The Top 5 Reasons SEO Has Not Worked For Your Website

SEO is one of the very best investments any business owner can make for his or her business. Not only for the obvious monetary benefits that come with having your website ranked first in the search engines when potential customers search for what your business offers, but it also brands you as the absolute authority in your niche. Having your website come up before all others immediately makes that potential customer look at your business as the number one go to for whatever they just searched for.

This all sounds great, right?

But we know all that.

I’m not here to try to sell you on SEO. If you don’t know how beneficial SEO is for your business by now, well to be honest…your competition is thanking you.

I’m here today to break down why SEO has not worked for you in the past. All these benefits that I listed above would be amazing, right? But for some reason or another, it just hasn’t worked that way for you. And the last thing you want to hear is another SEO guru pitch you on how great having your website ranked first can be when no one has been able to pull it off in the past.

“SEO is a crock. It doesn’t really work. These are just people saying that they can rank my site to get me to pay them every month. They can’t actually do it.”

Right?

Let me be the first to tell you with absolute certainty that SEO is real and ranking websites is possible. If you know what you’re doing.

Here are the top 5 reasons that SEO has not worked for you in the past.

5. You Are Doing SEO Yourself

I’m sure you are a very capable and intelligent person. You are a business owner, and you didn’t get where you are at by being the dullest knife in the drawer. But the fact is that SEO is not something that can be taken lightly. It is not a hobby that you can pick up and put down when you feel like doing it. It is a full time COMMITMENT. I say commitment because it is not just a job. You have to be 100% invested in the results of your website.

There is simply no way you can successfully run a business and do everything that it will take to rank your website properly at the same time. You have to concentrate on actually running your business. You don’t have enough time for both. Why do you think most marketing agencies don’t even do their own ranking? That’s right. Most marketing agencies actually outsource their ranking to people far more capable than them. They simply don’t have time or the ability to do it themselves. At least not the right way. And proper SEO (the kind that actually gets results) is way above the pay grade that they’re paying the employees that manage their clients.

So trust me when I say, you have more than enough on your plate. You really don’t have enough time to compete with the SEO professionals that your competition has already hired.

4. Your Site Has Been Penalized By Bad SEO Decisions in the Past

This one is pretty serious. And it’s one that most people overlook simply because they don’t really know that the site they’re working on could be penalized. Have you ever been stuck on page 3 and can’t break the barrier? No matter what your SEO does, you just can’t seem to get over the hump? Or maybe you were ranking great and had a sudden drop like you took a step off a cliff into oblivion?

The fact is that Google changes their algorithm constantly. What was considered good SEO a few years, or even months ago will get your website penalized without you even knowing it. The “in” thing a few years ago was to use software that would generate massive amounts of articles with backlinks to your site and spit them out to random directories creating a wave of links pointing back to your site. The problem with this is that it’s not real. It’s spam. And quite frankly, it’s pretty crappy SEO. Google recognized this and put an end to crappy link building.

While that’s all well and good, the problem is that there are still a lot of so-called SEOs who still think they can skate by by using these ancient methods of ranking because they are too lazy to do anything more than push a button on some software and lean back and collect a modest fee. Either that or they just don’t know any better.

Did you ever wonder why some people claim to be able to rank your site for peanuts compared to other SEO quotes? (More on that later).

Look, if your SEO does not know how to check whether your site might be penalized, you need to re-evaluate who you have trusted with your website. You need to make sure the work that they are doing is quality. Nowadays it’s not about the quantity. You need quality SEO being done and that simply can’t be done with automated software and spammy backlinks. If your site is penalized, you need help. NOW!

3. You Have Not Optimized Your Site For SEO

This is something that not too many people think of, but it is incredibly important to rank in the search engines. If you (or whoever works on your site) has not taken the time to optimize your site to rank for the keywords you are going after, then you are never going to rank for those keywords. It really is that simple. Google is not (all that) dumb. They are not going to rank a website for keywords when there is nothing on the site indicating that the site is about those keywords. So you can’t really expect to rank for something if your site does not have the proper content in place.

Google ranks websites by having their “bots” go around and crawl the internet. So you can’t expect these bots to put 2 and 2 together by themselves. You have to virtually take them by the hand and tell them what your site is about. There are things that the Google bots look for when crawling a site that tell them what the site is about. These factors are what will rank your site. Not having them in place is inexcusable if you are really trying to rank for certain keywords.

2. The SEO You Hired is Doing the Minimal Amount of Work

This one is a little harsh, but it’s extremely crucial to know and understand.  Just because someone says that they do SEO does not make them an SEO expert and does not make them capable of ranking your website. Like I said before, the reality is that a ton of marketing agencies actually outsource their SEO to people that are more capable of ranking than they are. I guess what you need to ask yourself is: who do you want working on ranking your website, a good salesman or an actual SEO expert?

I speak from experience when it comes to this one. I have personally worked for two marketing agencies as an SEO Specialist and a Director of Marketing. I know what goes on in these agencies. I know what type of work is done to client sites. And I know that there is a revolving door of clients that come and go every few months simply because the people at the agencies do the bare minimum to make it seem like they are doing work when in all actuality, they don’t know what to do to rank your site. And even if the owner of these agencies does know what is needed, they don’t want to waste the time and money actually doing it. I was literally told not to do certain things that would help a client’s website because the client only paid for 8 “SEO hours” per month and we had already done 6 and the reporting will count for 2. If you are paying for “SEO hours” you are getting short-changed. There should never be a limit on the amount of work done to a site in a given month.

I have seen firsthand how clients are handled at these places and it really is remarkable that these agencies are still in business. And it’s probably why I get so much of my personal work from agencies outsourcing their SEO to me, so I’m not complaining! If you are not seeing results after months and months, you may want to reconsider how invested your SEO is in the outcome of their work. Do you just count as a monthly invoice or can they take pride in their work on your site?

1. You Are Not Paying What It Will Actually Cost To Get SEO Results

This is by far and away the biggest factor when it comes to not seeing results with your SEO. And there are several reasons for it. We already touched on the fact that there are still people out there that are offering SEO services for nominal fees because they are doing the SEO by using methods that are stale and outdated like using automated link building software. We also talked about agencies charging for SEO hours and doing the minimum work just to keep you around. But the biggest reason that people don’t get the kind of results they are looking for is the simple fact that they shop around and find someone willing to charge significantly less while promising to deliver amazing results. But the fact is, these folks don’t know how much ranking a website actually costs. There’s no way to make a profit by charging small fees if they are actually doing what it will take to rank your site. You can’t have it both ways.

SEO is an investment in your business. It is not an expense. A lot of other advertising and marketing is an expense. With SEO, you get your rankings and you are benefiting from them for years to come. Again, I don’t need to sell you on SEO. But I do need to sell you on the fact that you cannot cut corners and skimp out on the cost of ranking your site. Unless you are looking for someone to do the bare minimum or use methods that will do nothing but get your site penalized, you need to invest money.

There is a formula that I use when it comes to figuring out how much SEO services will cost. I look at the amount of searches per month that we will target. I then multiply that by 25% because I know I will get my client at least 25% of the clicks for that search on the first page (I rank more than one property when I take on a client by the way). I then take that number and multiply it by 5% for the conversion rate of the website. Meaning that at least 5% of the people that visit the site turn into customers or leads or whatever the goal of the site. (This is the minimum number…it really should be higher than this.) I then multiply that number by the average customer value. This gives me the amount of money that this potential client is missing out on by not ranking per month. I then take that number and cut it down to a monthly payment.

So you see, it’s very simple math when it comes to how much SEO costs. Having blanket pricing or charging for SEO hours makes less than no sense. A site that has no competition going for geo-targeted keywords in a small town would not cost as much as a website offering services worldwide. And SEO hours are one of my biggest pet peeves in the industry. I don’t ever feel like I should limit the amount of work I do on a site. I believe I should do everything I can to get results for my client as fast as I can.

So if you are trying to cut corners and pay the minimum amount for your SEO work, you are going to get someone who cuts corners and does the minimum amount of work on your SEO. When it comes to ranking websites you really do get what you pay for. And if you think your competition is ranking number 1 in the search engines because they paid the minimum amount, again…they thank you!

How I Choose To Do SEO…

At the end of the day, you want someone who is going to treat your site like it’s their own. You want them to take great pride in the results they are able to generate for you. You don’t want someone who can promise you the world without being able to deliver on anything. Or someone who will do the bare minimum to keep you around for month after month after month.

I, personally, don’t want to keep a client for life. In fact, I rarely go to a full year with a client. I want to get in, get them results, and let them go about their business and enjoy the rankings I was able to generate for them. Why should I keep them after I’ve given them results?

I want to be able to get my client results as fast as possible so they can be my biggest form of advertisement. I want to be “their guy.” My main goal is to be my clients’ “guy” when it comes to SEO. You want to create a name for yourself and a reputation for being able to perform great work. When you are able to do that, your clients will be telling everyone: “you’ve got to talk to my SEO guy.”

If you are sick of not getting results with your SEO and are ready to start ranking today, I want to be your “SEO Guy”.

I invite you to take a look at real testimonials from actual business owners on my Linkedin profile (some of them are copied onto my testimonials page).

If you fill out the Discovery Form on this site it will allow me to know a little more about your business and what you do. What it basically is is an application that allows me to see  whether we might be a good fit to work together. After you fill it out, I will get back to you within 24-48 business hours and we can go from there. Either way, whether we work together or not, I will shoe you things about your site that are hindering you from achieving the rankings you are looking for right now.