My biggest early SEO mistake was treating it like a traffic game instead of a buyer game. I chased broad keywords that brought in a lot of visits but almost no qualified people. Once I focused on ‘searches real buyers make right before a decision,’ traffic numbers got less impressive but revenue went up.
I wasn’t geotagging and only using filenames for my images. Went through my entire site geotagging all my images and renaming them. Kept most image names to four words, no more than five. Did the same for any images I posted on social media. After a couple of weeks I began seeing results with more inquiries and bookings.
... that fewer than 0.6% of businesses that invest in SEO ever make it to the top 10 organic results in Google (according the the leading SEO company in the business).
This year was a huge learning curve when it comes to SEO. I learned it is NOT as important as all the marketing guru's want you to believe. We cancelled all our SEO consultant contracts, reduced our spend on Google ads by 50%, and implemented other strategies and sales will be up 15% over 2024.
Believing John Mueller and the rest of the Google Search team when they kept reassuring us that clicks on SERPs have no bearing on rankings, only to discover through the DOJ's antitrust lawsuit that clicks from SERPs is one of their major ranking signals.
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I chased broad keywords that brought in a lot of visits but almost no qualified people.
Once I focused on ‘searches real buyers make right before a decision,’ traffic numbers got less impressive but revenue went up.
I wasn’t geotagging and only using filenames for my images. Went through my entire site geotagging all my images and renaming them. Kept most image names to four words, no more than five. Did the same for any images I posted on social media. After a couple of weeks I began seeing results with more inquiries and bookings.
... that fewer than 0.6% of businesses that invest in SEO ever make it to the top 10 organic results in Google (according the the leading SEO company in the business).
This year was a huge learning curve when it comes to SEO. I learned it is NOT as important as all the marketing guru's want you to believe. We cancelled all our SEO consultant contracts, reduced our spend on Google ads by 50%, and implemented other strategies and sales will be up 15% over 2024.
Believing John Mueller and the rest of the Google Search team when they kept reassuring us that clicks on SERPs have no bearing on rankings, only to discover through the DOJ's antitrust lawsuit that clicks from SERPs is one of their major ranking signals.
Did not focus on building entities . Local SEO is just one aspect of the entire ecosystem for your brand.
SEO ftw. 👏