Agreed 100%. A web marketing strategy is a must-have for a new business plan IMO. It doesn’t work as an afterthought – especially if you’ve burned your budget on other things and now need bottom-of-the-barrel services. Search engines still drive the vast majority of traffic online. To leave them out of your strategy is foolish.

It’s tough to buy something you don’t fully understand so I understand the reluctance. Still, that’s part of being a decisionmaker – delegating the tasks you can’t/won’t handle to people you trust who can.

It’s amazing to me that SEO still doesn’t get more of a priority from decisionmakers. I understand that it’s a complex foreign language to many people, but that’s a poor excuse. Your website is critical to your business — you need to at least understand the key issues that contribute to its success or failure.

I see the “incomplete team” issue a lot myself. Writing is a major facet of a development project, and I rarely see copywriters involved.

The other issue I see most often is when clients hire on price or don’t otherwise vet their possible hires and end up with a poorly-coded website. It creates problems with SEO (sometimes rendering a site invisible to Googlebot/etc) as well as adds tremendously to the maintenance costs.