Major SEO Challenges You Will Face in Your Career

From managing customer expectations to balancing the workload, learn about 11 SEO challenges you may face in your career and how to overcome them.

Whether you run a solo operation and personally oversee every detail of a campaign for a small number of clients, or manage a wide range of projects as part of an agency, there are certain challenges you will face throughout your SEO career.

No matter how diligent, organized or proactive you are, there will be:

• Disgruntled clients
• Website malfunctions
• SEO campaigns that crater without explanation
• Internal problems and logistical dilemmas.
  

Most of these challenges can be solved if they are approached with composure, but it's always good to know what's on the horizon when you start your SEO career.

How will you deal with these 11 common challenges?

Project management, aka Balancing Client Load & Task Load

You need to be ultra organized if you want to become a successful SEO professional.

There will be times when you feel that you've taken on too much, or it's simply not possible to deliver everything you promised on time and with proper quality control.

To meet this challenge, an appropriate project and task management structure is essential. This allows you to distribute the workload among your resources and reduce burnout.

In SEO, a successful campaign is not a means but an end; it is created by small, manageable tasks that are carried out over a longer period of time.

If you neglect these small moments - weekly ranking audits, routine speed optimizations, regular content publishing - your entire campaign will never achieve what it needs.

You can't go all night before a client meeting and expect results. Digestible tasks distributed over a wide time frame across your team are the recipe for success.

As you grow from one to several team members, it will be crucial that you document your processes, continuously improve them and integrate them into your project management structure.

Listen to your employees and appreciate their insights on how you can improve the daily work flow and review the process regularly.

Don't rely too long on yesterday's tactics or you will fall behind.

Manage customer expectations

This is not a lesson you want to learn the hard way after you have promised too much to a customer and delivered too little. This happens especially when you are after a "big fish" that you need to impress.

Make no mistake: if you don't meet impossible expectations, you will never impress the customer in the end, so keep your promises realistic. Stay in your wheelhouse. Impress them with results, not words.

Whether it's an exploratory talk with a potential client, an offer or proposal, or upselling an existing client, I always try to set the right expectations. You may not get the sale every time, but that is the right result because you were transparent.

Customers and potential customers will appreciate this honesty in the long run. You would be surprised how often a prospect calls six months later to resume the conversation with adjusted expectations.

Learn not only to set the right expectations for results and campaign objectives, but also to set the right expectations for project scope and communication.

A needy client who gains advantages by working for hours free of charge out of his reach or who crosses borders at any time by e-mail, telephone or SMS is rarely willing to be involved.

Set these expectations early, value your work, value your time, and you can successfully meet this challenge.

Unexpected rankings breakdowns
You can manage a successful campaign, achieve great results, witness a huge increase in traffic and enjoy a smooth relationship with an ecstatic client. Suddenly, all success collapses.

Sometimes the cause is technical, like changing a search engine's algorithm. Maybe it is due to a change in the direction in which customers are moving - maybe they have budget problems or are in the middle of an acquisition.

They need to be able to cope with the situation and turn from one moment to the next.

If you have a search problem, you should create a protocol for investigating and rescuing a ranked drop. If it is a problem on the customer side, look for ways to support them during the transition and prove your value.

Stay up to date

Expecting to keep up with the search industry, algorithm updates and Google features can put a tremendous amount of pressure on your shoulders. This can be especially challenging when you're trying to grow your business, network, and deal with human resources and logistics. Suddenly, the daily research about the industry becomes much more difficult to find.

When time is short, investment in tools becomes absolutely crucial.

Don't be afraid to invest in this new keyword research tool, tracking tool or heat map software.

Talk to your team and ask them what resources will make their day easier, more productive and more efficient. The moment you think you know everything, all there is to know is that you're out of the woods.

There's always a new social media network, CMS and a search function just around the corner. How can you make it work for you?

Rely on a single channel approach

Although specialization has great value, it is a mistake to rely on a single-channel approach. You cannot have just one tactic and expect to be successful in SEO today and in the future, no matter how well you do it.

If you change your approach from search engine optimization to online presence optimization, you will achieve better and more stable results for your customers.

Optimize not only client websites, but also social profiles, quotes and directories, and remember that everything from Amazon to Instagram has a search engine.

Think smart: Optimize Yelp for restaurants and businesses that want to be listed in iPhone searches. With a Foursquare profile, your customer can be tagged in one place on Instagram.

More than ever, optimizing your online presence in these different outlets is critical to success.

Going beyond a multi-service approach

SEO goes hand in hand with web design, content writing, paid advertising, email marketing and social media management. Offering all these services together makes logical sense and allows clients to have a consistent web presence with the convenience of doing it all in one place.

However, if you start offering related services outside of your area of expertise at a customer's request, no one wins.

If you're not careful, you could end up knee-deep in a failed email migration with a disgruntled customer, and they won't care one bit about their SEO rankings.

Stick to what you know.

It's okay to redirect email support, brochure design, and event management to another location while you focus on outperforming what you do best.

Prioritizing vanity metrics over leads and sales

Over the years you will learn that most customers only care about two things: Leads and sales.

You can tell them about the amazing SEO audit you did, tell them about all the technical changes you made to their website, or tell them that you reduced their website load time to one second.

The only thing that really counts in the end is the results.

If the phone doesn't ring or sales are declining from year to year, the customer doesn't care that the bounce rate has dropped by 6 percent.

Concentrate on which measures can increase leads and sales. Don't be guided only by rankings or vanity metrics.

Getting too comfortable

You go to a client meeting, ecstatically, to share the results. Leads are up 200 percent, traffic is up 500 percent, rankings are higher than ever, and the new website you just launched looks beautiful. You will boast about these results without knowing that the customer is about to fire you.

Regardless of the results, constant communication is so important.

Never take a customer for granted and never assume that results, efforts or successes will guarantee a customer a lifetime.

Have confidence in your skills and service, but don't be so convinced of yourself that you miss it when a client is unhappy.

Warning signs such as a sudden lack of responsiveness, longer than usual delays in paying bills, or uncharacteristic reluctance to pay are signs that they may be dissatisfied.

Breaking the customer plateau

Regardless of the quality of your work, there is usually a life cycle in an SEO client relationship.

After two or three years many clients want to try new things and change things. Sometimes this is financially motivated. Even if you have done great work for them, they are willing to invest their money elsewhere.

In other cases they consider the SEO work a success and are ready to continue. They have reached a plateau and don't see how things can improve further - how do you go from the top of page 1?

You will not be able to retain every customer, but try to reduce your churn by being a proactive communicator and you will have much better customer retention.

Work together to position SEO as yet another tool in the arsenal to help them achieve their broader business goals. You want to be seen as a partner for continued success.

Choosing the right tools

When setting up an agency, it is never too early to create an invoice in a proper CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software and invoicing tool.

If you start out with just a handful of customers, you might think you can get away with a do-it-yourself invoice or a CRM that is little more than a to-do list and address book. You will learn early on that these methods are unscalable and will leave you in a world of pain if something is overlooked.

Although SaaS like Salesforce is no small investment, it will deliver a measurable ROI by allowing you to expand our customer base and hire more people. The ability to track contacts, leads, opportunities, accounts, and projects in a central, collaborative location is so important.

As your agency scales, you'll appreciate that you've laid a strong foundation. If you decide to adopt CRM on the fly or not at all, this could slow down growth significantly.

While there are many good options on the market, you need to invest in the right email platform, CRM, ranking software/tracking tools, competitor research tools/backlink checker and billing software at the absolute minimum. They will make your work easier and give you the flexibility to scale.

Dealing with adversity

Even with the utmost preparation, processes perfected down to the smallest detail and a skilful approach, you will still encounter obstacles, if not disasters, on the way there.

Your biggest customer could run away. An aggressive competitor could eat away at your market share. Staff turnover, leasing issues, customer indisposition... Every day brings something new, not to mention more general issues such as a recession, where customer budgets are inevitably tighter and the value of online marketing services less obvious.

You will face adversity, so much is inevitable.

The question is: Will you rise or fall in the face of these challenges, big and small?

You need to be creative, flexible, confident and open. Establish a safety net so that no loss of customers, personnel or data will cause you to falter.

BONUS: Scaling campaigns

Achieving great results at the local level is one thing, but can you take it to the next level and extend it to more cities or achieve national success? This can be a greater challenge.

With local SEO you can use many crutches that simply don't scale, such as optimizing the homepage title and H1 to a single location.

Eventually you will see that strong processes and a solid project management structure will help you scale, but there will be complications along the way that you may not have anticipated.

Conclusion

SEO is a rewarding industry where your entrepreneurial spirit, creativity, technical skills and thirst for knowledge can take you far.

Nothing good comes easily, and that is the case with a career in this field.

While you can't foresee every obstacle you'll encounter, these 11 challenges are commonplace, especially as you grow from a small consulting role to a larger agency with dozens, if not hundreds, of clients.

If you understand what lies ahead, you will be better prepared to face such challenges not with fear or anxiety, but with serenity and composure.