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The Challenges of SEO

SEO is more than just a buzzword, though: It's an extremely important marketing concern for businesses and other organizations of all types and sizes.

By Carlos FoxPublished 4 years ago 3 min read
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Search engine optimization, or "SEO" for short, is a term that is often thrown around but not always well-understood. SEO is more than just a buzzword, though: It's an extremely important marketing concern for businesses and other organizations of all types and sizes.

SEO sounds like a fairly simple idea, and it's easy enough to describe in broad strokes. SEO is all about making an online presence as appealing as possible to search engines like Google, with the goal of reaching more current and potential customers through internet searches. The higher up a business or organization appears on the search engine results page (SERP) for relevant queries, the better.

But what sounds simple in theory is complex in practice. SEO experts face serious challenges in their work.

The Secret Algorithm

Appealing to a search engine wouldn't be that hard if everyone knew what search engines wanted. But the reality of the matter is that search engines like Google are not at all forthcoming about the inner workings of their algorithms. That makes sense—the algorithm is Google's secret recipe; and competitive advantage, and if every website could cater to every detail of the algorithm then it would be hard for Google to serve up relevant results to searchers (rather than whichever sites have the best SEO—whether they're useful to searchers or not).

Understandable as it may be, this secretiveness is a hurdle to SEO pros. SEO experts have to do a lot of A/B testing and other experiments to figure out what works best in SEO—and, by the time they "crack the code," things may have changed!

A Moving Target

This brings us to our next major SEO challenge: The changing SEO landscape. Google is never a final product; just like other apps and websites, Google is always trying to get better. But a new and "improved" algorithm can drastically change the importance of certain factors to SEO. A Google algorithm update can reshuffle search rankings and set off a frenzy of experimentation and innovation in the SEO space. Experts work hard to figure out the SEO best methods for each new iteration of Google's algorithm.

Balancing Act

Google has made itself indispensable to businesses of all sizes. To compete, businesses simply must have an SEO strategy. The gang at Google understands this and does not ban SEO (even if they wanted to—which they might—there would be virtually no way to enforce the ban on most SEO strategies). But Google does draw the line at certain tactics that it considers to be black hat.

"Black hat" usually means "unethical" in computer programming and hacking. Whether or not that applies here depends on how sacred one considers Google's search engine and monopoly status to be. From Google's perspective, though, the issue is black and white (get it?): White hat tactics are accepted, but "black hat" tactics are not. Doing things like putting invisible text on your site (that is, text that the search engine will read but that site visitors won't) is an example of something that Google considers to be black hat, and it will get your site penalized in (or even banned from) search engine results. This adds another challenge to SEO: Pros must do as much as they can to improve SEO without angering the folks who work for the search engines.

Getting Competitive

All of this can be challenging stuff, but giving up on SEO just isn't an option. The sheer volume of Google searches, the rise of local search, the connection between searches (especially mobile searches) and purchases, and other key facts make it clear that search engines are an essential concern for all organizations. Besides, the competition will surely be addressing their own SEO needs. To keep up, hire pros that you can trust for superior SEO.

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