If you've ever heard about digital marketing before, you'll probably know what it is just from the name of it. Not to mention how popular and effective it can be to webmasters today. But sometimes it can be the newbies to digital marketing can have a lot of wrong preconceived notions and misconceptions about what digital marketing entails.
And if that's you, you may find out early that it can sometimes be quite a tough thing to learn let alone to do and may come across some defeat when doing it. We all have to start somewhere and I've made a few mistakes in the past myself when learning and doing digital marketing and SEO for myself.
In this technology driven world we live in today, SEO and digital marketing can give us the boost we need to grow and succeed with our websites and businesses. But there are some things that can go wrong for you. So that's why I've written this article for those that are fairly new to SEO and digital marketing because there are some things you should know about it and about doing it that can have a negative impact on your efforts and your website too.
So here are some of the most common mistakes that a digital marketer and SEO should avoid doing.
1: Not waiting long enough / doing too much too quick to see results.
One of the first things that newbies can do is expect results from their digital marketing efforts to just happen overnight. This never happens in the real world and there are no short cuts to it either. Unless of course you are doing PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising. When you are building backlinks to your website, you will need to wait some time to see the benefit of those backlinks taking place. You will have to wait for things like Google to crawl and index those backlinks and then attribute them to your website.
After you build good high quality backlinks to your site. No matter what kind they are from PBN's (Private Blog Network), guest blog backlinks, link directory backlinks or anything at all. After doing these a few times, you can expect to see some results by way of ranking improvements in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). But that doesn't mean that just because you are seeing some positive movement from them that you should keep doing them. If you build too many backlinks too quickly, and go overkill on them, that can have a negative effect on your website rankings too.
2: It's too hard and too technical for me to do.
Let me tell you something right off the bat right here, doing digital marketing / SEO and building backlinks is not too hard or too technical to do. It's not something that should only be done by professional SEO's in the industry and is something anyone can do fairly easily. I've heard it all from newbie webmasters, bloggers and affiliates who try to put off doing the marketing of their website because because it feels like it would be too hard and too technical for them to do.
Sometimes some people, and even some of my clients will say to me that you need to understand things properly to be able to do them. But that's simply not true! I'll tell you this for free, I hold no official degrees, and not even a full blown "SEO expert and specialist" despite learning and doing SEO for about 15 years now. But I know how to handle all of my own website's digital marketing.
And besides, these days, a newbie to digital marketing has it so much easier for them than we did back then. Simply because there are so many good tools out there for helping you with this. From keyword analysis tools, that can help you to find the right keywords & phrases to go after and how, to tracking tools and more to help you go forward and outrank your competitors in the SERPs!
3: You need a lot of money to see success and be successful.
One of the other newbie mistakes to think when you want your website to be a success is that you're going to need a lot of money to get it off the ground and be successful. Some people can have this misconceived idea that digital marketing costs a lot of money and financial investment to do (or get done for you) and will eat away a large chunk of your marketing budget.
Yet that's not at all true. In fact, whether you are doing the marketing and advertising and promotion of your website yourself, or are hiring an expert to do it for you, you can do it on a shoe-string budget and do it at a very nominal cost to yourself to see good results from it all. There are so many different marketing methods and techniques you can do at a very low cost to yourself that can yield great results without it costing you an arm and a leg!
4: SEO is going to die anyway so no point even doing it.
A lot of newbie webmasters can start out with the mindset that SEO is eventually going to die so there's no point in even doing it. Let's stop with this nonsense right now! As long as there is the Internet and search engines like Google, then there will always be a need for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) - the process of optimising your website so that it ranks higher up in the SERPs. Sure enough, Google has changed their algorithms a lot so that the older things that used to work, don't work anymore. And they do require that you meet certain standards on your website (on-page) and off of it too (off-page).
So some people can think that it's not worth doing SEO and investing any money in it since Google always keeps moving the goal posts so to speak. And it would be better to adhere to and follow other methods and techniques. This type of thinking is nothing but another misconception of digital marketing. Both on-page and off-page SEO is still of great importance to Google and other top search engines. These things help the web crawlers and spiders to better index your website and its content to provide better returned results to users search queries.
Sure, SEO and digital marketing methods and techniques are getting much more advanced than yesteryear, but SEO and marketing of any kind will never die as long as search engines and the Internet exists!
5: Social Media Marketing is the only Digital Marketing you need to do
These days a lot of people think that social media marketing (SMM), is the above all and be all of digital marketing. This generation of webmasters have grown up with the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube etc and can almost think that's all there is in the world! They have this ill conception that that social media marketing is the only way of doing any digital marketing at all.
Some people can think that if you can push, promote, advertise and market your business, services and or products in social media, then you don't need to do anything else. But you can't think like that! If you look around, you'll find that's just one part of it and there are so many other methods and techniques out there you can do and make use of to bring in equally if not better results anyway.
Don't indulge all of your time and effort in just using social media sites to market and promote your website online today. You're going to need to find out about and use other methods and techniques to be able to reach much more people than you can find on just social media sites alone. And with a wealth and plethora of guides out there, you really have no excuse not to make use of anything else!
Overview and Conclusion
There are so many other misconceptions that people can have about digital marketing today. But here I have listed out only 5 of them that can be helpful for a newbie to know about and avoid doing. I've personally made some of these mistakes myself in the past and write and share these in the hopes that you wont have to make them yourself.
I think with all of the information that's out there today on digital marketing and what you should and shouldn't do, at just a few searches and clicks away, nobody should be making these mistakes at all. When you look around you'll find many websites and blogs out there that provide much more information than this that can really help you when it comes to finding and being successful with your website business.
For example take into consideration Mr. Matt Cutts and his blog that he shares a lot of great SEO and digital marketing tips and tricks on. As well as Neil Patel's blog which I subscribe to myself since he posts a lot of cutting edge guides and articles to help you get ahead in this game! These kinds of blogs and sites are invaluable for a newbie and you'll be bound to find success with them!
Author: IdealMike
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