How can bad SEO affect your business?

Bad SEO (Search Engine Optimization) can have a devastating effect on your business. Your whole online campaign may be compromised, or even turn into a PR nightmare. You have to remember that these days a lot of people are getting their information from a website. And, if the information they receive about your company is skewered, then so is your public image. It may even come to pass that negative reviews about your company are appearing on the search engines results before the results containing your website are.

Without good SEO your website will not be seen

This is a basic fact that revolves around SEO. SEO guidelines exist to make websites more search engine friendly. If your SEO is no good, then your website is not search engine friendly and so you will not be ranked up the search engine results page. Bad SEO is going to damage your company because you will be missing out on a free opportunity to gain more customers. This is damaging to your company because your competitors will be gaining free customers whereas you will not.

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Poor SEO is going to attract the wrong people

SEO is more about getting the right people to look at your website. There is a good chance that poor SEO is going to attract a lot of people. But, if those people are not interested in your website or your company, then what is the point of attracting them? They are simply going to use up your bandwidth for no reason. You may even be attracting people who are angry with your company and want to cause damage with negative comments or by sending you phony orders or clogging up your help desk with spammed requests for help.

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Poor SEO is going to attract nobody

If your website cannot be found on the search engines, then there is little chance that you are going to gain any traffic from it. There is also a brand of poor SEO that will rank you highly but will still not attract any people to your website. Not only do you have to have your website rank highly for the right search terms (as entered in the search engine), but you also need to encourage people to click on your search engine result. If people do not do this, then what is the point of ranking your website highly in the search engine results pages?

Poor SEO may put negative reviews above your own website on search engine results

This comes from a combination of poor SEO and incompetent SEO. You should be optimizing your site to appear as high in the search engine results as possible (that is where poor SEO comes in). You should also be optimizing your site for people who want to visit your website, and so should not be optimizing your website in line with the people who do not like you (that is where incompetent SEO comes in).

Bad SEO may rank up irrelevant pages

This is typical of simply bad SEO. This is where the most search engine friendly pages are actually the ones that have no bearing on your business or are simply irrelevant. Your landing pages, and to a lesser extent your home page, is supposed to rank the highest. These are the pages that convert people from viewers to buyers or supporters. However, some people make information pages that are accidentally very search engine friendly. A user will end up landing on a page such as “about us” and immediately bounce (leave the page) because they were looking for products not people.

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Bad SEO may rank up negative pages

You may have pages that have a negative effect on your online PR or online reputation. Pages such as the ones explaining your current share price slide. These are sometimes arranged and optimized in a way that has them appear above your positive/landing pages on the search engine results. Do you really want your customers’ first exposure to you to be one explaining why your share price has dropped?

Terrible SEO may get you kicked off of the search engines

This is called Black-Hat SEO, and it is made up of SEO techniques that break the rules laid out by Google (and to a lesser extent Bing/Yahoo). If you break these rules then there is a good chance that your website will be kicked off of the search engine results and you will not gain any traffic from a search engine.

AUTHORS BIO:
Kate Funk is a freelance writer at http://getanycontent.com/. She is mainly focusing on technology, gadgets and all the latest SEO trends which are interesting for networking enthusiasts.