with true quality and original content are going to end up on the top end of the SERP’s.

-Written by Kevin Sawyer