The Biggest Mistake MSPs Make with their SEO (It Will Waste So Much Time and Money)

Search Engine Optimization is one of those things that can seem both straightforward and soul-crushingly convoluted all at once. Google tells us “just make a great website with good content” and yet there are hundreds of intricate metrics that Google uses that they don’t tell you about. Then you have experts claiming to know the secret sauce, or people claiming to have access to some mythic back door to Google, or others boasting their success based on one little thing they did. 

There are a lot of ways to get lost in the weeds when it comes to SEO, but there is one particular mistake that MSPs make that truly ends up costing them a lot of money, and in the end, doesn’t guarantee any sort of success.

Put Down the SEO Reports. They are Keeping You from Success.

This is one of the biggest pieces of advice I can give a business owner when it comes to their SEO. SEO is important. Technical SEO, which is generally the side of SEO that reporting tools can analyze, is important. However, it’s not the full picture. 

We’ve blogged about this several times in the past. 

Let’s walk through a hypothetical scenario where an MSP comes to us asking to help them out with their SEO. We review the website, and come up with a prioritized list of action items. It might look something like this:

Technical SEO Fixes:

• Fix the browser page titles.
• Optimize headings on each page.
• Fix bad or broken redirects.
• Fix broken internal links.
• Adjust some homepage copy to better reflect the terms you want to rank for.
• De-index superfluous URLs
• Review backlinks and address any toxic backlinks.
• Run some ADA compliance tasks.

Content Marketing SEO:

• Get the homepage to spell out what you do in a way your prospects would actually search for.
• Start building strategic content each month.
• Start a social media strategy.
• Promote monthly content.
• Look for opportunities to create case studies, press releases, and other valuable content.
• Consider running joint webinars or events with other local entities.

The way we prioritize SEO tasks is to get the basics covered, so there is more room to be reactive during the ongoing work and maintenance. Get your house in order before you throw the party. Those initial upfront tasks, however, as important as they are, are not going to get you the results you want on their own. 

In the list above, the 8 technical tasks are mostly just technical. It’s the backend stuff that is important, but will only get you so far. The rest of the tasks are things that your competitors are likely doing to blow you out of the water, and if they aren’t doing it, when you do it, you’ll blow them out of the water. Google cares about effort.

The technical stuff is just there to keep the house in order and make it easier for the harder stuff to succeed.

It’s important, but not the end game.

What Does This Have to Do With SEO Reports?

Technical SEO reports are not Google. They aren’t showing you your actual performance, your actual rankings, or how users actually perceive your website (although you might get some behavioral information from a few of them). They tend to look at a long list of technical metrics and report back to you, and if you are lucky, they might be pretty good at prioritizing what they spit out.

It doesn’t matter what online SEO tool you use; SEMRush, Moz, Ahrefs, Screaming Frog, Spyfu, WooRank, Yoast, SE Ranking, Hubspot’s Website Grader, etc. It doesn’t matter if you use a free version or a paid version. The information that the SEO tool gives back to you isn’t the full picture.

Even the best websites in the world that consistently rank #1 for the most aggressive terms can be chewed up and spit out by an SEO report, because SEO reports will often report on things that don’t matter, or don’t matter all that much.

These tools will tell you that a completely healthy page has a title tag that is too long. So what? It’s ranking. Google likes it. It’s getting traffic. 

They will give you a big list of 301 redirects, which is a thing that WordPress does automatically when an external link from some other website doesn’t have a trailing slash or doesn’t use the www in your domain. Why? Because some 301 redirects are worth looking at and knowing about, or might need to be removed or resolved, or an internal link should be fixed to make it easier for Google’s crawlers. 

We’re an MSP too, we’re intensely technical and understand that it can be concerning when a report comes back and finds something that doesn’t quite make sense, but with SEO, it’s a unique kind of animal. It’s so easy to get stuck on some little metric from SEMRush or Moz or Ahrefs and ignore the actual stuff that will help improve your presence, delight your audience, and encourage conversions.

What Are SEO Reports Good For?

They help SEO experts and web designers/developers prioritize technical tasks that can slightly improve SEO efforts and ranking. With years of experience, a good web designer or SEO specialist will know what to look for in the report, and then determine if it’s worth fixing, if it even can be fixed, or if attempting to fix it would actually cause more harm. SEO reports make it easier to compare the state of things on a website from one month to the next. 

For instance, if suddenly a handful of toxic backlinks are found one month, an SEO expert can review them, determine their severity, and tell Google to ignore them. Then we watch to see if the number of toxic backlinks goes down. Sometimes bad backlinks can come from some deeper issue (but not all the time) and it’s worth monitoring. A few bad backlinks won’t hurt a healthy website, but catching issues and being proactive is the name of the game here. 

They are a great little overall health check on a new or long untouched website, and like I said before, we use them to prioritize tasks and solve technical issues.

Don’t Fall into the SEO Report Sinkhole

The biggest problem we see is when highly technical people get stuck on SEO reports. They see 27 title tags that have too many characters or they see that every blog archive page for hundreds of pages has a generic meta description, so they spend time and frustrated effort trying to get these things “fixed” when there are strategic reasons why your title tags might be a little longer, or that a generic meta description on certain pages is fine. 

It’s so easy to throw a lot of money at these extremely small, insignificant problems while ignoring the fact that you really just should be putting some effort into content, social media, marketing, or the other things you are putting on the back burner. 

If you need help prioritizing, reach out to the MSP marketing experts at JoomConnect. Contact us to get the conversation started!