3 Ways to Completely Waste Your SEO Budget

I’m not suggesting for one moment that it’s particularly wise to any of what I’m about to suggest. But in SEO, there are a lot of particularly “expensive mistakes,” taking place and it can be a little too easy to mis-spend if you’re not careful.

 

Here are 3 ways to completely waste your SEO budget!

 

Paid SEO links are a controversial topic in SEO terms. It’s frustrating to see the competition beatnig you off the back of a load of them, but they contravene Google’s guidelines. And if you’re found out, you could incur a penalty. There are natural means of acquiring links naturally from relevant sites and these should be your priority.

 

Google’s ultimate aim is to rid its search engine of the sites that benefit from excessive link buying. While they might not be there yet, they’re getting closer with every major update so it’s fair to say that spending a lot of money on a lot of links from a clearly spammy network is not going to have a happy ending.

 

If your keyword research isn’t carried out properly, you could find yourself in a position where you’ve invested a lot of time, effort and money in a SEO campaign, you’ve produced rankings results but you’re not getting the visitors. Alternatively, you might be ranking well, getting visits but finding they’re not converting the visits into leads or sales. Keywords should be picked by volume, your budget and the level of competition, relevance to your products and services and relevance to the search habits of your target audience – the people looking for your products and services.

 

All too often, people talk about spending SEO budgets in link terms. “How many links can you get and how?”

 

But one of the most important elements of any SEO campaign is the website itself. Granted, you’ll never make waves in the competitive SEO sectors without an impressive inbound link profile, but the basics on your own site could make or break your campaign.

 

A comprehensive on page audit should be carried out at the beginning of any campaign (and the on page should be reviewed periodically throughout). You should take into account a number of website elements, including:

• Content. Ensure your site is rich in unique, high quality and relevant content that’s keyword rich (but not stuffed!).
• Meta titles and descriptions. These should all be optimised for your keywords.
• Navigation and URL structure
• Load speed

So if you are on a SEO-icide mission (sorry about that poor attempt at word play), buy a load of poor quality links, invest in bad keywords and don’t bother with an on page audit. On the other hand, if you want to spend sensibly, your link building strategy will need to be varied and natural, your keywords should be strong and your website should boast the perfectly optimised basics!