Advertising can be like chasing the dragon. You keep throwing money on the fire, only for the buzz to burn out in a matter of days.
It starts with a lot of mistakes. Mistakes that turned into wasted time and money. After running 4 of our own international tourism websites, we were hit with a Google Core Update. It stopped our growth in its tracks. We’d created efficiencies in inventory, built social media channels with tens of thousands of followers, earned international press coverage, and won some pretty incredible awards in the process. But seemingly overnight, it was no longer enough.
What we hadn’t planned for were search engines changing the rules. Changes made in an effort to be great at what they do. In hindsight, this was wildly naïve on our part. You can’t blame the Search Engines - for years online marketers were gaming their systems, and creating poor, and often irrelevant search experiences.
When Google prioritized original content our cross-platform duplicate listings lagged in the absence of canonical tags. We didn’t know any better.
When Google made the move to indexing only mobile-friendly sites, our antiquated approach, built for a desktop experience, sank like lead boots in the Hudson River. We failed to anticipate the speed at which mobile devices would become research tools.
When Google said search speed is increasingly important, our years of archived high-quality media and the custom API that fed the consumer sites struggled to keep pace. We didn’t appreciate that Google is in the business of serving more volume per bandwidth, and that we were bad for their business.
In order to keep our traffic up, we had no choice but to spend more and more advertising money just to keep the status quo. We didn’t realize the growing importance of SEO best practices and needing to stay current. It became unsustainable.
It didn’t have to be this way, however. In hindsight, when we designed our first sites we thought we had the right team in place. We had years of product and marketing experience plus decades of web-development resources at our disposal.
What we didn’t have, was an SEO specialist to make sure decisions flowed in line with the science, art, and psychology of ‘search’.
The chance to save a business from making the same mistakes we did, and benefit from our training and hard lessons learned, is a task we’re up for.
