Is SEO & Digital Marketing Working For Your Business? Are You Getting What You're Paying For?

It really amazes me to see how many businesses are being taken advantage of by some of these so called digital marketing agencies by either charging an exorbitant amount, or just not providing the quality and service they said they would do.  Which is why it's so important for business owners to choose the right partner to work with.  Ask your web developer or digital marketing specialist what exactly you're getting in exchange for your hard earned money.  Pay close attention.  Can they easily breakdown and articulate the scenario in easy to understand math and English?  Are they charging for too many hours?  Some will throw in a lot of startup costs or extra hours for things that may not even make sense.  To avoid this, make sure to ask a lot of questions to help you determine the value.  You should never feel pressured when making a decision.  Especially when it's someone you'll be working with.

Find someone who can really help.  Ask yourself  "what am I expecting out of this?".  "Is it reasonable?".  And "is it mutually beneficial?".  Then compare what you're getting with some competitors to see if they might be a better fit for you.  It's always a good idea to weigh your options every now and then, so that you can gauge what's going on at the moment and how it can affect you.

Some of the most common mistakes I see from websites are SEO related.  But what really irks me is when I scroll down to the bottom of the page and see that they outsourced the project, and there's still so many fatal errors hampering their search engine results.

Here's just a handful of some of the more common errors I encounter.

-Meta description and H1 heading missing or incomplete
-Image tags and alt attributes missing or incomplete
-Website uses URLs with www and non-www subdomain. Can cause duplicate content and bad links
-No favicon!  This one is really amusing :)
-Not enough words or content on the page
-Page takes too long to load.  It's recommended to get your site to load in under 0.4 seconds for search engine robots to find you quicker and easier, as well as offer a better user experience
-No https redirect.  This will result in the user going on an unsecured website where information can be tracked and stolen

Well as said, there's much more than that, but those are just some of the more common ones I see all the time and these things are what search engine algorithms are analyzing on a regular basis.  Competition is steep, so the easier and faster it is for search engines to crawl your web pages, the higher the rank you will achieve naturally.

So what about you guys?  Are you coming across a lot of these similar issues?  Or are there other issues that come up frequently?  Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.

Also, you can find out more about SEO and digital marketing and how it can help your business in 2019 by visiting our website.