Hello.  My name is Ray Comstock.  Most people call me Catfish.  I am the SEO Manager for BusinessOnLine and I am not only responsible for defining our SEO process, but I oversee all the enterprise level SEO work that BusinessOnLine does.  So I have had a lot of experience dealing with all kinds of SEO engagements at various levels and I have had opportunities to work with a number of different marketing teams. 

As a result of that experience, I thought many of the OMS participants would like to see my list of some of the most common ways that I see marketers squandering resources and not optimizing their optimization.  Hopefully this will help some folks avoid similar circumstances and save money!

#1 - Waiting a Long Time to Implement SEO Recommendations

This is the number one thing I see costing people money.  I will give you a worse case scenario to illustrate the point.  One of my clients is a Fortune 500 company with a lot of divisions.  It’s a HUGE company.  The marketing team that hired us is completely separate from the IT team.  We have told the marketing folks there at least 4 times formally and a few more time informally that they really need to remove the robots.txt meta tag that is blocking the main 3 category pages of their site.  I wish I could tell you who it is cause it really is amazing a company this big has this problem.  But the tragedy is the amount of traffic that the site has lost over the course of the last SEVEN months that could have been gained by literally backspacing one line out of an html file.  We are talking in the tens of thousands here folks.  And the amount of money paid for this campaign is considerable so it is extremely frustrating from an SEO perspective.   But these types of situations are all too common when companies purchase SEO services and then don’t convey the sense of urgency and importance of those recommendations to the entire team.

#2 - Buying Links / Reciprocal Links

Too many SEO folks and search marketers look to short term fixes for link acquisition.  Whether its buying links or exchanging links, its easy to waste a lot of money and get not much in return.  And even more so, its impossible to directly tie SEO results to link buying in a quantifiable way that justifies ROI.  It’s all guesswork.  Exchanging links is fine to do with related business partners to get some low hanging fruit, but reciprocal links shouldn’t make up the majority of your back link profile.  Marketers would get a much better long term ROI by using a sophisticated blogging / social media strategy for link acquisition.  Not only does this type of approach produce links but it also produces authoritative content which enhances brand position, increases conversions and also contributes to SEO by continually adding additional keyword focused content to the site.

3 - Not Having Clearly Defined Conversion Goals

Not understanding your conversion funnel from the beginning of a visit, whether its from search or direct referral, to the conversion event, can significantly affect your ROI.  If you don’t know what is making you money, there is no way to do more of it.  Additionally, if you keep your conversion definition too narrow in scope you can leave money on the table.  So for example, if your main conversion is a lead form, you might be tracking what keywords cause the most leads (and rightfully so, this is essential).  However, you may not be tracking which search terms cause the most white paper downloads because downloads don’t generate dollars.  But, if you started tracking how many white paper downloads ended up in conversions based on a coupon code you put in the white paper, then you can compare downloads to coupon code usage (along with similar email addresses) and get an approximate measure of how many people who download your White Paper also buy from you.  Once you have a reasonable approximation of that ratio, you can determine how much money each White Paper download is worth to the company.  This information allows you to prioritize the White Paper content for organic search and also get a much better understand of your ROI for paid search on related terms.  Often times this will allow you to increase your spend on these words as you can see exactly (or approximately) how much money they are generating.  Understanding all your conversion funnels and the relative worth of traffic to your Web site is critical to a successful search marketing campaign.

4 - Bad Usability

Nothing like getting a bunch of targeted visitors to your site only to find that they don’t do what you want them to do because it isn’t clear how to.   I don’t want to beat a dead horse but usability evaluation and testing should be an ongoing activity for every site.  If you can double your conversion % from say 1% to 2%, that’s like DOUBLING your traffic.  Good usability doesn’t just affect conversions either.  As Google becomes more socialably driven, usability will continue to have a profound impact on SEO.  Marketers would be wise to start and end all campaigns with usability as a primary focus.

These are my top 4 that I see most often.  Do you have some others you can think of or maybe some experience with one of these four issues you think would help the group as a whole?  Let us know!