If there is one thing that is almost omnipresent is the challenges.
Whether it is your personal life or professional life or career of any choice or career as a digital marketer or as an SEO professional, we never run out of challenges.
When one challenge ends, we can be sure that another one is around the corner.
We face challenges according to our expertise, experience, pay scale, and so many other things.
Challenges are the only thing that connects all of us.
It doesn’t matter whether you are a beginner or an experienced one. You have your challenges and I have mine.
But this article is not about those innumerable challenges we face every day. This article is all about the challenges you and I face as an SEO professional and what we can do about them.
Let’s start.
- Unexpected Rankings Drops
The first and foremost problem is the unexpected ranking drops and they keep SEOs on their toes.
Assume you worked hard on that page or keyword. You created the best possible content, optimized all the elements, found the best link opportunities, outreached and built backlinks, and finally, it happened. After months of hard work, you reach the top of the search results.
You want to do your favourite dance. Call a party and enjoy the achievement. Tell the world about it.
But you can’t because deep inside you have the nagging worry. How long will it rank? How long will it hold on to the position?
You’ll wake up every day worrying about it. You’ll open the browser or analytics account with the same fear.
Because Google might suddenly come up with an algorithm update that could entirely change the SERPscape and you might be seeing yourself on the 2nd page or somewhere in the bottom of the first page results.
Or one of your competitors might have upgraded their content or gained a couple of backlinks
Or you might have lost a backlink or two or you might have stopped link building a bit while ago
And so on.
But no one is going to like it when it happens. Not you or your boss or your client. Even if they aren’t noticing it right away, they are gonna see it when you send your next monthly report.
Questions gonna come. You got to face them and answer. And above all, you got to take action to fix it.
You should be agile and ready to pivot when it happens.
You should be able to find out what caused the rank droppings? Is it an algorithm update or a competitor overtaking you or something else and do whatever required to regain your rankings as soon as possible.
- Managing Client/Boss Expectations
Almost every SEO face this issue. When they start the project or job, they promise the world to impress the client or boss, and when it comes to delivering fall short on their promise.
That’s the end of good times. You lose the trust and confidence. It doesn’t matter how valid your reason, the client or the boss won’t care. You just have lost the trust. And it’s gonna take a really long time to gain it back or it might not happen at all.
That’s why you should be realistic with your promises and projections.
You need to do your homework, run a thorough audit of the website, keywords, and everything else required and also understand client’s or boss’s expectations before doing so.
Give them realistic and correct expectations. You might not wow all your prospects or bosses with such expectations but you’ll not disappoint them once you start the job. You can impress them with your actions instead of words.
And trust me the honesty will do wonders and bring prospects back even after months because during the time they might have realized it’s what they can get and they will choose to go with you because you were the first one to set those expectations.
- Project Management, a.k.a Balancing Client Load & Task Load
That’s your third challenge.
Whether you are on the job or freelancing, managing clients or boss and managing the work is a huge challenge.
You have tons of work to do. You have to keep a tab on your existing keyword performances while focusing on the future keyword & content opportunities and plans.
You should keep building links while making sure that you aren’t losing any links or getting links from bad neighbourhoods or wrong partners.
You should also keep monitoring the actions of your competitors. You should know whether they are going after a new keyword or upgrading their content or acquiring a new link and so on so that you can counter it with correct steps to retain your rankings.
You should also keep tabs on your website performance – how much time visitors are spending on your website, how fast your pages are loading and so on because of everything matters.
And in between doing all those tasks, you should also talk to your boss or client, keep appraising them about the traffic and rankings, send monthly reports, answer their questions regarding the report data and so on.
And while doing all of the above, you should also keep filling your lead pipeline, building your brand and reputation.
It’s a lot to handle and to handle all that, you should be really good at balancing your time, tasks and needs of your clients.
You should plan your activities to cover all that required.
For every campaign you handle, you should have a clear sight of the goal and the tasks.
You should break the tasks into easy, actionable chunks and plan your day-to-day activities accordingly.
You should know what tasks you should handle them, the tasks you should delegate according to the importance of the tasks.
Then you should have a dedicated time for your clients and your brand building and promotional activities.
- Scaling Campaigns
The next challenge is scaling the campaigns.
Getting your page ranked or building a backlink is all good. But it’s not enough. You need to scale the campaigns to get the maximum results.
You should be able to rank for all your business or client’s keywords. You should be able to get more and more relevant, high-quality backlinks to the website and relevant pages on the website.
Or you should be able to rank the content that is relevant to your entire customer’s journey, answering all their questions that need to be answered so that they can reach their purchase decision.
While doing all that, you should also see how you can use the structured data and local listings and everything else to leverage.
Because your goal is to identify the opportunities you can leverage to grow your organic traffic to the website or content assets.
You need not restrict yourself with the text content and optimization, you can expand further to audio, video, and image content and grow your organic reach.
- Staying Up to Date
And the final challenge is keeping up with the changes in the industry.
We all know digital marketing is one industry where things change and evolve at a faster pace than most other industries out there.
And SEO is even more challenging because it changes even faster. You have to keep up with the algorithmic changes, strategy and tactical changes so that you can get results better and quicker.
It’s not just that. You also need to keep up with the growing demands of the industry, clients, and team members also. You need to keep educating them so that you all are on the same page.
You also need to learn to manage your time, balance your tasks so that you can use your time efficiently to stay up to date with the industry changes.
And when you prepare for these challenges, you’ll be all set for a great career and accelerated growth.
What’s the biggest SEO challenge you have faced so far? How did you overcome it?
I would love to hear it. Do reply and let me know.
Related Posts: https://writeonwall.com/which-is-the-best-career-in-digital-marketing/
