A new site or redesign has failed to live up – after spending substantial resources building it. The SEO expert is suggesting major changes. What now?
I’ve been thinking about how the Sunk Cost Fallacy undermines SEO again and again.
In those times when a new site or redesign did not consider SEO as a priority and now has failed to live up to business goals there can be major resistance to recommended SEO and content changes.
Opportunity Costs Pile Up When Sunk Cost Fallacy Goes Unresolved
Even Awesome Web Developers are Under Pressure to Launch – Not Always to Deliver Business ROI. Understand that, except for fixing bugs, everything in the realm of SEO is painstaking to do. There is enough hard work involved that you don’t want to add more of it by competing with yourself.
The best course is to involve senior SEO expertise long before any redesign or launch. But if that didn’t happen, and things aren’t going well, talk to one now and work together to resolve the situation for tomorrow.
“We just spent a fortune on that website.”
In our discovery conversations, we have included such questions as the current base conversion rate of a site for direct, referral and branded organic traffic in that list. We ask about content creation resources and attitudes about topic clusters and pillars.
But one of the most important questions is about recent investments into the website itself – because if so, there can be silent pressure not to rock the boat – introducing a resistance to the kind of change that enables organic rank to succeed. The team can start looking for shortcuts while expecting strong outcomes.
Do whatever you can to help us rank, but we cannot change this site – we just spend a ton of money on it, and it was a nightmare to get approved.
– Thousands of Marketing Directors
We owe our clients and prospects an honest, real world view of their situation. Not the situation they wish for – but the situation they have. Nobody wants to just go through the motions and budget to end up in the same or worse scenario while competition moves on.
Are you able to embrace the process of aligning your website to what the web is asking for? Can you consider your earlier SEO mistakes a sunk cost and move on to stay competitive? It might be required – and good SEO consultants will tell it like it is and find a path that works.
