When SEO is bad for your business

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So you can either do one of the following two things:

1. Set to implement SEO on your own website.2. Hire someone to implement it for you.

Either path is right. In fact I advocate that whosoever is in charge of a company's SEO project has a basic understanding of what the process entitles. This is one of the reasons I invest so much in educating my clients on what they need to know about SEO and how it affects their business.

Unfortunately not all business is ripe for website optimisation and my aim in this post is to let you know some of the reasons why you may just "hold" on a bit.

Your business is not ripe for SEO when you do not:

Have a basic understanding of SEO

I think this should go without saying. Either you are the owner of the business or you are saddled with the responsibility of working with the SEO company in charge of the project, you need to understand what SEO is all about.

At this point, you do not need to understand the technical details but you need to understand just a bit to help you make the right decision.

This can mean understanding why you want to rank for a particular keyword, what ranking is all about, why SEO is never about first page ranking alone, even though it is important, and when to listen to your SEO provider or not.

All this is at the heart of a properly optimised process.

Have a well-designed website

I have seen lot of businesses who want to optimise their website but their website is poorly designed. Sometimes this is a technical issue where the web designer does not give thought to marketing or sometimes the owner of the website just put up a website for the sake of having one.

Your website is a representative of your business online and should be treated as your number one marketing tool. Period.

This means paying attention to issues like - creating a good user experience, writing good copy, having the right call to action at the right places. Your website should be structured in such a way that your landing pages, service pages and content marketing pages align with the aim of the business. And while we are at this, your home page is the last place to make as a landing page.

Hire the right SEO company

No matter what you do, your project will fail when you engage the wrong SEO company. Sometimes in a hurry to get the cheapest service, we tend to compromise on quality. The days of ranking for a keyword for ranking sake is done. Now SEO is about marketing and a good SEO company understands that.

There are some questions you can ask to find out if you have found the right SEO provider to work with:

• How do you measure result? - This will let you know if they understand the principle of marketing or not. Whatever results they measure must be what matters to your business, which is more leads and more customers.

• Are you going to engage in content creation? - The days of ranking with quality content is long gone. Content is king and the more quality content your team creates, the better your chances of succeeding. If your SEO company still promises you 1000 directory links or article submission website, then you are in the wrong hands.

• Do you guarantee first page ranking? - No one can guarantee you will rank position one for any keyword even though we all know this is possible. If your SEO company offers you a guarantee number one position without putting the above two questions in perspective, then you better run.

These are just the sort of questions that can help guide your decision process to either hire a company to handle your optimisation or not.

If you get the right company, then you are on your way to a successful SEO project. If you engage the wrong company, you may get some short term benefit but all this will come tumbling down when your website gets caught in one of Google's penalties.

Seek alternative means of attracting traffic to your website

One major reason SEO is wrong for you if you are depending solely on SEO as the only source of traffic. Search engine optimisation is just one of the numerous ways you can attract and drive traffic to your website.

Granted that SEO gives you better traffic which can be easily converted to leads, but growing a business is different from getting traffic to your website. If you want to grow your business faster, then it is important that you also explore other means of getting traffic to your website while your SEO should be done as a long time strategy.

Conclusion

Optimise your website per all means but pay attention to the pitfalls businesses experience when they seek to start driving traffic to their website through organic channel. If you do, you have a higher chance of surviving whatever it is the Google gods are capable of turning up.