How I Screwed Up My Search Engine Optimization - SEO Content Mistakes Made by the "Expert"

Although my expertise is in content, online content marketing today is so intertwined with search engine strategies (how content on the web is often found), I also study, practice and teach about search engine marketing best practices. It is with that introduction that I want to tell you how I didn't listen to my own advice, and lost customers and traffic in the process.

As we launched Junta42, we determined that there would be no space between Junta and 42. Through the first three months and into the launch of the beta site, we had so much tunnel vision that I never thought about considering a space when someone searched for Junta42.

In determining our final meta tags for the website, we did all the right things.  I surveyed a group of publishers and marketers to get their keyword terminology that related to Junta42, such as custom publishing, content marketing, custom magazines, customized content, branded content, etc.  Those keywords became a core part of our content strategy, and continues to be.

Yet, one day, about two months after the launch of the site in late July, I received a call from a close colleague of mine.  He couldn't find the site in the search engines. I actually laughed, thinking he was some kind of an idiot. Yet, I found out the finger was pointing right back at me.

At that time, if you typed in Junta42 into Google, about 3,000 related results returned to our company. Only about seven returns had to do with someone else (one user on a discussion form, we believe out of Japan, uses the profile name junta42...go figure). If you typed in Junta <space> 42, you got zippo. (NOTE: One of the reasons we chose Junta42 was a search engine strategy. We knew that we could dominate that term due to its rareness in the search engines.)

The worst part, the majority of references under Junta <space> 42 were for Thomas Junta, a 42-year-old man who was recently charged with manslaughter.  There was no sign of our company anywhere.

We ignored our own advice that you must have a clear understanding of your customers and prospects online behaviors when it comes to a content marketing strategy. How do they get to your site?  What relevant keywords do they type in? If we would have done just a bit of chatting with our users during our beta test, we could have easily found out that many of them might type in Junta <space> 42 into a search engine. (Which, by the way, is a good reason to "watch" customers use your website, not just use an online survey.)

Now this was not the end of the world, but is a good example of the barriers you can put in front of your customers if your content doesn't have the proper meta tags, title tags, and, in our case, company name variations. Is it easy for customers to misspell your company name?  Do they search for your company information by product (product misspellings), company executives (executive misspellings), locations, etc.?

Try this exercise for yourself.  You may be surprised at what you find.  I actually just added a number of my last name misspellings into my meta tags. Why put a barrier between you and your prospects or customers when a five minute fix can take care of that?

Since the initial launch, we've to fix the problem.  If you type in Junta <space> 42 today, the first four results and six out of 10 are for Junta42 (Mr. Thomas Junta receive the rest of the attention). Within the last 3 months, over 100 people have landed at Junta42 through a search engine by typing in Junta <space> 42. Over the next few months, we should have all 10 on the first page of Google.

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Comments

[Melanie]

Thanks for the thought-provoking post. Since my company name has two words together without a space and since the name can easily be misspelled, this article has prompted me to search through the search engines to see what I've been missing.

[Joe Pulizzi, Junta42]

Thanks Melanie...although from the look of your listings on Google, you are doing a better job than I did. Probably more focus on the Attention Max would pay big dividends.

Best
Joe

[Mario]

Joe:

I think the problem was not the space of the lack of it, but the fact that one of the terms in your URL is a noun and the other one is a number.

Search engines have trouble with that: they don't know where to split the URL. If your domain would have been, for example, juntacompany.com, the SEs would have "understood" that they were in fact two separate words and you would have ranked for those "junta company" and "juntacompany".

The point of your article, though, is still valid. You have to understand your users' behavior and cater to it.

[Joe Pulizzi, Junta42]

Hi Mario...great insight. I think this happens a lot where the search engines might not know where the proper breaks would be. Good stuff!

[Kyle]

Some of the best advice that you can give is in your own failures. It takes a lot for someone to admit that they messed up and even more to publicize it to the world. Thanks for provoking thought in the rest of us to not make the same mistakes. :)

[Joe Pulizzi, Junta42]

Hi Kyle...thanks for the note. Fortunately for my readers, I make lots of mistakes and will be sharing them often. That is part of the fun of the internet as well...try lots of things, fix lots of things, continue to learn.

Best
Joe

[Paul Burani]

Now this is useful feedback. You don't even need a premium tool like Wordze to get this right--simply look at your most important keyword(s), and look on your computer's keyboard at all the surrounding letters! Or just type it fast and try to force the errors. Those misspellings amount to a nice long tail of traffic intended for you anyway.

P.S. I've also read (and this is from Danny Sullivan, people) that the meta keywords are pretty much useless nowadays EXCEPT for misspellings of your core keywords.

[albachtimi]

I think Joe was right, the main problem of your site is placed to URL address, but your strategy to solve your problem was great... It proved with your high pagerank.

[seo specialist]

hey

Really nice tips!

will try to keep it in my mind

thanks!

[Joe Pulizzi]

@seo Thanks for taking the time to comment.