Avoid these online marketing mistakes

If you are a business owner, then you know how important marketing is for business growth. And since you are reading this blog, you understand the role online marketing plays. Being aware of some online marketing pitfalls will save you time and money. Let’s do this by looking at a small- business scenario:

Pretend you sell garden supplies. You know you need to let potential customers know how you can help them, but you aren’t sure when would be the best time to increase your SEO marketing efforts.

Take a guess. A lot of people would probably say spring and maybe even summer, but that’s actually not the right answer. Spring is close, but the fact is that you should 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.

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. 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.

Missed timing is the first online marketing mistake to avoid. Here are three others:

1. Another major pitfall is not having all of your social media buttons operational or — even worse — not having those channels connected to your website. If a potential customer clicks a button that is not operational, they might try one more, but they won’t keep coming back. And chances are high that they won’t make the effort to navigate to your website on their own.
2. Here’s another note of caution: Constructing intuitive site navigation is no simple thing. It requires an SEO professional who understands the nuances of how customers will interpret and navigate through your website. A clunky website will drive customers away. Make sure your website is designed to be easy to navigate.
3. Finally, keep in mind that seasonal opportunities to sell merchandise are often missed when merchants do not freshen web pages with new content. Update the information on your pages regularly. If the first piece of information a potential customer sees is outdated, then they are unlikely to continue browsing.

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!