5 Ways To Stop Sabotaging Your SEO Success

Don’t let these road­blocks pre­vent you from reach­ing your strate­gic goals.

Kristine Schachinger By Kristine Schachinger. Join the discussion » 0 comments

You want to tri­umph over your com­peti­tor. You want to see your bounce rates go down and see pos­i­tive gains in rel­e­vant traf­fic. Watch­ing a site go from neg­a­tive to pos­i­tive means more rev­enue, more jobs, new prod­ucts, and the poten­tial to even rev­o­lu­tion­ize an indus­try. So what’s stand­ing in the way? Well, it might be you.


Often the hard­est bat­tles for search engine opti­miza­tion experts isn’t with Google algo­rithms or for search rank­ings, but with the com­pa­nies that hire them. Despite being hired for their exper­tise inter­nal issues with process­es, pri­or­i­ties, or peo­ple can severe­ly hin­der SEO out­comes.

What prob­lems must you solve to stop sab­o­tag­ing your own SEO suc­cess?

1. Silos

A site audit is quite reveal­ing. It can almost tell you how your com­pa­ny came to be and what your inter­nal struc­ture is with­out even check­ing. Why?

SEO issues are often a direct reflec­tion of the inter­nal struc­ture of a com­pa­ny. How they are addressed, what and how SEO plans are imple­ment­ed all point to the company’s inter­nal archi­tec­ture – the good and the bad.

Inde­pen­dent silos that don’t over­lap are one of the most preva­lent chal­lenges in SEO imple­men­ta­tion. Because most com­pa­nies don’t have a CDO, or chief dig­i­tal offi­cer, SEO tasks usu­al­ly fall between the efforts of the tech team and the mar­ket­ing group.

This means that no one group is lead­ing the effort. Each silo only has part of the pic­ture and more so, part of the knowl­edge. In return, either team can unknow­ing­ly cre­ate issues.

Mar­ket­ing may send over a design that is fraught with SEO issues because it rep­re­sents their brand in a way they think is best. Where the tech­ni­cal team may decide to ignore brand fac­tors in favor of an eas­i­er tech­ni­cal solu­tion.

In addi­tion, none of these teams spe­cial­ize in dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing. Which means no one with all the knowl­edge of how every item affects you web­site vis­i­bil­i­ty. No one is over­see­ing all the work to make sure it is being done accord­ing to best prac­tices.

Silos work for cer­tain inter­nal process­es and not for oth­ers. SEO isn’t a ver­ti­cal effort, but a hor­i­zon­tal one cov­er­ing many areas often han­dled by sep­a­rate teams. Cor­rect SEO imple­men­ta­tion requires one team hav­ing full knowl­edge, a full pic­ture, and the full exper­tise to over­see the strate­gic effort.

Solution?

Because the cur­rent Google algo­rithm touch­es so many aspects of a web­site, in front and behind the scenes, it’s ben­e­fi­cial to have a team that can co-ordi­nate efforts. These peo­ple will inform on strat­e­gy, help pre­vent issues from being cre­at­ed and can help make inter­nal teams make the best choic­es when unsure.

Whether it’s an inter­nal SEO that works with your exter­nal agency or an inter­nal depart­ment; hav­ing some­one with exper­tise who can watch over the all aspects of your dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing plan is the best way to achieve suc­cess.

Caveat: The only way this can suc­ceed is if your SEO team is giv­en the abil­i­ty to not only over­see, but also direct. Should they be telling your writ­ers how to write? No. Should they be telling you that if you write that arti­cle it needs to be over 750 words, have a prop­er title tag, descrip­tion, and URL along with the best prac­tices to add these? Yes.

2. Prioritization

Often when an SEO does a site audit or comes up with a strate­gic dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing plan, the com­pa­ny isn’t pre­pared to imple­ment the rec­om­men­da­tions. Though there can be many rea­sons, typ­i­cal­ly this is due to the issue of resource allo­ca­tion.

With­out prop­er resource allo­ca­tion, pri­or­i­ties are no longer the pri­or­i­ties out­lined by your inter­nal SEO team or exter­nal agency. Pri­or­i­ties become tied to avail­able resources and usu­al­ly few are direct­ly giv­en to the SEO team. Typ­i­cal­ly this caus­es a mis­align­ment between what needs to be done and what can be done.

Mod­i­fy­ing SEO plans hap­pen all the time as there is rarely an ide­al envi­ron­ment to imple­ment a plan as hoped. How­ev­er, when the SEO plan is mod­i­fied it means you’re stray­ing from the best plan and are now uti­liz­ing a “what we can imple­ment” plan. This will get you results, but not the best results.

Solution?

Make sure when you being a plan or receive an audit that you have allo­cat­ed X per­cent of your devel­op­ment and mar­ket­ing team’s time to address the issues pre­sent­ed to you and to imple­ment the strate­gies giv­en. Organ­ic traf­fic is worth its weight in gold. Don’t piece meal your plan togeth­er.

3. Processes

This often is com­bined with the issue of pri­or­i­ti­za­tion, but deserves its own men­tion. When attempt­ing to imple­ment your SEO strate­gies those plans either fall to dif­fer­ent teams with their own process­es that don’t sup­port the end goal or it requires the SEO team has to work with process­es that don’t sup­port their efforts. Either way, what needs to hap­pen doesn’t.

Inter­nal process­es are often road­blocks that make get­ting any­thing done dif­fi­cult to impos­si­ble.

Want to add that con­tent? Mar­ket­ing has a month back up for approvals.

Need to fix that tech­ni­cal redi­rect issue? The tech­nol­o­gy team doesn’t have room in its sched­ule.

The SEO spends more time fight­ing with your team to get some­thing done than doing the work because the process­es to get that work done don’t exist.

Solution

SEO can lit­er­al­ly change in a moment. What worked last night might have changed today because of a Google update.

A “wait and we’ll get to it envi­ron­ment” will impair suc­cess. If you want to achieve suc­cess, your SEO team must be able to make quick changes and not have to wait through lengthy approval cycles.

So not only does the team, inter­nal or exter­nal, need to be able to set work pri­or­i­ti­za­tion they must be able to have access to the process­es to accom­plish this work. Some­times it’s direct access, oth­er times it just the C‑level exec­u­tive in charge of a team mak­ing sure every­one knows what process­es are need­ed, so they can be put in place for imme­di­ate action should a change occur.

4. People

It hap­pens all the time. An SEO agency is hired and peo­ple inside the com­pa­ny get ner­vous and go into pro­tec­tion mode.

No agency wants to come in a take an inter­nal SEO’s job or have one removed. In fact, most SEO agen­cies will work with your team to help edu­cate and inform them, so they can bet­ter assist the over­all effort. The more the mer­ri­er (and the eas­i­er the suc­cess­es become the more resources that are avail­able).

The issue is often the exec­u­tives in charge leave the exter­nal agency in the hands of the peo­ple inside their com­pa­ny that see the SEO agency as a threat to their jobs. This can result in sig­nif­i­cant push­back by the inter­nal team. The SEO agency is put in the posi­tion to spend their time, not work­ing, but prov­ing they know what you hired them to do.

Solution

There are no sim­ple solu­tions, but there are actions you can take to min­i­mize this issue.

First, make sure the team is prop­er­ly intro­duced to your agency, so the agency can explain why they are there and how they want to help.

Sec­ond, do not allow team mem­bers to direct­ly con­front your agency with “proofs” why “X” or “Y” needs to be done a cer­tain way. Arrange a month­ly or bi-week­ly meet­ing where you can dis­cuss all items that are unclear, so the team and agency can estab­lish a help­ful dia­log sur­round­ing work and meth­ods, not chal­lenges to exper­tise.

Third, don’t rely on your team’s inter­nal report­ing to tell you what is hap­pen­ing with your SEO cam­paign. Estab­lish­ing your own check-in with the agency leads ensures you’re both on the same page, that you know what is hap­pen­ing, and why it’s hap­pen­ing. This can be a 10,000-foot view, but if you do not have that view it is easy for mis­com­mu­ni­ca­tions to occur.

SEO isn’t an exact sci­ence. Min­i­miz­ing mis­com­mu­ni­ca­tions and estab­lish­ing a help­ing hand rela­tion­ship with your agency will go a long way in eas­ing people’s minds and remov­ing this road­block.

5. Fear of Change

If you want organ­ic traf­fic, you may have to make major changes to your site, your inter­nal process­es, or both. SEO teams don’t make sug­gest­ed changes light­ly – they do it because they just think this needs to hap­pen, it is because every­thing they know about Google’s algo­rithms tells them that your site can­not suc­ceed in its cur­rent state using it cur­rent meth­ods.

For instance, a process called lazy load­ing means all your con­tent below that point will no longer be read by Google. And did you know Google has a page lay­out algo­rithm the deval­ues your site if you use too much space “above the fold” for adver­tise­ments or graph­ics?

There are 500 main points of the algo­rithm and thou­sands of sub-points. You are pay­ing your SEO team to know these and how to best address them. They are not telling you that you need new host­ing, a new site, more con­tent, bet­ter site archi­tec­ture because they just think it needs to be done, they are telling you it because they know it needs to be done.

A prop­er SEO expert will be able to inform you about how your site’s tech­ni­cal make-up is reduc­ing your web­site vis­i­bil­i­ty, or how an orange but­ton won’t covert as well as this green one, or that using infi­nite scroll Isn’t a pos­i­tive user expe­ri­ence for most sites and that it is not well inter­pret­ed by Google.

So when they tell you to change that but­ton col­or, remove your infi­nite scroll, or improve your site speed, they are telling you because their ulti­mate goal is to see you suc­ceed.

Solution?

If you prop­er­ly vet­ted your agency, trust their rec­om­men­da­tions. It can be dis­heart­en­ing to be told you need a new site. It can upset inter­nal staff to find out that the tech­ni­cal choic­es they made, while slick, are pre­vent­ing the site from being seen by poten­tial cus­tomers.

Your web­site is just a tool to make sure peo­ple see what you are sell­ing or pro­vid­ing. Don’t let fear of change pre­vent you from mak­ing bet­ter choic­es that boost your bot­tom line.

Summary

Road­blocks pre­vent your SEO team from reach­ing your strate­gic goals.

You can hire the best SEO agency or con­sul­tant in the world, but if they can’t imple­ment a plan, have no over­sight, or are unable to cre­ate change because of inter­nal issues, then you’re essen­tial­ly tying their hands behind their back. They will still find a way to make pos­i­tive gains, but you won’t get all the gains you might have had you addressed your inter­nal chal­lenges.

Min­i­mize road­blocks and you will find more gains than you thought pos­si­ble.


Are any of these issues mak­ing it dif­fi­cult to reach your strate­gic SEO goals?

Kristine Schachinger

Written by Kristine Schachinger

CEO

Kristine has worked for 18 years in the creation, development, implementation and maintenance of websites in all sectors including government, academia, entertainment and e-commerce with a focus on usability, architecture, human factors, W3C, Section 508 and WCAG accessibility compliance as well additional specializations in SEO, ORM and social media. Currently focusing on monthly SEO Support, Site Audits and Penalty Recovery working with small business to Fortune 500 companies on increasing their website visibility and online presence.

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