10 CRITICAL MISTAKES MADE BY STARTUPS (PT 1)
1. Ineffective or Non Sufficient Tracking
This is a common mistake that many companies make when starting their digital marketing. It’s especially important to track conversions in Pay Per Click campaigns like AdWords and Facebook Advertising. Without knowing what’s working and what isn’t it’s hard to make good decisions about where to spend your money.
2. Site is Not Blocked To Search Engines During the Development Stage
I learned this the hard way. When you are in the developmental stages of your website design it is very important to block all search engine access to it using either a robots.txt file or if using wordpress you can do it from the backend under “privacy.” Failure to do so could negatively affect your performance long term in the SERPS. It will make an already difficult project even harder.
3. Targeting General Keywords with Mass Search Volume
This is fairly self explanatory and a very popular mistake. Here is an example. Someone searching for “shoes” probably doesn’t know what they want, or have any intentions of buying, they are “browsers” also known as “tire kickers”, “time wasters” or in this landscape “bandwidth wasters.” Sure you may drive more traffic to your site targeting general keywords, if you are successful in such a competitive and broad market. If you are, keep in mind, it’s useless traffic and will probably cost you more in the long run, since their presence on your site is not completely cost free. These tend to be the ones that like to call and ask you thousands of silly questions. They start eating into your soft costs after a while, and your nerves. Someone searching for “high heels” is a much more targeted market and maybe still a bit on the general side. You get the idea.
4. Poorly Written or Non-Existant Meta Tags
I cannot stress enough how important Meta tags are for many different reasons. How they are written can also heavily influence your ranking and CTR (click-thru rate). Don’t attempt to do these yourself, and don’t look to the internet for information on how to write them. It’s an unsolved mystery as to why there is so much inaccurate info in regards to Metas on the internet. Understanding the dual purpose of Meta tags ie what they are used for, will help you better understand how to write them.
5. Failure To Do Competitive Research
Chances are your competitors know something you don’t if they have been online for more than a season. Use that to your advantage. Mostly, just learn how to do it better.
Yep I know, there is supposed to be 10 critical mistakes….and there is! See Part 2 of Top 10 Critical Mistakes Start-Ups Make Online.
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