As a long-term strategy, SEO is a good one. You shouldn’t necessarily be expecting that your SEO campaign is going to be an overnight hit (sometimes happens but rare) but you should also expect that the actions you do throughout your campaign, should last a long time and continue to grow. We’ve always appropriately pushed the need to “do it right” when it came to SEO and as a result, our client websites have not been penalized.

As an Internet Marketing company, we anticipate a fair amount of client churn with SEO. Sometimes it’s impatience, sometimes it’s bad info from others, at other times it’s just appropriate to move on. I’ll often check up on these folks, out of curiosity mostly and more often than not, they tend to have continued to perform well. A recent one had me a little concerned though. The biggest issue with this particular campaign was that we built their website and followed through with a very effective SEO campaign. It brought in traffic, business, email signups, direct sales to the point where Search was responsible for a fair amount of their business (and Email Marketing which we had set up as well). Alas we came to a point where it was time to move on.

So for some reason they popped into my mind and I quickly checked in, actually did it using a known performing keyword phrase but no sign. So I check the website. The visuals had been slightly adjusted but the backend was very different. It was a fairly significant overhaul and not in a good way.

Without knowing the full scope of their project, nor the new target phrases (one could hazard some guesses) it’s tough to estimate the full extent of impact but given the loss of keyword visibility and loss of traffic, it’s tough to imagine there hasn’t been a negative impact on business.

So whoever took over the campaign (and they did tout themselves as being SEO’s) did not do the migration properly, the new setup was sloppy, replete with spelling errors and structural deficits and in a fairly short amount of time has now sent them back 4 years. Hopefully that slide turns around soon.

A couple of points I feel are important to outline. The first is that SEO takes time and should take time. You should expect it to take time as long as the overall trend demonstrates growth. The second is that if you are anticipating any significant change to your website, do your research. There are plenty of guides to help you co-ordinate this process appropriately.

If you are seeking validation of your current SEO company I can’t speak to the quality of SEO audits/website reviews out there, but for sure there are some good, reasonably priced ones that can tell you how you’re doing rather than your networking buddy who wants your business or cousin Gary who is an expert on everything.

Hopefully your campaign data doesn’t end up looking like this —