Here is a list of our top 10 most common digital marketing mistakes that we have seen with new clients. This could be everything from simple mistakes to huge issues that will add months on to a project and negatively impact your online presence. Most of these are easily avoidable if you are aware of what to look for.
Local SEO Marketing Mistakes
Digital Marketing and SEO is a constantly evolving process. There are plenty of tactics that worked great years ago that have been phased out or have been replaced with better tech. Most of this is common sense, but we still encounter this every week with new clients.
Here is our list in no particular order.
1 – Cheap Website Platforms
Everyday we see ads for different discount design platforms like Wix that advertise themselves as a great service for start up websites. While these may see more cost effective for you as a business, you will soon realize that these low cost platforms are very limited in what they can actually do.
Wix, Squarespace, and yes even Shopify are not as SEO friendly as they advertise. They are built on their own custom platforms that require specific coders to optimize. While they advertise great results, the time it takes to optimize is at least doubled for good organic rank.
2- Cheap Website Design
There are a thousands of web designs companies out there that offer low cost website builds. We literally just took on a client in June of 2019 who hired a web designer off of Craigs List who built them a beautiful website for a very little upfront cost. They thought it was great. 3 Months after the site was built, they still were not ranking for anything.
It turns out that the original web designer did not add any security to the site, and they were hacked. They were showing up for keywords in Austin, while they were a Dallas based business. They were showing up for terms related to steroids and weight loss, but their business was based in the home remodeling industry.
We had to go in and basically rebuild the entire site from the ground up. It added about 2 months to the ranking process but within 90 days we were able to take them from no rank to over 150 local keywords. We have increased their organic traffic by over 200% and it increases every month.
This could have all been avoided if they hired a proper web design team to build the site from the ground up. This way your local SEO optimization is set up correctly as the site is being built.
3 – Incorrect Info Online
There are been many times that a business owner has had different business and social profiles created by someone on their staff. The issue here is that the profiles and listings are created with an individuals email address and login. More often than you may realize is that people change jobs and careers a lot more than they used to. Which will often lead to a totally abandoned account.
If a company moves locations or simply changes their phone number; all of the business info needs to be updated. This is very difficult to do if you cannot login and access your social media and business listings.
YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and other sites require an email login and password. If your intern from 5 years ago created all this for you using their email address, you will have a hard time claiming ownership of these profiles.
The best bet is to use a company email address to create all of your business profiles and listings. Make sure you keep that email and password in a secure place for future use.
4 – Not tracking anything
I have met a number of business owners with websites who have never set up or looked at the analytics of their site. Being able to track your incoming traffic and where the traffic is coming from is a huge benefit to your online marketing. Not tracking your calls, visitors, traffic, etc is a big mistake.
If your business depends on phone calls, but you don’t have call tracking; you are missing out on valuable data. Analytics tracking is crucial in being able to see where your website visitors are coming from.
Quite often cheap web design companies will not do this for you or magically skip this step.
5 – No SEO
While every business is different, every business needs to have some sort of organic presence online. SEO does more than just rank your site for “target keywords.” Good SEO helps you own your brand online. It helps you attract customers.
Not doing SEO on a site is basically the equivalent of opening a store and not marketing. Good SEO is a good investment.
Another thing to consider is that there are niche marketing agencies vs general marketing agencies. A marketing agency for contractors will probably get better results for contractors and construction companies because that is all they focus on. A general agency works with anyone and everyone and needs to learn your customer avatar.
A dispensary SEO agency for cannabis companies will definitely get better results than a general marketing agency.
6 – Focusing on the wrong marketing strategy
I am also a huge Gary V fan, but not every business needs to focus on Instagram or the new hot social media campaign. Certain companies can utilize these platforms as a secondary or extra marketing strategy.
This refers back to tracking your data. We have a number of clients who are “influencers” in their own niche. While they do a good amount of social media marketing, their main traffic and lead generation comes from a combination of YouTube videos and organic traffic.
You have to know what platforms are bringing in the best ROI for your business. Not everyone needs to be marketing on Pinterest or Instagram.
7 – Misunderstanding Funnels
Shiny objects are usually “quick fixes” or the new hot thing that can easily distract someone from accomplishing their goal. This goes hand in hand with the wrong marketing strategy.
Quite often shiny objects come from someone “crushing it” with some new never heard of strategy… that isn’t that new. It’ probably just new to you, or they regurgitated an older strategy and repackaged it.
We’ve had people contact us about creating “funnels.” We have built plenty of in depth sales funnels for online client launches. Most of these calls simply needed a simple landing page (or home page) that allowed visitors to enter their information.
A real sales funnel requires much more than just a page to collect info. A real sales funnel needs follow up emails, retargeting campaigns, and much more. Don’t get fooled into thinking you need a funnel when you just need a good website and home page.
8 – Patience
It takes time to build a business. It take time to build and rank a business online. It definitely takes time to build trust for a brand and for a business.
Too often are people easily discouraged because they are not seeing instant results. Building a website, Facebook page or YouTube channel is the first step. While this is an initial investment (both time and money), it is just the first step.
Growing a brand takes time and dedication. Some of our clients have worked with us for years, and their business grows bigger and bigger every year because they are doing the work alongside us. This includes content creation, marketing material, and being on their A game when clients contact them.
We have taken websites from no traffic to over 10,000 hits a month. We have also taken YouTube channels from less than a 1000 subscribers to over 65,000 subscribers organically. We have taken websites from no search terms to over 300 high ranking terms in competitive markets. This was done over the course of time, and definitely did not happen overnight.
Be patient and do the work. It’s worth it.
9 – Customer Service/ Not answering the phone
One of the main reasons we recommend using call tracking for your business is to find out whether or not your calls are being answered. We had one client who was paying close to $50 a click for Google Ads and the person that was supposed to be answering the phone NEVER picked up.
His site ranked, he had ads in place, and the calls were coming in… but no one was answering the phone. His average clients were worth anywhere from $1500 – $10,000 a month. While his call volume wasn’t huge, his “assistant” was missing 99% of the incoming calls.
Once we figured out where the gap was in his marketing, he was able to quickly fix it. Without call tracking in place, this might have never come to light and he would have continuously been losing money. He would have also been paying someone for not doing their job correctly.
10 – Reputation Management
Reputation Management is HUGE for local businesses. Reviews have become the go to search term when it comes to a buying decision. Whether you are selling a product or a service you need to have positive reviews and feedback on all of your business listings.
Google now shows all of your reviews when someone searches your business. Yelp, Angie’s List, Houzz, Facebook, and other platforms all have reviews and show up in Google searches.
One of the biggest digital marketing mistakes that we commonly see is a lack of reputation management. Lucky for you, we have a system that we use for our clients to manage all of this.
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