Search Marketing Mistakes – Are You Dealing Your Brand A Bum Hand?

Online retail is a tricky act to nail these days for the simple reason that competition is way beyond fierce. Regardless of what it is you’re selling or who you’re planning to sell it to, it’s largely guaranteed that you’ll have your work cut out when it comes to standing out from the crowd and earning a following. And while there’s much to be said for seeking out the best shopper marketing agency in London for a little professional input, it often tends to be the smallest things that add up to the biggest difference…and at both ends of the spectrum, too.

So, with this in mind, what follows is a quick overview of just a few of the most common and potentially harmful search marketing mistakes that could be holding back your efforts:

1 – Poor Tracking

Right off the bat, if you aren’t carefully tracking your site’s activity and the habits of your visitors using the appropriate analytics, then you have absolutely no way of knowing what’s working and what isn’t. What’s more, you won’t know which elements of your search marketing efforts are coming to fruition and which are falling short of the mark. Analytics are free, easy to use and could not be of greater importance when it comes to tracking both the success of your business and the progress being made by your marketing efforts.

2 – Favouring Quantity Over Quality

Google has made it pretty clear over recent years that quantity really does matter when it comes to site content. Sites with thin, dated or generally rather stagnant content rarely rank well, but at the same time neither do sites that are loaded with filler just for the sake of bulking things up. If you’re going to go for one over the other, it always has to be quality that comes first. That being said, the key to success lies in striking the right balance – that being a ton of content of the highest quality.

3 – Broken Links

A handful of broken links across your website can look harmless enough and aren’t necessarily hurting anyone, but that could be standing in the way of your search marketing push. The reason being that broken links give an impression of a site that’s falling to pieces, been left to stagnate or is generally rather on the dodgy side. This applies to your customers and search engines alike – both of which respond quite badly to broken links and could therefore harm your progress and performance.

4 – Ineffective Keyword Use

Getting it right these days with keywords is quite tricky and for two very good reasons. First of all, the way people search for sites, products and services has changed enormously over recent years which must be taken into account when choosing keywords to target. And at the same time, the world’s biggest search engines are stricter than they have ever been when it comes to the overuse of keywords and phrases – not only is the line finer than it’s ever been, it’s also disconcertingly blurred. What works and what doesn’t will vary from business to business, but in any and all instances it’s crucially important not to underestimate just how crucial deep keyword research really is.

5 – Ignoring Local Search

To overlook the importance of local search can be wholly fatal for the modern e-commerce business looking to get by. If you don’t make the necessary efforts to target your own locality, your chances of success take a dive for the simple reason that in order to succeed, you’ll have to outshine every one of your rivals operating at national or even international levels. The beauty of local search is the way in which it immediately narrows things in your favour by excluding the vast majority of rival brands that aren’t targeting your own locality. And when it comes to scoring points with Google and Co, local search is a very big deal these days…VERY!

6 – Mobile Matters

Last but not least, Google recently rolled out one of the biggest changes in the history of its primary search algorithm, which took aim squarely at those sites that haven’t yet been brought up to standard in terms of mobile-friendliness. Statistics show that more web users than ever before are turning to their mobile devices as their primary tools of choice for pretty much every online activity across the board. As such, to run a site that isn’t 100% mobile-friendly is to turn your back on a genuinely enormous chunk of the consumer population and this deal your brand a quite severely bum hand.