[{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org\/","@type":"BlogPosting","@id":"https:\/\/www.adamriemer.me\/seo\/business-decisions-can-tank-seo-warned\/#BlogPosting","mainEntityOfPage":"https:\/\/www.adamriemer.me\/seo\/business-decisions-can-tank-seo-warned\/","headline":"Business Decisions That Can Tank Your SEO – You Were Warned!","name":"Business Decisions That Can Tank Your SEO – You Were Warned!","description":"With more people online (mobile, tablet & computer), companies are finally paying more attention to their websites. \u00a0That also means branding, PR, C level executives and others who are not familiar with the digital landscape are making the decisions that are smart for traditional business, but have unforseen consequences with online and websites. Below you’ll […]","datePublished":"2017-07-24","dateModified":"2021-06-24","author":{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.adamriemer.me\/author\/adamriemer\/#Person","name":"Adam Riemer","url":"https:\/\/www.adamriemer.me\/author\/adamriemer\/","identifier":2,"image":{"@type":"ImageObject","@id":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/fda62f751f2a6c2ec2b079fedff69720852e4a65633212ffb11832454c29160a?s=96&r=g","url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/fda62f751f2a6c2ec2b079fedff69720852e4a65633212ffb11832454c29160a?s=96&r=g","height":96,"width":96}},"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Adam Riemer Marketing, LLC.","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","@id":"https:\/\/www.adamriemer.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/arm-logo-2.jpg","url":"https:\/\/www.adamriemer.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/arm-logo-2.jpg","width":600,"height":60}},"image":{"@type":"ImageObject","@id":"https:\/\/www.adamriemer.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/07\/business-mistakes-that-tank-seo-and-how-to-fix-them.png","url":"https:\/\/www.adamriemer.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/07\/business-mistakes-that-tank-seo-and-how-to-fix-them.png","height":1086,"width":1505},"url":"https:\/\/www.adamriemer.me\/seo\/business-decisions-can-tank-seo-warned\/","about":["SEO"],"wordCount":2665,"articleBody":"With more people online (mobile, tablet & computer), companies are finally paying more attention to their websites. \u00a0That also means branding, PR, C level executives and others who are not familiar with the digital landscape are making the decisions that are smart for traditional business, but have unforseen consequences with online and websites.Below you’ll find a few recent examples about companies that made or are making these same types of mistakes and how they could avoid, fix and prevent them. \u00a0If they don’t and you want to compete, you’ll also find how to jump in and take some of the traffic they would have had.As a heads up, all of the external links in this post are ads (affiliate links) and if any aren’t I will change them out for these ads (affiliate links) if I find out they have a program. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Unforseen Consequences That Kill SEONote – If you’re an executive or decision maker in your company, do not just consult your CFO or high level executives…get the SEO and people working under the Marketing Manager to give a 2 sentence statement on if these decisions will impact their channels. \u00a0They have no reason to lie and it is them who will be fired if you tank their channels. \u00a0They are the ones in the trenches who deal with your actual sales numbers daily and can give the honest feedback you need. \u00a0If you don’t, well you’ve been warned.PhotoBucket Charging For Image HostingI came across this article\u00a0last week\u00a0and had a mouth drop moment. \u00a0I also read this one which has an important statement about bloggers. \u00a0Then there’s this one which I didn’t read but the title is pretty clear. \u00a0I did a quick Google search and from what I understand it looks like they’ve blocked access to load images to third party sites unless the person upgrades to a paid account.As far as charging for your services, I’m 100% on board. \u00a0They’re showing ads over their own site to monetize that part of their free tools, but how do you make money from hosting images for other sites to use? \u00a0Charge them. \u00a0It’s really simple. \u00a0But it is also potentially very harmful.Image companies like PhotoBucket have a serious advantage in organic search. \u00a0They have images that people want and references which leads to an incredible amount of backlinks (note the bloggers mention in the Denver Post article). \u00a0This becomes very clear in the screenshots below.People use PhotoBucket images across multiple forms of content and source\/reference them which provides what looks like a good chunk of their backlinks. \u00a0By killing off the images loading to third party websites, website owners, news sites and others will start to remove and replace these images and links for other image hosting companies. \u00a0These links are the backbone of SEO (combined with on site experience (load times, internal links, clean code) and content) in general and should not be messed with, especially the hard to get and good ones.By removing the images from being publicly available they are potentially removing their links and giving their competition room to come in and destroy them. \u00a0It’s not hard to crawl a site for broken images or images from a site\/server and then sending an email to the webmaster letting them know. \u00a0If I was in competition with them, I would start that campaign immediately and without hesitation.Here’s a screen shot of the links I found using ahrefs.com\u00a0which I would use both if I worked with them and if I was a competitor to them. \u00a0Right now I’m neither. \u00a0There’s an explanation of how to use the screen shots below them.In this first image we see they have 1.25 million referring domains. \u00a085% of them are do follow. \u00a0There’s 805.2 Million referring pages with 87% of them having do follow links. \u00a0This would be a huge warning for any site to have this high of a ratio, except that in this case images aren’t always no followed since they’re being sourced so it is normally a legit and earned link. \u00a0This is also the first signal that their SEO is primarily based on their images being publicly available, with news and articles about their services being the next level of backlinks. \u00a0The next section in the screen shot proves this assumption.We see 804 Million text links with 562 Million being images. \u00a0A fairly safe assumption to make is that they are being sourced in articles, under images or being referenced in footers, image notes and across a site. \u00a0These are the backbone of their company’s SEO based on this report. \u00a0This is public information you can find with tools like I just did. \u00a0Your own SEO or agency should have this information on your competitors if you ask them for it. \u00a0It only takes a second to put together.If I was their in house SEO or agency, I would take these steps immediately:Pull a list of the top referring domains (maybe top 2,000)Segment them by:niche (industry and content relevant sites)major news outletsand extra focus if the site is in Google newsBlogs with authorityOtherNow add in conversion data from these referralsCreate a pitch to go upwards on giving these sites free accounts because:they provide traffic (include conversion numbers)their references and links keep our organic rankings strongif they’re relevant, we get a bit of consumer trust by having them use and reference usIf you’re a competitor, you do the same but you reach out to the site and pitch them to replace the PhotoBucket links with your own. \u00a0If you have an affiliate program, invite them in and offer to pay them commissions in addition to them having the images free. \u00a0It’s a double win for them and you’ll be helping to create less competition in the space organically for your own products and services.WSJ Charging for SubscriptionsThis is a beautiful one with lots of advice that should give bloggers and smaller news organizations a huge advantage and room to grow. \u00a0I found the article here.WSJ decided they didn’t want people to find their content through Google without paying for a subscription first. \u00a0That’s completely understandable based on their industry of providing high quality content created by staff writers. \u00a0Its the same as the newspaper boxes outside of metro stations where some are pay and some are free. \u00a0There are different business models that work for everyone and with WSJ you’re paying for serious quality. \u00a0So whats troubling about this?The first thing is that Google expects people to be able to access content for free. \u00a0That’s why people use Google. \u00a0You search for something and then you get an answer. \u00a0Paying to get an answer or having to jump through hoops creates a bad experience and defeats the purpose so Google has less of an incentive to display the content. \u00a0The article above references their traffic plummeted by 44%. \u00a0That was something that was expected to happen so lets move onto something that is actually interesting.The article talks about a skyrocketing subscription increase rate. \u00a0Without any inside knowledge and a bit of basic common sense, wow is that a bad number. \u00a0If you decrease your free traffic, all paid users are going to increase. \u00a0Less traffic and the same subscription rate means higher conversion rates…duh!!! \u00a0The increase was substantial so I thought there could be more to this.I decided to plug them into another tool I use which I personally feel is more accurate for large sites traffic numbers and that is when I discovered something else interesting.It looks like they did in fact drop substantially as you can see 10M to the 6Mish mark in the last 6 months which matches up to the reference in the post about organic traffic. \u00a0What’s interesting is that you also see a huge increase in paid traffic. \u00a0The paid traffic is what we should be thinking about.They could be using it to bring people to content that has a higher conversion rate into subscribers. \u00a0They can also target those people who are more likely to convert based on query and competitors. \u00a0This could lead to a higher increase in conversions for subscribers. \u00a0That is what we may not have known about the increase in subscriptions in the article I referenced above.If WSJ’s analytics and search teams are savvy, they are tracking how many sales they make per topic, by article type and by author. \u00a0As new stories that fall in this category break, they can increase the keywords for people looking for that topic and start bringing this type of high converting traffic to it. \u00a0Since it may be higher converting and there is less free traffic, this would in theory also impact their subscriber rate above the obvious numbers. \u00a0The downside to this is they’re paying for a lot more traffic instead of getting it free. \u00a0Not everyone has the luxury of a larger budget like WSJ and may not be able to make up the difference or scale.If WSJ doesn’t want the additional millions of impressions and revenue from CPM ads, etc… then no worries. \u00a0Tons of other websites would love to have it and will. \u00a0If I was on their SEO or monetization team I would try to find a happy medium where after a certain amount of time they let articles be free and keep the newest and most in demand blocked for subscribers only. \u00a0 This would help them to continue to be referenced and linked to as well as get people to subscribe if they want the newest content first. \u00a0But that’s just me and I have no relationship with them.Branding Teams Changing The “Feel” of the SiteThis one I’m not going to show examples of, you can find a ton of them easily on your own. \u00a0As companies grow they hire branding experts who know about what is important for your digital persona. \u00a0In a traditional sense it makes sense to have them involved. \u00a0For ecommerce, they’re one of the biggest causes of companies tanking in the search engines, at least from my personal experience.Branding experts talk about the look and feel of a site and why it should balance, how this wording is wrong and why we need to modify our language including product and service names. \u00a0We should think about where and how we send people through a sales funnel to keep the emotional attachment and colors we want to associate with alive. \u00a0That’s awesome for offline, for TV commercials (think of state farm being about family and having a friend or the Nationwide on Your Side jingle) and even for packaging and logos. \u00a0When it comes to a company’s website there is a lot more that goes into this.Instead of ranting I’m doing bullet points on the errors and severe damage branding departments do to companies on a regular basis. \u00a0I’d like to point out that it’s great to have branding, but your company makes money from sales. \u00a0If the “branding” disrupts or decreases your sales, you may not have a company left to keep “branding”.Word removal or changing – the wording on your site can be directly correlated to your ability to rank. \u00a0If you sell blue widgets, but you don’t say it anywhere, or you remove all occurrences of it, you may start to slip and fall for these terms in the search engines. \u00a0It doesn’t mean the volume changed or more people are in the market, it means you lost your exposure to them. \u00a0A blue widget is a blue widget and if you want traffic for it, you pretty much have to use it and feature it to make sure search engines (and your potential customers) know you have them or offer them. \u00a0If your rankings dropped, start by checking where you removed the wording from in your:Title tagsH1 tagsH2 tagsNavigation – main, sub and footerAlt tags and image namesSubheaders and bolded contentInternal links from body copy and blog postsColors to match the brand – When your colors change, your site experience changes. \u00a0Even if they match what the brand should be, users may no longer engage with them or convert as well. \u00a0This can be proven time and time again. \u00a0Here’s where to check color changes first if your conversions decreased:ButtonsContact us spacesNavigation areas or places people click to find more informationBackground colors and imagesCTAs – If the branding team said to remove CTAs or move them so we don’t take away from the feel of the page, or to change the color, this almost always has a direct impact on leads and sales. \u00a0You have to exclude traffic from other pages to see this properly. \u00a0Be cautious and make sure you have the right data before addressing this one. \u00a0I’ve seen it go bad many times.Extra images – more images can mean longer load times and less attention to the message. \u00a0People are there for a reason, do not distract them with fancy decorations, video, flash and features like high res images that may not load or slow down your site. \u00a0This is a very common thing branding teams do that aren’t meant to be problematic, but ultimately cause damage to a company.To prove the damage or the need to reverse the decision, use heatmapping tools to track the actual UX and who is clicking what on your site. \u00a0Then get the conversion data for the actual keywords from your PPC campaigns that show the traffic levels and revenue from them. \u00a0Now compare those to the amount that your company has dropped in organic search and they should add up to about the same if there wasn’t an outlier.This is the solid numbers based case for why you need to restore certain things regardless of branding. \u00a0Without money there is no brand and if the executives don’t want to listen, it was a fun ride to get to that point and hopefully they change their mind before its too late. \u00a0If you show them that this branding and wording is causing financial damage and they insist it isn’t, it may be too late for that company. \u00a0I’ve seen this happen as a consultant, in house employee and unfortunately I’ll see it again in the future. \u00a0It’s something that will continue to happen as traditional business morphs into a web and app atmosphere.This post is already a bit long so I’m going to stop here, but the big take away is that if you’re an executive, things that don’t seem to matter or not getting feedback from people doing the actual work can and will hurt your company. \u00a0The above examples are extremely common, especially for companies who are just starting out, got a lot of VC funding, have excessive amounts of free users they can’t monetize or are experiencing quick growth and forget about business basics.Remember, everything from a line of code to the wording in a tag can impact your business and how people find it. \u00a0Once they find you its about converting them into a customer by showing them what they’re looking for and how you’ll help them with their problem. \u00a0Once they’re a happy customer, bring in branding for the existing ones and have them work on keeping your customers with you…after that is done you can then worry about everything else. \u00a0 The bottom line is that without money and sales, you don’t have a 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