Being a leader in today’s digital economy is not easy. The hasty shifts in technology and the way customers adapt to it have changed the way of doing business. Also the obstacles between offline and online business are broken down gradually.
In online business, especially in SEO, the capital alone is no longer conclusive in determining success. If you haven’t redirected your key pages properly, while changing your website or completely moving over to a new platform, you are unwittingly corroding the rank, sales and traffic of your website.
As a business leader, it is your responsibility to take your company to the desirable height and also to achieve the company goals. For that, you must be aware of some critical mistakes that should be avoided; they can stop you from achieving success.
I have discussed about them below. Implementing these recommendations on your SEO strategy will help you attract more sales and leads, bring more traffic, strengthen your whole company and help you speed up towards your financial and strategic goals at a lower cost.
Mistake 1: Remain in the Past:
SEO is a vast and ever-changing field with huge possibilities. However, many business leaders are not updated with the latest developments and keep clinging on to the past.
Of course, sticking on to the safe and sound SEO methods is good, but always keep in mind that success will always run behind the persons who is skilled with the latest developments.
Though the older methods and techniques are still relevant, the introduction of newer methods is what turns an ordinary campaign into a successful one.
Take-aways:
- The advanced tools help you get an exact idea of your current position from which to build upon. So, spend some amount for analytic tools.
- Take your past experiences as advantage and move forward with your eyes on what lies ahead.
- Hire an external consultant so that you can concentrate on other significant issues.
- Build actionable dashboards in your analytics tool. Mainly focus on how well you are performing? how much you are successful in reaching your economic as well as strategic goals? What makes you more effective – which helps you to increase more sales and traffic, which is cost effective, etc.?
Mistake 2: Managing Without Leading:
In terms of managing a business, one of the greatest challenges for leaders is to conclude how much is too much.
Being a leader, you must have a better analysis of your whole business. You must recognize how different segments incorporate and work together. Managing them to perform in sync must be your first priority.
Getting involved in too many minute or specific details may affect your results. You may not be well versed in all of them but your SEO expert will be. So, leave the nitty gritty details to your expert and keep your eye on the overall picture.
Mistake 3: Avoid Heavy Organizational Structure that Lacks Teamwork:
Large organizations are tiresome unless effort is made to keep the communication channels open. A business leader must make the organization responsive, so that it works for the benefit of the company. The SEO can get you the exposure you want, but the company has to capitalize on it through legitimate products and services.
Take-aways:
- A business organization will be successful only when all its sections work together to satisfy the basic needs of the customer. So, as a leader you must analyze your internal organization structure and see whether your departments (Marketing, Sales, PR, etc.) and staffs are organized appropriately for effective collaboration and communication.
- Assign the specific responsibility to each and every staff members of all departments. Make sure they have an attitude for maintaining an environment of mutual cooperation because without cooperation or teamwork, it is impossible to achieve success. So, have them oversee and approve every action before it goes out of your company.
- Give more importance to your customer needs, not to your own. Instead of talking about your business, just tell them how your products and services solve their problem and change their lives.
Mistake 4 : Lack of Unity:
Many leaders err at this point. They fail to set up an integrated multi-channel sales and marketing efforts guided by a combined strategy that gives strength to each component of the whole.
There is a vital interdependency between social media, search engines, mobile units, PR and how successful you are in getting more local customers for your business. If you have a well-planned strategy, then many low-hanging, ripe fruits will be available for plucking.
Take-aways:
- Good SEO experts are an exact hybrid of an analyst, marketer and business developer. They will help you find new ways to captivate the customers, increase sales, add business opportunities and optimize other parts of your business.
- Don’t underrate the synergy and interdependency between different parts of your marketing. Routine communication between departments is a good rule of thumb to get the most synergy within the entire corporation.
Mistake 5: Short Term Thinking and Budgeting About SEO:
The decision-making about buying marketing or SEO services is usually based on flawed perceptions. Most of the time, business leaders underestimate the significance of SEO.
They think that SEO is helpful only to rank the websites higher in the search engines. Actually, it is more than that. It is never a “cost”; it is more of an “investment”. If you give more importance to the SEO, definitely you will get big returns from that.
Take-aways:
- While buying SEO services, please stop focusing on the price. Low budgeting services may offer you one route but it may end up being costlier, more problematic and even fatal for your business in contrast to more expensive services that are rooted in the best-practices.
- Be aware of the fact that SEO is the largest contributor of revenue to most of the businesses; yet it receives only a small fraction of the amount in the overall marketing budget. If you increase your SEO budget, you can easily achieve your financial as well as strategic goals of your business.
- If your SEO consultant drives many qualified sales and leads, but it is limited by resource allocation, then break the restrictions and give full independence to him to achieve the target. Definitely it will benefit your business.
Invest more in knowledge transfer. Most of the leaders don’t want to do this; they just want to fix the problem. But keep one thing in the mind: quick fixes are short lived; you may have to pay an exorbitant price in the long run.
Leave a Reply