Don’t curse your budget on someone who says they can do it all.
Key Takeaways:
- Hiring a “one-person-does-it-all” can lead to a haunted website and ghostly results.
- Beware of poorly done technical SEO, PPC, and backlinks that drain your budget.
- Don’t let your website and marketing budget vanish into thin air—get e9digital to exorcise your digital demons!
Whether Halloween is coming up or it’s the middle of summer, it’s always fun to get a little spooky! As a cautionary tale, the team at e9digital is sharing some horror stories we’ve heard from our clients. Learn from their mistakes so you don’t make them, too! Now, we present…
The Do-It-All Freelancer From the Black Lagoon!
A client came to us with a problem–they had been working with an individual who offered SEO, PPC, and website design services. They weren’t a digital agency but a solo freelancer. No shame on freelancers, but they specialize in one area typically, such as copywriting, website design, or social media management… not all three.
Month after month, the company spent some mega $$$ on PPC and SEO but had nothing to show for it. They were a reputable company, but their website didn’t help them grow.
Once e9digital’s PPC and SEO experts (two different people!) gained access to complete an audit, the situation was much more sinister than they initially realized. The company’s website felt like a real haunted house! The foundation was riddled with SEM (search engine marketing) haunts:
- The keyword apparition
- The technical SEO specter
- The Grim Reaper backlinking scheme
- The PPC banshee
Problem 1: the keyword apparition
Keywords are critical to help boost your SEO (search engine optimization) on your website and match your ad campaign with your target audience so the people interested in your content are the ones who see it.
This one-stop shop had set up the keyword campaign in such a way that it was reaching people completely irrelevant to the target market. Our client has a location-based business, and the keywords were hitting people nowhere near their geographic area. They were paying big bucks for keywords that would never lead to conversions. Talk about every business owner’s nightmare!
To fix the problem, e9digital’s PPC expert set up a keyword exclusion strategy to ensure that the search queries where the client appeared matched their target audience.
Problem 2: the technical SEO specter
Whenever a website design firm creates a new website, the sitemap must be submitted to Google to ensure all the pages are crawled. Surprise to no one: this one-stop shop didn’t do this properly, which meant it would take longer for Google to discover and index web pages, tanking SEO rankings. Not to mention, the site was riddled with broken links and 404 errors, which can also negatively impact site SEO.
Our e9digital head of SEO found 403 technical errors on the website. Technical SEO is a complicated process and should be done by an SEO expert like ours. Period.
Problem 3: the Grim Reaper backlinking scheme
When done correctly, backlinking (when one website links to a different one through anchor text) can be a great way to improve your search ranking and build credibility for your website.
However, this one-stop shop instead implemented black hat SEO strategies and linked a website from China at the bottom of the client’s page. They may have gotten tons of money to do this from this foreign company, but it cost their client dearly. At e9digital, we always put the client first and would never use a backlink to make a quick buck.
Our SEO expert removed the backlink from our client’s footer, and now, we only utilize tried and true white hat backlinking strategies to rank higher on search engines.
Problem 4: the PPC banshee
Without getting too much in the weeds here, PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns, which are the first search results you see when you query Google, must be set up the right way to be effective. Typically, you set up multiple campaigns, and each campaign has a landing page that matches a sector of the target audience. This one-stop shop didn’t do that. Instead, they had one campaign going to three different landing pages, confusing Google with where to send the clicks. This strategy lowers the effectiveness of the campaign and drains a marketing budget faster than you can say, “Boo!”
Our PPC expert fixed the campaign structure so that the correct keywords matched the corresponding landing pages, maximizing the marketing budget.
Renovate your website development haunted house with a technical audit from e9digital
Maybe you’re in the same boat as our client was. You hired someone to do SEO, PPC, and/or design on your website, and all they’ve done is invite a bunch of monsters into your house.
Our expert team at e9digital can clean it up. We provide top-of-the-line services with our NYC-based agency and can help you rank higher on Google with SEO and appeal to your target audience with PPC. There’s no reason to be scared–contact us so we can bust the ghosts out of your website today.
