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The Greatest Challenges & Threats in SEO

Insights from our recent State of SEO Survey report show that although the last year began with uncertainty across the industry, SEO is now more in demand than ever before.

Even so, it is not without its challenges. What issues are SEO professionals facing — and moving forward, what are the threats that might block success?

We surveyed over 2,800 SEO professionals about their experiences in SEO over the last 12 months. Keep reading to find out:

What the biggest challenges were in the last 12 months.

Whether SEO results trended better or worse over the last year.

What SEO pros perceive as the industry’s greatest threats in the years ahead.

What Were the Biggest Challenges in SEO Over the Last 12 Months?

At the start of the pandemic, there was a lot of uncertainty for everyone as businesses tried to navigate an unprecedented situation rife with real-world shutdowns, a near-instant shift to digital, and massive changes in consumer behavior.

As the pandemic unfolded many businesses had to pivot quickly in order to survive. Some struggled while others thrived as digital and ecommerce growth accelerated by several years.

Early in the pandemic, budget cuts were the biggest challenge for SEO professionals, as indicated by 37.6% of survey respondents.

Strategy issues (34.8%) were also a significant challenge in the SEO industry, as was a lack of resources (32.9%).

Read more: The Greatest Challenges & Threats in SEO

5 common pitfalls to avoid so you maximize your keyword strategy’s business impact

As an SEO agency, you already know the role that keyword research plays in understanding the business opportunities of your clients and how to gather hundreds and hundreds of keywords for your SEO campaign.  

But how do you go from a large list of keywords to an articulated, coherent, data-driven set that ensures you’ve zeroed in on the objective and know where you’re heading?  

Jumping straight to execution, crunching tactics and tasks might work in the short-term, but without a well-defined strategy in place, the risk of wasting client resources and, ultimately, trust is high.   

And you’ll know a strategy is good when you trust it to leverage your performance and generate results for your clients while ticking all the following boxes:  

Having a diagnosis which details the challenge to be solved. This helps you narrow your focus to a clear, simple problem that your client faces. Deciding on a guiding policy that defines the approach you follow for solving the problem. Developing a set of coherent actions: the tactics you’ll use, step by step, in accordance with your approach to get the best results and solve the problem. This logical structure, called the kernel of strategy, can help your SEO agency at every stage of campaign development, but for the scope of this article, we’ll be looking at how to refine the guiding policy by avoiding common keyword strategy pitfalls.  

Let’s take them one by one, so you discover new ways to get the most out of your keyword list and set yourself up for success:  

Pitfall #1 You include branded keywords in the mix Branded organic traffic is not SEO traffic.  

The navigational keywords related to your client’s website or other websites (even competitors) won’t be valuable for your SEO campaign, as you can’t directly influence them. Plus, your client owns all the branded keywords, and they’re using other channels to amplify them (marketing campaigns, advertising, paid search, etc.). You don’t need rank tracking or SEO for that.  

Mixing the two will muddle your data and will make your client’s position in the search landscape seem better than it actually is — which, in turn, will alter the strategy and your desired objectives.  

Read more: 5 common pitfalls to avoid so you maximize your keyword strategy’s business impact

Global Agencies SEO Services Market Report 2021: Market is Expected to Reach $83.7 Billion in 2025 at a CAGR of 19.6%

The global agencies seo services market is expected to grow from $37.84 billion in 2020 to $40.92 billion in 2021 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.1%. The market is expected to reach $83.7 billion in 2025 at a CAGR of 19.6%.  

The agencies SEO services market consists of the sales of SEO services and related goods by agencies or companies that provide search engine optimization services for businesses. These establishments are the entities which provide both on premise and cloud-based deployment SEO services and charge their clients based on man-hours, results based, and click based among many other models. Only goods and services traded between entities or sold to end consumers are included.  

Companies operating in agencies SEO services market are using “Zero-Click Search Results” to increase their appearance in the search results and this is a major trend in the agencies SEO services market. Zero-Click Searches alludes to a search engine results page (SERP) which answers the query directly at the top so that the user doesn’t need to do any further clicks to complete the search. A zero-click search is one that fulfills the search intent at the top of the SERP.  

According to the Search Engine Journal, 34.4% of all desktop searches result in no click while 62.5% of users never click search result links on mobile. Google presented zero-click searches in March 2020, with the aim to eliminate multiple results that searchers don’t really need and to satisfy the user intent faster. Zero-click searches include database-style searches, dictionary and encyclopedia-style searchers, and map direction style searchers.  

The agencies SEO services market covered in this report is segmented by service type into online services; offline services. It is also segmented by subscription into monthly; annually and by end-use industry into professional services; IT services; e-commerce; hospitality; recreation; real estate; others.  

The number of people using smartphones and internet services is increasing rapidly, especially in developing countries and this factor is expected to drive the market for agencies SEO services during the forecast period. For instance, in January 2020, the numbers of smartphone users in the world were 3.50 billion accounting for 45.12% of the world’s population.  

Read more: Global Agencies SEO Services Market Report 2021: Market is Expected to Reach $83.7 Billion in 2025 at a CAGR of 19.6%

The importance of SEO in business

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process where you aim to increase the quality and quantity of traffic to your website through organic search outcomes. When a search engine like Google ranks your website on the first page, you will receive more visibility. This means that you get more visitors, increasing your revenue.  

If the Seo ranking is high, customers consider your brand as trustworthy. SEO also improves the user’s experience making it easy for clients to interact with your site. Read on to discover why SEO is essential to your business.   Visibility and rankings. Users tend to choose the topmost items that search engines display when searching for a product or service online. If you rank high in search engines, the visibility to the potential customers becomes high. If your business receives more visits or views on search engines, the number of customers likely to purchase from your brand becomes high. As such, it is essential to incorporate SEO into your marketing strategy to increase your visibility.  

Web Traffic. In simple terms, this means that if potential clients cannot find your website, the chances of missing opportunities become high. To increase your organic search engine traffic, consider optimizing your site for SEO. This will, in turn, increase the number of visitors to your site. SEO also allows you to target specific audiences, improving your chances of increased sales. Audience targeting makes your clients feel unique and more willing to buy from you.  

Trustworthy. If your SEO score is good, you will appear in several search engines. SEO optimization will earn you a positive appeal and increase your visibility. Combined with excellent user experience, these characteristics will earn your trust with potential customers.  

Customers are more likely to refer a company they trust to their friends and family. Every start-up brand requires referrals to grow. As such, it is essential to create trust with potential clients.   

Growth. SEO is essential to the development of any business, whether small or already established. As earlier mentioned, if your brand ranks higher on the search engines, the more traffic the brand receives. An SEO-optimized website will attract more traffic, generating more leads. If you satisfy the needs of these customers by providing quality products, you will experience gradual growth.  

Read more: The importance of SEO in business

Importance of automation for your website & SEO team

The time for the website promotion might range from several days to months. With manual SEO, the implementation of on-page and off-page optimization tasks could be really tedious. Thus, automated SEO is widely used by many webmasters these days.  

Owing to SEO automation tools and software, it takes less time and effort for search engine optimization activities. It is sometimes considered that automated SEO could not benefit your website promotion. On the contrary, automatic SEO was believed to be hazardous and even harmful.  

However, this statement is far from reality because the effect of automated SEO is the opposite. It helps SEO teams to streamline repetitive tasks, which allows dedicating more time to other important SEO activities.  

What is automatic SEO? The principles of automatic SEO imply the utilization of software to perform daily tasks faster. As a result, effective SEO teams become more productive when using SEO automation tools. Automated SEO considerably reduces the amount of time and resources spent on various SEO activities.  

Automated processes provide a possibility for webmasters to spend less time on routine daily tasks. While an SEO expert may spend minutes on finding broken links, for instance, an SEO automation tool can accomplish that in seconds.  

How does automated SEO work? The concept of automated SEO refers to the desktop software and utilities designed to streamline activities dedicated to search engine optimization. Automation tools assist webmasters in repetitive tasks that could be easily systematized. Those are usually related to position tracking, backlink profile analysis, finding broken links, site audit, and reporting.  

To get the most benefits out of automation, webmasters first need to decide which processes to streamline. Based on that, dedicated SEO automation tools should be selected for facilitating chosen activities.  

Read more: Importance of automation for your website & SEO team

The Wild Web: How SEO Can Attract, Engage and Retain Consumers for Brand Building

In our connected world, almost every organization has an online presence they rely on heavily to support the bottom line. Amid the ongoing crisis, that hasn’t been more true than now. While the web can streamline endpoint processes like sales, it also functions as a critical gateway for customer engagement. That’s why companies need to place increased emphasis on their online presence for brand building – and where SEO tools can make all the difference.

SEO has always been a critical tool for optimizing a company’s brand online in order to drive leads into the sales funnel. However, in light of recent events that have made brands’ online presence the main channel of customer engagement, we need to ensure we are pivoting and shifting strategies to meet consumer needs in this new reality. With a crowded landscape and more content competing for consumer attention than ever, it’s vital that brands leverage SEO technology to ensure they’re maximizing brand awareness online in order to continue generating revenue by converting leads into loyal customers. Here’s how:

Encourage new customer recruitment and acquisition

Building a brand starts with converting audiences from being “new visitors” – checking out a website to learn about the company – to a “brand visitor” – visiting the webpage because of what they know about the company. This means increasing the volume of non-brand-traffic, which can be done by leveraging SEO insights to understand what consumers are searching for and finding the best route to exposure to rank high in their searches. And the more familiar consumers are, the more likely they are to keep coming back – a recent study from Econsultancy found 82% of consumers click on brands they are familiar with first before looking at other options. With exponentially more brand options to turn to than ever, a sense of familiarity and consistency will help you create an engaged and loyal customer base.

Read more: The Wild Web: How SEO Can Attract, Engage and Retain Consumers for Brand Building

5 Ways SEO & Web Design Go Together

When you’re trying to improve your website’s performance, it’s important to remember that you have to focus on numerous factors simultaneously.

In both life and digital marketing, we tend to give all of our attention to one or two important elements while neglecting something else that can turn out to be equally as important.

If you want to do better in the SERPs, it takes more than just SEO.

Your website also needs to be designed well, or you risk squandering all of that organic equity you have been building.

SEO and web design work together more seamlessly than many people might realize.

Their components mingle and flow together so well that, when executed correctly, your website visitors should not actually notice anything about what you have created; they should simply start navigating through your site.

So, what are those elements where SEO and web design collaborate? Check out these five ways they are used together.

Read more: 5 Ways SEO & Web Design Go Together

 

How to defend yourself against an ongoing negative SEO campaign

You know what negative SEO is (and isn’t). You know how to audit your site to determine if you’ve been hit. You know how to protect yourself to limit your exposure. Now it is time to discuss how to defend yourself against an ongoing negative SEO campaign.

Who is attacking you?

There are a variety of ways to unmask the people targeting you and your site with a negative SEO attack. Some depend on the type of attack you’re experiencing. No matter how they are coming at you, you will need to collect some information in order to shut them down.

Let’s look at common attack methods and see how we can turn the tables and use what they’re doing to us — against them.

Inbound links
Using your favorite link analysis tool, you will need to segment the links you expect to have (your old links) to the new ones you believe are coming from an attack. This step is very easy to oversimplify because link scoring varies significantly, depending on your philosophy of links, risk tolerance and which tool you use to score links. The end result of this step is a list of links you think are part of an attack.

Check to see if the links being used against you are related or follow similar footprints:

  • Are you seeing a lot of links from low-quality blogs, scraper sites, bookmarking sites, wikis or directories?
  • Did a large number of new inbound links pop up at the same time?
  • Are a lot of your new links coming from the same IP address or countries?
  • Are the new links using the same anchors over and over?

This massive influx of inbound links can be the work of an individual or group using spam software. Spam software tends to leave some telltale traces, such as a high number of links using the same anchors or a concentration of links from a single specific footprint. An example of this might be links inserted in footers like this: “Powered by phpBB © 2000.”
If you were to look at your backlinks in your favorite link analysis tool, you might not immediately notice specific patterns or certain types of links. Look for unusual patterns such as adult and pharma anchor text phrases in new links, or a high volume of links you cannot attribute to any of your marketing activities. These types of links may indicate a negative SEO attack implemented by someone using a spam tool, or possibly someone using a network of sites.

Read more: How to defend yourself against an ongoing negative SEO campaign

 

How to Avoid 6 Common Web Design Mistakes That Hurt SEO

We can all agree that the best websites are designed for both users and search engines, right?

That means you never should sacrifice beauty over function, or vice versa.

Check your website for the following six common mistakes to see if your beautiful design is preventing your pages from ranking high in search engines.

Mistake 1: Missing H1 Tags (Especially on the Home Page)

Imagine entering a website with a nice background picture, a well thought out font, and an elaborate color scheme. It looks amazing. Browsing through feels like a walk in a beautiful garden.

Too bad nobody will find it in search engines.

Why? Because very often website designers and developers forget about essential SEO elements.

The most common offense is removing an H1 tag just because there is no place for it on the page.

The H1 tag is one of the first elements search engine crawlers will look at to determine what the page is about. Having this tag, and including your target keyword, improves your chances of ranking higher.

Here’s a website that has a clear H1 tag front and center:

Read more: How to Avoid 6 Common Web Design Mistakes That Hurt SEO

Use What Google Gives You To Create A Successful SEO Content Strategy

I’m a nerd who loves analytics. I’m also stingy and hate paying monthly for SaaS marketing tools. Fortunately, Google provides all the tools I need to succeed as a marketer without paying a dime or signing up for a free trial.

Below, I share how you can take what Google gives you to create a search engine optimization content strategy and market your business through content on your website.

Google Autocomplete Feature

Nothing gets our creative SEO content strategy juices flowing like Google autocomplete. This tool uses search predictions to suggest what other people are searching for based on the terms you are typing. In other words, it’s a search marketer’s dream. Begin by going to Google.com and typing out the main keywords associated with your product or service. Immediately you should begin seeing the top search predictions based on what other people are searching for.

For example, let’s take “dog food.” Autocomplete will suggest five search queries that are your starting point for an SEO content strategy. Examples: Dog food container. Dog food brands. Dog food coupons.

Take Google autocomplete one step further by typing in every letter of the alphabet after your main keywords. “Dog food a” produces queries like “dog food allergies” and “dog food analysis.” “Dog food b” produces suggestions like “dog food bowl” and “dog food brands.” Make a long list of all the autocomplete suggestions that make sense for your product or service. Spin these keywords into content ideas like “Five Tasty Dog Food Brands That Puppies Love.” Then, get to creating the content.

This search prediction tool uncovers long-tail keywords in an efficient and creative way. It’s a wonderful method to kick off any SEO content creation strategy.
Read more: Use What Google Gives You To Create A Successful SEO Content Strategy

 

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