SEO projects are the central part of the company’s digital marketing activities. However, you should know that SEO projects fail for various reasons. In some cases, even though the digital marketing service provider does all the necessary work properly, the ROI will not reach the desired number. You spend money on SEO but do not get the desired business result.
There are several reasons for this. Sometimes it is due to competitors’ unforeseen activity or new competitors’ arrival. These are things that are beyond the control of a business or digital marketing agency. But in many cases, the mistakes of the agency or collection pave the way for the failure of SEO projects.
Getting enough information about the most common mistakes in this area reduces the likelihood of their occurrence. Thus, In this article on intelligent strategy blog, we will review ten common reasons for the failure of SEO processes. If at least one of these mistakes is present in your SEO projects, the chances of failure increase. With enough information, you can identify common mistakes and fix them to return to your original path of success. Join smart strategy at the end of the article.
Obstacles to a successful SEO project
Part of the reason for the failure or success of a business SEO project is the performance of the digital marketing agency. Here are five
common SEO mistakes of digital marketing agencies that lead to the failure of SEO projects:
1-Dependence on freelance contractors
SEO projects need the integrated and coordinated collaboration of several experts to succeed. If digital
marketing agencies have unstable contracts with freelance contractors; it will be difficult or impossible to maintain the integrity and coordination of SEO projects. For example, if one of the specialized freelancers leaves the collection to join a better or bigger company, an agency must find another person with the same skills and expertise. Often during that time, the performance of SEO processes reaches its lowest point. If such problems occur continuously and consecutively, SEO programs will not implement properly.
2- Lack of personalization of SEO solutions
Some digital marketing agencies have a specific SEO checklist and promote all projects based on the checklist. These agencies make all SEO processes a general formula and use that formula for all customers.
Under these circumstances, all the agency’s clients are moving in the wrong direction. Why? Because no two sets and organizations are the same. Although there may be many similarities between the two corporates, each SEO project should plan separately, and the starting point of each project should be determined according to the specifics of each set.
These two examples illustrate well why we need to personalize SEO projects and what will cause SEO projects to fail due to lack of personalization:
- The timing of projects should be determined based on
the main characteristics of each customer as well as competitors of that
particular customer, existing backlinks, or the quality of the customer’s
Website content. Predetermined programs will never consider this and implement the same program for all customers without flexibility.
- Some customers will have to spend 50 to 70 percent of their budget and resources on bug fixes on their website, while others will need less, or some will not need this bug fix at all. For this reason, the same program and method will not be effective for all customers and will cause the inevitable failure of some customers’ projects.
3- Poor communication and reporting
The SEO process can be very complex and technical. Customers are often confused. Why? Because the client does not know these questions exactly:
- what is the agency doing
- what have the results been
- what their SEO investment has been
- what the status of the project is.
In particular, SEO projects are usually time-consuming, and this length can lead to more confusion and boredom.
To solve this problem, digital marketing agencies generally provide monthly project progress reports to customers. However, this fatigue and customer disorder increase because these monthly reports are sometimes very specialized and complex (conversely, straightforward and vague). The problem becomes so great that the customer eventually stops all SEO projects. The central tragedy is when in most of these cases, the SEO projects are on the right track, and the agency is doing
the right thing and is getting positive results. But the lack of proper
communication and reports, this unfortunate event means the cessation of cooperation between the client and the agency.
4- Lack of project management skills
Many digital marketing agencies have talented and specialized staff but are weak in management. Poor management means that the talents and expertise of these forces are not fully utilized or even wasted. A successful SEO project must have a robust management protocol in which things are done. For example, a website needs a complete content overhaul before doing backlinks. Most SEO activities are related, meaning that if, for example, step 17 doing before step 16, step 17 will fail or at least have no effect. Then, in practice, the implementation of steps 18 and 19 also fails.
Proper project management monitors the meticulous execution and planning of each part of the SEO project and does not let problems occur. Performing one activity several times or ignoring some crucial details; are examples of these problems.
Usually, the SEO project management department receives the least possible attention and the minimum research about it, while without proper and moral management, SEO projects will rarely succeed.
5- Selecting inappropriate customers
Each SEO agency has a specific scope of work based on previous experience in which it achieves the most success. For example, some agencies perform best when working with small businesses, while others perform best when working with clients and medium and large groups. Some agencies have records on store sites, while others have SEO on content sites. Some agencies perform better in technical businesses, while others know customers’ needs very well. You should know that the size and dimensions of the company and the area of expertise; can determine the appropriateness of the work and the probability of failure or success.
Agencies also often have open castings that you can attend to get selected. This is due to the wrong sales mentality and lack of knowledge of project requirements or sometimes the absence of other customers. The probability of success will be low if the cooperation and coordination between the agency and the business are at their lowest level. The only solution to this problem is to develop the level of activities and capabilities of the digital marketing agency to meet the needs of its customers.
Obstacles and SEO mistakes of the customer (business)
In many cases, the digital marketing agency fulfills all its obligations properly, but still, the customer does not achieve the desired success. This problem is often due to customer sector mistakes, and in the following, we will review 5 of the most common customer sector mistakes.
1-Excessive rush
Getting a good ranking in search engines is a continuous and lengthy process due to the misbehavior of some people (called black hats) who try to deceive search engines and unrealistically increase their ranking. Therefore, Google prefers consistently active websites that produce helpful content over a long time. For example, a site that reaches more than 100 external backlinks overnight has suspicious activity, but if a site achieves 100 backlinks in a year, Google will likely rank that site as a site in the long run. Therefore, better rankings and stability for different expressions also belong to it. Companies in the business world are accustomed to or want to get fast results. Many activities in the field of digital marketing, such as Google ads, banner advertising campaigns, influencer marketing, sales collaboration, and the like, come to fruition quickly. On the other hand, many companies that do not know digital space and specifically SEO well; expect to get results rapidly and give up the activities if they do not get the desired result.
Before investing in SEO, every business should have a natural mental background in this regard and should know that this field needs a period of at least 6 to 18 months to get the initial results. After that, reaching the final results will take more time, and the site should continue to operate during that period.
2- Start the SEO process and listen to it
Although working with a digital marketing and outsourcing agency is perfectly reasonable and acceptable, not cooperating entirely is wrong because success in this process depends on the expertise and experience of the same collection and business. Furthermore, not cooperating with the agency means increasing the likelihood of failure of SEO projects. For example, a successful project requires valuable and creative content. Suppose digital marketing agencies and company content writers have a common understanding of errors. In that case, they can produce much more valuable content that will increase the likelihood of interaction and much better linking.
3- Inability to implement changes and existing content
Since SEO is a continuous and long-term process, it is essential to follow the existing planning to perform the assigned tasks. If the digital marketing agency asks the customer to fix the bugs on the site or update the content, the customer should do all the tips and things as soon as possible. If a customer postpones doing anything for weeks or months, the speed of the search results ranking process will significantly reduce. Failure or delay in implementing site changes and technical improvements within the specified time will cause oscillating effects. For example, if the content of a product introduction page requires changes, such as adding keywords or adding valuable content, the customer should do so quickly. Otherwise, the digital marketing agency cannot request links from reputable sites until these changes are implemented. It will not lead to the desired result even if it does internal backlinks or external linking processes.
4- Failure to determine a suitable end to the marketing cycle
The sole purpose of SEO is not to increase site traffic, but the main goal is to get more users acquainted with that collection, interact, and ultimately increase the sales of that collection. However, in some cases, despite increasing sales and customers; and achieving the desired results, the customer does not transmit these results to the digital marketing agency. A digital marketing agency needs information such as “What types of inputs attract more customers?” Or “Which online orders are more popular?” To have available. The business suite should share this information with the agency; the digital marketing agency should plan the content linking and marketing strategy based on the results obtained, thereby providing a continuous, appropriate, high conversion rate for Creating a site.
5- Implementing fundamental changes in the website without the participation of the agency
The customer website is the centerpiece of SEO projects. However, suppose the customer makes significant changes without notifying the agency, such as changing or deleting some pages, changing the server or domain, replacing links, or doing things like the main changes. In that case, some SEO activities may negatively impact them. Even worse, the website may return to the starting point. This mistake is one of the most common mistakes in organizations and collections where the technical management of the website is separate from the marketing and does not have a direct relationship with each other. In addition, this happens when the manager has not established coordination and integration between the website development department (technical unit) and the SEO department. As a result, each of these two departments continues its activities without coordination.
The last word
Categorizing common SEO problems into agency and collection mistakes allows you to correctly identify the errors in each area and try to fix them. But more importantly, this separation of errors causes this to become a credible source for mutual education.
With mutual education, we come to the eleventh reason for the failure of SEO projects, which is the existence of misunderstanding. If the two parties to the SEO contract are sufficiently aware of each other’s duties, the mistakes mentioned above are less likely to occur.
Prompt and timely detection will prevent irreparable damage and significantly increase the chances of success of SEO projects.
If there is any question, please contact us or request a free proposal from our smart strategy SEO services. Also, visit our LinkedIn profile to have more digital marketing infographics and summarized articles.
