It’s a difficult time for a lot of companies during the economic turmoil of the credit crunch. Lots of companies are having to tighten their belts, and cut back on their expenditure and their marketing budgets. Your SEO budget however, is not something that you should cut back on. Having a good online marketing campaign can be the differentiating factor between you can your competitor, and can help you gain the vital work you need during a recession.
As more companies realise the benefits of an online marketing campaign, there has been an increase in what is commonly known as DIY SEO (Do It Yourself Search Engine Optimisation). DIY SEO occurs when an inexperienced company takes it upon themselves to optimise their own sites. This is especially true for companies that have their own in-house development teams. Many programmers believe that they can optimise a site for search engines, and it is still popular belief that simply adding keywords and meta-descriptions is enough. This simply isn’t the case, and as a result many sites find that they have missed opportunities or even been penalised by search engines. A classic mistake is to have the same keywords and meta-description on every page, using over 20 single keywords on each page, and keyword stuffing the content and ALT descriptions of the images.
If you have an in-house development team, it can be tempting to try to search engine optimise your site yourselves. After all, there’s so much information available online for free! However, finding reliable and up to date resources is a big issue. A good SEO company will actually act as a consultant for your site, enabling your in-house team to make all the changes, which can be a very cost effective option. This way you know your developers can follow clear instructions to update your site, and you won’t have to worry about potential loss of business from dropping rank or being removed from a search engine index.
One Comment
An interesting post. Other things to consider include having a dedicated member of staff to work on the campaign as SEO is a full time job which most people don’t realise! If you are going to try and do it all yourself, I would recommended at least speaking with a consultant and creating a strategy from the start, rather than doing bits and pieces here and there which won’t be beneficial.