Are you making these online marketing mistakes?

Let’s say you sell garden supplies. When is the time to increase your SEO marketing efforts? If you said summer, that’s not exactly the right answer. In fact, you should probably begin your efforts well before the planting season, say late winter when people are starting to get tired of snow and want to begin purchasing seeds and other supplies for the garden they spend all year dreaming about.

But don’t feel bad if you answered summer. Chalk it up to human nature. People procrastinate, which is why the first snowfall sends drivers herding into tire service waiting rooms.

SEO is a powerful marketing tool. But when business owners cut the legs out from under their marketing by letting those seasonal opportunities slip by, a last-minute SEO dash won’t cut it. You’ve got to think six months ahead. When runway models are showing off the latest swimming suit fashions, if you’re selling beachwear, you’ve already missed the boat.

The key is to put together an SEO marketing calendar, because many small to medium-sized merchants have such busy days they are often caught by surprise when the prime selling season is over.

The other major pitfall is not having all of your social media buttons operational, or even worse — not having those channels connected to your website.

And here’s another note of caution: Constructing intuitive site navigation is no simple thing. It requires an SEO professional that understands the nuances of how customers will interpret and navigate through your website. And seasonal opportunities to sell merchandise are often missed when merchants do not freshen web pages with new content.

These oversights are the psychological equivalent of allowing spider webs to collect on your wares. Stale webpages don’t perform very well when Google and other search engines are indexing new websites at an incredible rate. Freshness is an important element in website rankings — so watch your timing!