10 Reasons Why SEO Fails

I've worked on quite a few SEO orientated projects for SME's in the past and I have to say that nearly all of these project failed for one reason or other.

"By fail, i mean to say that SEO techniques were applied and increased rankings were realized with greater organic traffic volumes, yet the customer received very little return from SEO, in terms of inquiries and sales."

I'm being brutally honest with you here because from what my colleagues tell me in the Industry 95+% of projects are failing to provide anything near a return on investment (ROI).

Here are the 10 main reasons why SEO fails to deliver on its promise.

1. As I discussed in my post Pragmatics in Keywords, the customer neither takes responsibility for or takes the time to identify the keywords that will be most likely to bring traffic and convert into inquires.

Quite often from testing I found that the most obvious keywords were also the least likely keywords to convert and the least likely keywords were the most likely to convert into inquiries. 

"Yet, if the customer cannot be creative and convert his knowledge of his customer markets into keywords, or is unwilling to share this insight, the project will fail."

"Why does the customer expect me the SEO guy to have a better understanding of the keyword language of his market than him?"

"I can only guess at his keywords, then suck it and see. Which means he can probably kiss goodbye to his ROI."

"Ok, I can check what keywords his competitors are targeting, but how do I know whether these keywords are converting for them unless I steal access to their in-house ROI spreadsheet?"

2. Another reason why ROI is poor on SEO campaigns is the content that visitors reach by clicking on search results is neither consistent with the organic listing clicked on, offers no additional value to support their interest and has no call to action.

"If the customer thinks SEO is simply about adding some metatags in all the right places, they are approaching SEO from an ignorant direction"

"They have to pay for content to be massaged into the right order to match the search listings."

3. Another reason for failure is that hiring managers consider SEO to be a technical skill to be called upon at will, rather than a skill, core to sales.

"To get the best ROI, SEO is actually a 24*7*365 job for someone"

"SEO is actually a full-time job for someone and given it has the potential to return high value/low cost of sales opportunities should be seen as a core sales task. A core drive to profit."

"SEO is not a peripheral technical skill to be purchased at will"

"SEO is a skillset you really ought to consider bringing in-house - or at the very least contracting a freelancer local to your office"

4. Much the same as number 3, but here the customers doesn't realise that they need to pay for a content strategy and for someone to write the content on a daily basis to feed Google the confidence it needs to both index and rank links.

"The customer did not realize that SEO would take their business global and be viewed from many different platforms. So they didn't see the point of paying for language localization and re-purposing of content to fit on mobile, tablets, TV's etc."

5. Customers choose cheap SEO services as a speculative measure to learn the ropes and build confidence in their decision making before they invest in finding more effective support.

Whilst I can see the merits in this, employing cheap, remote, foreign SEO services can also do long term damage to the fortunes of your website.

"SEO is no different to any other service employed in business. If you want a job done well, you have pay for it."

"If you must speculate to learn, make sure you find grown-ups to do your SEO and may sure you pay them properly"

"Don't get me wrong though, "Foreign SEO" has its place. See point 6."

6. Customers want to take on the world, sell to the world, be on top of the world, yet they Don't know the World.

This is a similar point to above. As with a conventional business, if you don't already have a presence or knowledge of markets abroad, you are going to have a hard time developing an SEO campaign in those markets, unless you hire SEO expertise with knowledge of both SEO and your particular industry.

"Lesson 1. Don't pay to play the SEO game in foreign markets you don't understand. Save your money and if you really must enter these markets, do so with a local industry knowledgeable SEO partner"

7. Customers don't want to pay for SEO tools, data or backlinks

Basically here there is only so far FREE takes you! Yes, there are a ton of free tools and historical search data out there, but that only gets you so far.

So too must you the customer be willing to invest in a backlink building campaign - and I don't mean paying for automated spamming, I mean paying to advertise links on websites in your markets and spending time forming relationships with webmasters.

"If you want to play everything on the cheap, be prepared for cheap ROI"

"Cheap tools and cheap data = cheap SEO"

8. Customer doesn't understand that SEO is about reflecting how their customers or prospects think about them in the search engines results. 

"Customers don't appreciate that a website is for their customers and for their prospective customers and must therefore use all and only the language that their customer identifies their business and product with. SEO addresses the brand."

"A Website is for the customer, not for the Company who owns the website"

"Chosen keywords will always reflect a deep knowledge that the owner of a website has for their customer"

9. Customer doesn't understand that it is going to take over 1 year to really start seeing a return on Investment.

Whilst you can start seeing results in the form of increased traffic volumes in the first month, you won't really build traffic volumes to a substantially increased level for between 6 and 9 months and you won't have sufficient data and tools support for at least one year before you can truly have control of your conversion funnel.

Those customers who want faster results should look to running pay per click (PPC) campaigns rather than SEO campaigns.

10. Customer expects the SEO guy to operate with limited systems access.

Forget it Guys, If you knew how technically involved SEO was, you wouldn't even consider it, or if you did, you certainly wouldn't expect to restrict access to the one guy you expect to attract extra clients and extra revenue.

If you want to play at SEO, you might find it cheaper playing Xbox games or pressing coins into slot machines lol