Search engine optimization is the best weapon you have these days or creating brand awareness, driving traffic and making conversions. Despite this, however, SEO is a fluid and living thing in which hundreds of variables can affect the very life of your business. Even for the professionals, staying on top of your SEO is a full time job and there are a few challenges that will pop up along the way. Should these certain challenges worry you?
- The first challenges business owners tend to fret over is that their traffic has dipped and they can’t find their site in a SERP. Your traffic has been fairly regular but you have begun to notice your traffic figures dropping. Most traffic will dip from time to time in the 10% or so range and there is no need to fret about that. New rivals come online and indexes get refreshed from time to time that will cause your traffic to go up and down. If your traffic dips more than 10% or so, then you will want to examine your SEO strategy because such things as a Google penalty or bad inbound links could be causing you some serious trouble. If you are not showing up in a SERP at all, it just means that your sight has yet to be indexed. That can take anywhere from a week to a month to happen. If this continues to happen, you may want to have your robots.txt files examined to ensure that the bots and spiders are not being blocked by your site.
- Perhaps you have become concerned that your SEO results should be better than they are or that your SERP rankings keep going up and down and don’t seem to be holding a steady pace. You must always keep in mind that SEO is a long term strategy and an investment in your future. It isn’t a cost or a short term instant gratification fix. It may be that you need to up your game and throw some more money and resources into your SEO pot. Your rankings will be a bit volatile from time to tame as is the nature of the SEO game. Also, your traffic will go up and down depending on the nature of the business. Your traffic may spike during your normal busy seasons and then slow down a bit in between. It is those in between times that you want to address and put a plan in place to drive more traffic during your normal down times.
-Written by Kevin Sawyer
