What Happens When SEO Goes Wrong

Employing a professional SEO company can be expensive. Choosing the cheaper option might sound like a bargain at first, but can prove to be a false economy. Worst case scenario, it can cause serious damage to your business. This article is not to scare you, but rather to try to make you aware of the pitfalls of SEO. SEO can make or break your business, and at Arcalea, our aim is to help and educate everyone.

The following examples are not one off incidences, but rather regular mistakes that are caused by SEO experts.

Broken Lines of Code

In many ways, SEO is like a giant game of snakes and ladders. Like slowly climbing those steps, you can spend years building up the SEO of your website. The problem is that there are so many traps that can destroy great work almost overnight.

Although many websites are now built using WordPress rather than coding by hand, there are still benefits to understanding and coding correctly. Even one line of code written incorrectly can mess up the website’s formatting, or return less than optimal SEO results.

Your site has thousands of lines of code, but all it takes is one line to be wrong. That line of code could be turning away the crawlers of various search engines, resulting in a lack of online visibility. That’s why it is essential to employ a company at the top of their game, who knows exactly what they are doing.

Poor SEO Implementation

Every website owner on the planet is bombarded with SEO companies promising them the world. One of the key points to remember about SEO is that you slowly build upon the foundations. If you were building an extension to a property, you wouldn’t destroy the ground floor to improve the first.

The same theory applies to SEO. If you have managed to write excellent content, which has generated you some incoming links, then you don’t want to remove or change that content. Some self-proclaimed SEO experts could come in and advise virtually starting from scratch or to change your content managing system or hosting company. While this may earn them extra money, they are actually placing you right back where you started. They might remove all of the positive links you already had, change the URL structure, or destroy on page SEO. These quick fixes can cause long-term damage, that can take months to repair. If someone promises you something that sounds too good to be true, online as in real life, it is probably a good idea to walk away from them. The long term damage poorly executed SEO can do to your website could be a fatal.

Employing Black Hat Tactics

This is one of the most dangerous aspects of SEO. As a site owner, you most likely are unaware of the difference between black hat and white hat. In laymen’s terms, white hat uses legal, above board methods to try and improve your search engine rankings.

Black hat, on the other hand, tries to find loopholes and shortcuts to pull the wool over the search engine’s eyes with serious risks attached. Initially, these tactics may deliver excellent results, and your rankings may shoot up very rapidly. But as Google and the other search engines become ever more artificially intelligent, there will come a time when they will catch up with you. The best scenario when they do is that you are penalized, but can eventually recover. Worst case scenario is that your domain is permanently blacklisted. If this happens, it means that your domain name will never appear in any search engine results. Any traffic that you used to receive from search engines will stop permanently. This would be a total disaster for your website. Ensure that you instruct your SEO company to only use white hat techniques.

Additional Information

Think about SEO like a science experiment. Done properly under the right conditions, the results can be spectacular. When you try to break the rules or are careless about their implementation, it can be highly dangerous. This is your business we are discussing, so treat your SEO in the same way you manage your stock; look after it, and don’t take any risks.

For more information on how to implement SEO properly, read this article about SEO for Law Firms, much of which can be transitioned across to many other businesses.

If you would like to read more about the dangers of poor SEO, visit this page for some eye opening information.