SEO is a challenging job. Let me share our own experience within our company with you. As soon as we get a new client we try our best to implement the highest quality onsite optimization and offsite link building techniques in order to achieve some good results for them.
We don’t want to keep them waiting for months before they can see an improvement in the search engine ranking and website traffic because waiting is frustrating. But then it depends on a ton of different factors to get them ranked and some of those factors are beyond our control, so things don’t always go as planned. Some keywords are easier to rank, while others take a large amount of consistent effort because keyword competition has a role to play.
Another thing comes as a huge challenge when some keywords become absolutely stagnant on page 2 or 3 and don’t look like moving up to the first page no matter how much effort we put in the back end. Yes, this scenario occurs quite a lot of times. And it’s a huge challenge to recover the keywords from the state of stagnancy and get them to the top 10 results.
The reason I’m sharing all of this with you is because if you’ve just started a new digital agency, it would provide some motivation to you. Even after spending over 12 years we’re still facing these challenges every day, so you are going to face them too.
Don’t lose hopes, don’t lose passion and don’t stop doing the hard work.
In this post, I’m going to share some of the important challenges we face and the exact tips and tricks to address those challenges, so you can create a great SEO roadmap and achieve guaranteed success for each of your clients.
Read on…
Search Engine Ranking Algorithm is a Mystery
Back in 2008 we knew search engine ranking algorithm was a mystery, and it’s an unsolved mystery for us even today.
You pay 5 dollars for a coffee or 500 rupees to get a movie ticket. In both the cases, you know what you pay and what you are going to get in return. All real world scenarios are like that. You know what you’re going to give or pay, and what exactly you’re going to take or get in return.
However, how search engines actually work and how their ranking algorithms operate is hard to decode. The only thing you know is that you have to do a lot of consistent hard work fixing on-page errors, build quality back links, create useful content for the human visitors (not search engine bots in the first place) and stay within the limit while optimizing websites by following all the search engine guidelines. You can only hope for a ranking boost, but you cannot know exactly when and where your website(s) will be ranked. This is why we can the ranking algorithm a mystery.
The point is not to discourage you, but to make you aware of the truth. Search engine algorithm is a mystery and it’s absolutely okay.
During the initial months, we thought we’re in trouble and it felt like a huge challenge too, but with time we understood the nature of the search engine ranking system. Even though it’s impossible to know exactly what ranks you are going to achieve through your SEO work if you do the job right, you would definitely get the reward.
So, that is my advice to you. Do your homework right and understand how you should proceed with your SEO campaign. Keep moving in the right direction and never ever expect to take any short cuts. It will definitely pay off soon.
Finding the right or the best keywords
One of our recent clients that I’m personally dealing with asked a question – “David, I like your team’s SEO work by means of which my website’s ranking is great for the keywords you’re working on. But what if my keywords are not searched and cannot drive enough visitors to my site?â€
That’s a god question many clients don’t normally ask.
I immediately asked my support team to look at the analytics data and see the traffic count and behavior. It’s good that the website is getting a good amount of organic traffic. Sigh of relief!!
So, here comes the important player – the â€KEYWORDSâ€!
You have to choose the right keywords for the website you are going to work on. An exhaustive keyword research and analysis is essential.
Finding the right or the best keywords for a particular business can be a challenge. If there are 5 root terms you are targeting as your main keywords, there can be tens of different derivatives you can target. Those derivatives can be found from the:
- Auto suggestions (while you’re typing the terms in the search engine)
- Questions and answers section (with the title ‘People also ask’) and
- Related searches section right at the bottom of the search results page.
Ideally, you should target all those derivatives of your root keywords for a holistic improvement in ranking of the website and growth of their business.
You must apply this technique too (if you are not using it already) in order to find the best keywords because keywords are a big player when it comes to creating a successful SEO roadmap.
Technical SEO implementation
Technical audit is a must. Every SEO expert must have knowledge about the technical side of SEO. By saying this, I am not asking you to know all the high-end technical aspects like writing or editing some lines of the website code, setting up the website plugins or doing the server settings etc. That is the job of your designer.
But being the SEO expert, you should definitely have enough knowledge about the basic technical SEO factors like page loading time, onsite content analysis, competitor analysis, dynamic tagging, indexing and crawling etc. Unless you take care of these technical factors and fix the onsite issues, those issues can come up as huge obstacles in the future no matter how strong your offsite SEO link building process happens to be.
You don’t have to acquire a lot of background knowledge of HTML, CSS or JavaScript in order to be able to implement technical SEO because there are content management systems available these days that can make this job extremely easy for you.
It’s essential for you to be able to look after a few critically important tasks like diagnosing the issues in the code with duplicate tags, tracking script implementations, improving the site speed etc.
Technical SEO implementation in the beginning days can be a huge challenge, but with the above mentioned tips and some continuous learning it can be a lot easier.
Local SEO Expertise
Local SEO has emerged to be a highly effective marketing campaign today. Search engines including the most popular Google have learned that online searcher’s behavior has changed and they are now more focused on looking for local businesses for the services. And for this, they are now performing their searches based on the local or region specific terms that include the region names in the entire search phases.
You, as an SEO expert, must have sound knowledge on local SEO technique and its implementation because of its high demand. You must know how Google local listings work, how the entire local search ecosystem functions, the importance of official data used for posting such as the name, address, contact number and contact email address of the business etc.
Our SEO staff has complete, in-depth knowledge about local SEO implementation. Also, all of our trainees are becoming real local SEO experts after the training is completed. Â So, be a local search expert.
Local SEO, a few years ago, definitely came as a challenge to us, but with some quick and thorough learning we were able to win over the difficulty. If it is also a challenge for you, do not worry. Be sure to study how it works and if you can handle a couple of local SEO projects well, it should be an easy task for you.
Master this skill to be a real leader in your SEO field.
Monitoring the performance
You may be very strong in onsite SEO, offsite SEO, technical SEO, local SEO, international SEO and even enterprise SEO, but you cannot afford to skip monitoring the performance of your hard work.
I still remember there was a time, maybe during the late 2016, when our company got 15 SEO clients within a quick span of one week. It got difficult for us to do tracking, monitoring and reporting. We didn’t have a good big team that time what we have today, and our staff got so much involved in the onsite and offsite SEO implementation part that it became really difficult to monitor the performance, track the results and generate the complete reports manually.
So, if you don’t track or monitor the performance on a daily basis, it can become as a huge challenge later.
But don’t be scared. You can easily tackle this just like how we did. Hire good people that can add value to your team, and monitor all the details about every project on a daily basis right from day one. This should not be difficult for you.
Creating the best content
In SEO world, we understand that ‘content is king’. Don’t know where it started and when people began saying this, but this has been there right since I began my digital marketing journey.
It’s been said for the right reason too.
- When your visitors come to your website, they see your content. And your content tells if your site visitors would love or hate your website, product(s) and/or service(s).
- When we promote the website on social media, people see the content. If they like the content, they engage more with it. And that’s the goal of social media promotion.
- When we do offsite SEO, we generate SEO content (articles and blog posts) to building different kinds of links.
- We write press releases to promote our product launch or other special news or events within the organization.
- We write regular blog posts for our website blog to provide more knowledge about our product or service to our target audience.
So, it is CONTENT that plays the most significant role in SEO or any other digital marketing strategy. Being the SEO partner of your client, you must ensure to create the best content for them that is useful for their audience.
We have our in-house content team to take care of all our content needs either for our own website’s promotion or for our clients. So, you should also have your own content team. If you can’t, make sure to hire a reliable content team. And you can always hire our content writers for your content needs.
Thus, with these helpful tips and techniques you can easily tackle the common and critical SEO challenges that you face, and also build a great SEO roadmap for your clients’ success.