10 Frustrations of SEO

1) Google keeps changing its algorithm

Search Engine Updates happen pretty much everyday and major ones likePanda, Penguin, Hummingbird can make or break your site. Just when you get used to an SEO strategy that works for Google, a new algorithm update shakes up your strategy. Remember when guest blogging was all the rage? Well now Matt Cutts says it is too spammy, Google’s head of web spam. If you are not constantly on your toes, the next Google Algorithm Update could crush your rankings.

2) Poorly designed sites can outrank you

Why is that awful site outranking me!!! There is nothing more frustrating than seeing a site built on Microsoft front page out rank your beautiful fully responsive HTML5/CSS3 website with awesome graphics. Google’s algorithm doesn’t index design quality. It looks for on page and off page SEO factors, few of which are design related, except for things like bounce rate and other indirectly related design elements.

3) It takes a long time to rank high

Clients want to rank higher now, not six months from now.  There is nothing worse then waiting months for your SEO strategy to play out. What if you’re wrong, and your strategy doesn’t pan out? That’s a whole lot of time wasted. At the end of the day SEO takes time, there are no more shortcuts unless you want to get a Google penalty or risk losing your sites rankings down the road.

4) Google can penalize you at any time

Just when you thought everything you were doing was white hat. Remember that SEO guy you fired a few years ago for his blackhat spammy tactics? Well Google has finally caught on and you’re about to pay for it. Google can slap on a manual penalty at any time if they feel you are trying to cheat the algorithm.

5) Creating quality content is really hard

Anyone that thinks creating content is easy has not written many blog posts in their life. Yes, simply writing a post is not hard, but a good post that goes viral or gets substantial social media traction and backlinks is hard to create. Unless you’re Rand Fishkin or another heavy weight in the Internet marketing industry, most people are not going to link or share your blog unless it truly has quality content. That takes time, and time is something most businesses do not have to spare.

6) Your rankings can disappear overnight

Ever have a nightmare about your rankings report coming back with every keyword down across the board. Your rankings can literally disappear over night. Ask Metafilter or Ebay and they will tell you horror stories most businesses would cringe over.  Any day could be the day your rankings simply disappear due to one or more algorithms updates.

7) Link building is dead or wait is it….?

Building links is now harder than ever. Google can penalize spammy or poor backlinks so its never been more risky to try and build links than it is now.  It’s probably best to not worry about backlinks and build quality content that organically generates good links. That may however, take a very long time. So then should we link build? That question is still up in the air for many SEOers.

8) SEO never ends, there is always more work to do

Take a weekend off right? You worked hard and got some awesome backlinks, wrote some quality blogs and got more social shares than ever before. Everyday you take off is a day your competitors could come racing up from behind to overtake your rankings. When your job is to rank high on the major search engines, your job never ends.

9) Only about 20% of people know what SEO is

In your mind you couldn’t have a more awesome job. What’s more awesome than getting your website or clients website to rank high on Google right?  Some studies have found that only 20% of people even know what SEO is. So when you tell people what you do, their eyes usually roll over.

10) And Maybe 1% of people really know how it works

Of those 20% of people that have heard of SEO, only a fraction of them actually know how it really works. Try talking to someone about title tags and backlinks and you might put them to sleep. At the end of the day you are with limited company if you know the ins and outs of SEO on the technical and non-technical side.