Did you Fall off the Google Cliff?

As a leading Digital Marketing Agency, we’ve seen our fair share of inadequate and improper work done by other agencies and in-house “experts”.

The chart above shows a dramatic drop in Google Keyword rankings, and we’ve seen hundreds of incidents of websites, and overall performance, falling hundreds and thousands of points.

Because Digital Marketing is fairly new to the business landscape and many business owners are unfamiliar with the strategies and terminology used, they are susceptible to falling prey to unqualified practitioners who will end up doing more harm than good.

One of our recent clients came to us with a mess on his hands. He had hired a young “digital marketing expert” to work on his website, and the results were terrible. The person that he had hired had pushed his website off the Google cliff – he made it nearly impossible to find.

Here are some of the issues that he created, and things to keep an eye out for when looking to hire someone to work on your website:

• He took the website off of WordPress and launched a WIX website instead. When doing this, he dropped blogs and articles into the digital wasteland because he wasn’t familiar with proper blog setup. All that content was lost, and any traction they gained to the website through organic SEO searches was null.
• He put a photo of the Google Maps location of the firm on the website rather than integrating a Google Maps plugin – which would have a significantly positive impact on SEO and Google Maps “GBP”.
• He created new pages on the new website, and failed to redirect Google from the old pages. He lost all the backlink value for those original pages. Technically, these are called 301 redirects – something every web developer should be very familiar with before launching a new website.
• He dropped the analytics code and lost all tracking and web traffic history. When we look at the progression of this site’s traffic using our sources it goes from a steady incline to dropping off the edge of a cliff.

So, what’s the good news?

In hiring someone so inexperienced and cheap initially, the firm had enough budget leftover to hire someone legitimate to relaunch their website!

Unfortunately, there was far more work to be done when we took over. The firm had gone from 600 Google listings to just 5 by the time they came to us.

If you’ve learned one thing from reading about this firm’s experience, it’s to invest in a quality internet marketing agency and web developer with a solid track record of client success. And if you’ve “fallen off the Google Cliff” give us a call, we will be happy to do a complimentary SEO Audit to determine the source of your problems.