Don't Let S.O.S Syndrome Kill Your SEO

Local business owner: do you have S.O.S. Syndrome? If you haven't heard of S.O.S. Syndrome, don't feel bad, because I just made it up.

S.O.S. = “Shiny Objects & Specks.”

S.O.S. Syndrome is when a business owner lets exciting new tactics and tools (“shiny objects”) and/or relatively small, niggling site maintenance tasks (“specks”) distract from the real goal of his or her internet marketing program.

Most local businesses don't have an unlimited budget for internet marketing services like SEO, email marketing, social media or paid search. When you allow yourself to get distracted by S.O.S., you redirect your internet marketing agency's resources chasing those things, instead of doing the steady, progressive work of getting you real business results.

Here's a common example. You hire an agency to do “web marketing and maintenance.”

At the outset, you define your goals for the program:

achieve strong rankings for relevant keywords
improve the quality and quantity of your website traffic
convert more visitors to customers.

These are objectives with solid, obvious business value and return-on-investment. Unfortunately, the activity associated with achieving those goals is often behind-the-scenes and not terribly visible.

A month later, you hear about the latest trend in online marketing. Sure, it isn't part of your plan, but it's exciting and interesting. Gosh darn it, you're paying a web marketing agency to keep you informed on this stuff, and your competitor is already diving in. So you fire off an email asking them to provide you with strategic recommendations for how your business will use this new tactic or tool.

While you're thinking about your local business website, you start poking around and notice that there are some cosmetic changes you wanted to make to a few of your product pages. So you fire off another email (or two, or four, as you keep combing through the site), asking your web agency to make these updates this month.

If you have only 4-5 hours per month within your budget, guess where you just sent 90% of it? Into having your agency investigate potential business value of a new trend and in making a change that probably could have been bundled with a few other changes at the end of a quarter to be knocked out in a more time-efficient manner.

You've also put your agency in the awkward position of having to choose whether to:

Do the extra tasks you requested instead of the work they had planned (and hope they can make it up next month).
Do the extra tasks you requested in addition to the work they had planned (and hope you don't make a habit of overspending your retainer hours)

This isn't an issue if it happens every few months; certainly, you do want your web agency to be constantly looking for new opportunities to improve your efforts and you do want your website to be properly maintained. A good digital marketing agency is going to be providing smart recommendations for new tactics and updates that need to be made as a matter of course.

The issue is when this is what happens pretty much every month, and at the end of 6 months, you either don't have the business results you signed on for because you sent your web marketing experts chasing after a few dozen S.O.S's instead of letting them do the work they pitched, or your agency isn't willing to keep letting you get a 2-for-1 deal on their time.

So, how do you avoid S.O.S. Syndrome and make sure you really get the results that sold you on internet marketing in the first place? Here are a few suggestions:

Be realistic about what you can achieve within your current budget. If you're on a very small retainer, you may have to accept that you can get cutting-edge consulting OR regular maintenance OR a consistent SEO program—not all three.
Yes, staying ahead of trends and keeping your website maintained are important; but avoid knee-jerk emails on topics that are really S.O.S's. Try bundling these “off-plan” items for a monthly touch-base with your agency, so they can use their time most efficiently.
Choose a web agency that acts like a partner, rather than a vendor. A partner understands your whole business and can be trusted to let you know when a new trend could affect your business, or when a website maintenance issue could be adversely affecting your results.
Remember that pride is a horrible guide, especially in online marketing. Don't make business decisions based on how things look, if it means sacrificing how the program delivers results.