DON’T DO THIS

DON’TS IN SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING. LIST OF THINGS YOU SHOULD NEVER DO.

Search engine marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways to grow your business. However, there are certain things that you don’t want to do. Put it simply,

In Content Marketing and Website Related

• Never send a press release without optimizing it first, that includes verifying that all the links are working and using the right anchor texts
• Never produce videos using songs playing in the background that you don’t have license to use
• Never use an image, illustration or photograph without first doing research to determine its copyright status. If in doubt, always assume the image is protected by Copyright. Don’t bother optimizing an image that is not yours to begin with

In Email Marketing

• Never use your main email account (the one you use daily) to mass email communications. Instead, use a dedicated email to announce your promotion, new blog post or whatever is that you want your permission-based contacts to know
• Never send a spammy eblast to your entire email database, you may regret when many of your hard-won opted-in contacts unsubscribe
• Never send out an eblast without testing it first. You need to verify how it looks in mobile, not just in desktop. Research shows that mobile marketing receives a response of 20-70%
• Never use so many links in an email blast that they become un-clickable for recipients on their mobile devices, as illustrated in image below

In Targeting Latinos

• Never assume targeting Latinos is strictly marketing in Spanish. To connect with the entire spectrum of the Latino audience, better to engage in both languages (English and Spanish). This may not apply to every single campaign
• Never hire celebrities with a large following who have nothing to do with your promotion, even if they are or look Hispanic
• Never translate your website from English to Spanish if you are not operationally ready to support a new influx of Spanish-language prospects and clients
• Never launch an Hispanic marketing campaign without first studying the age and level of acculturation of your Hispanic market segment
• Never use the word Latinx or Latinx marketing without first understanding the meaning of it or in a context that is not accurate or appropriate
• Never use Google translate for your website.

In SEO and Link Building

• Never assume Spanish SEO is as easy as translating the META tags and plugging them into your Yoast meta fields; it goes much beyond that
• Never publish any web page, post or other content in any of your web properties without optimizing it first, including adding the META tags, h tags, alt tags and proper anchor texts
• Never pay for links that could compromise your entire SEO efforts
• Never copy content that will cause duplication of content, leading to Google’s penalties towards your site
• Never staff keywords in your web pages (called “keyword staffing”), your pages could be demoted in rankings, or even removed from the Google index
• Never cannibalize your own keywords. Avoid keyword cannibalization (where two or more of your pages end up fighting for attention)
• Never change your URL infrastructure without creating 301 redirects first from old to new urls, failure to do this will almost assure the demise of your SEO
• Never get links from blog networks and avoid sitewide backlinks
• Never contribute guest posts for bad sites, this will negatively affect you
• Never use cloaking and doorway pages
• Never engage in black hat SEO techniques just because you may have some short-term gains over your competitors, it will backfire
• Never forget to use analytics to measure performance and Google Search Console to gain direct insight from Google as to how the search engine sees your website

In PPC Campaigns

• Never translate the ads from English to Spanish and pretend you have filled the “Spanish PPC Marketing” bucket, you must manage the Paid Advertising campaign effectively from a language and a cultural standpoint
• Never launch untested unapproved ads with poor planning and irrelevant landing pages as destination URLs, just because you are in a rush to launch a campaign (save your money and do it later when you have the required time to do it right)
• Never waste paid budgets in ineffective campaigns, after a reasonable time without good results. Instead, remove or suspend ineffective ads
• Never engage in any activity that is unlawful or illegal, this one goes without saying!