What is the biggest mistake you made with one of your SEO campaigns?

[DorotheaKettler]

What is the biggest mistake you made with one of your SEO campaigns? When did it happen? What were the consequences and what did you learn from it?

[MarketingOfAmerica]

Generally our biggest mistake is not understanding our clients correctly.  Some will approach us and tell us that they need to rank terms to get traffic to their site which is normal.  Some tell us just to get traffic to their site.  We have found that we have to settle on keywords no matter what, because even if we get thousands of real visitors to a site, it really matters what keywords we are using to a client regardless if they are still relevant.  I have had clients get mad that we weren't ranking them for terms like "toys" for example for $325 a month.

We learn on a daily basis on how to better serve our customers, but something new always comes up.

Have a nice day.

[Personnel_Concept]

May be out of many websites I started with the most important one and made links. And some of the links were low quality ones resulting in bad rankings.

[Michael-Goode]

Biggest mistake?

Hiring a content writer overseas, even though that person was "high rated" it was utter crap. Got an in-house writer about 2 weeks after that.

[MarketingOfAmerica]

Oh I have been this route before.  In house writers I found are a must.

[adamguerin]

I'd have to second this one. Hiring an oversea's copywriter because the client insisted on getting the cheapest one available.

It was disaster. I spent more time fixing and correcting the copy for grammar and SEO than they spent writing the content.

After about a month the client agreed, and we hired a favourite local copywriter of mine who nailed the copy first time. In the end she only cost a little more and because she could meet the client, we formed a great team and work to this day together.

I put that down as a reminder that I won't work with an overseas writer again.