Sandy Wardenburg Waggett lost $30,000 a month in sales when Google algorithm updates dropped her e-commerce site from page one to page ten. She warns against putting all your eggs in one basket, whether that's a single supplier, customer, or marketing channel. Diversify across SEO, PPC, social media, and owned channels instead of relying only on platforms you don't control.
Dropped from page one to page ten (search results).
Chapters
Good morning, everyone. Sandy Weigt here with MSW Interactive Designs. And today I want to talk to you about the number one. The number one is a very dangerous number in business if you think about it. If you just have one major supplier, if you just have one major customer, one project, product or service that is your sole source of income, everything's at risk. It's true in your marketing too. If you only have one major source of leads, your business is at risk. You need to diversify where your leads are coming from. I can talk about this from personal experience. We own a store called wherebytesgo.com, it's an e commerce store and about 10 years ago it was doing about $30,000 in sales a month. We were ranking on page one of Google for that website. Google changed its algorithm. You might remember the Panda and Penguin updates from back in the day. And because we had multiple wedding portals that were pointing to WhereByTesGo.com, google, Google penalized for that redundant content. That change came out of the blue and it was 100% out of our control. Our website plummeted to page number 10 overnight and the sales plummeted overnight. Thankfully, I had MSW Interactive designs also. So I had another business, I had another source of income. And with Where Brides Go, we were solely relying on our Google rankings for all of that traffic and it literally changed overnight. Don't put your business in that risk or that situation. You want to make sure that you have as many lead generating sources as you can because so many things are out of your control. So you want to diversify. Yes, do organic SEO. Yes, do pay per click if you need to get on page one of Google. You also want to do display remarketing social media. You want to do print ads, you want to do radio ads. You want to diversify your marketing budget as much as you can so that you're not solely dependent on one thing. You know, regulations change. The can spam app came in and it regulated how email marketing was done. You know, if you're old enough and you remember when people were doing the whole mass fax marketing, you know, there were businesses that went out of business because that's how they were generating their leads. And suddenly overnight they couldn't do it anymore and it was 100% out of their control. If you don't have a website and you're relying just on a Facebook page, you need to stop doing that because you don't own Facebook. Things happen with Facebook. Clearly, when Facebook made the news with all of the privacy concerns. They lost millions of people that were on the platform. Stuff like that can happen overnight. So don't put your business at risk. Think about what single points that you're relying on, what one things that you're relying on that you should diversify to reduce the risk. This is Sandy Waggett with MSW Interactive Designs. I hope that tip helps. Have a great day.
