7 Common SEO Challenges And How We At Semalt Overcome Them

We live in a world where the answer to every question and the solution to every problem is only ever a Google away. As such we increasingly find ourselves turning to Google for our every want and need. The challenge for businesses is simple: be the answer to the question, the solution to the problem, to meet your audience's wants and needs.

But when every single one of your competitors is trying to do the exact same thing, the simple becomes far more complex.

Search engine optimisation is full of challenges, not just for these businesses, but for SEO experts too. Let's take a look at seven of the most common roadblocks, hurdles and challenges in SEO, and how we at Semalt work to overcome them.

Conventional wisdom states that if you create a website or web page, Google's web crawlers will find it and index it within a month. You might assume that this means that any page on any site will definitely come up on Google (unless you've intentionally put a 'noindex' tag on it). 

But you'd be wrong.

There is an extensive list of reasons why your website or certain pages may not appear on Google at all. Perhaps the pages were impossible for Google's bots to find or read. Perhaps they have been made in a way that goes against Google policy. Whatever the case, you're not listed, and you're missing out on valuable website visitors.

To fix your indexing problem, you first need to understand your indexing problem, or if you have a problem at all. Type 'site:[domain.com]' into Google to check that all your web pages come up. If you have 215 web pages, Google should say 'About 215 results' at the top of the SERP. If it says fewer than that, or 'Your search did not match any documents', you have an indexing problem.

Semalt's Website Analytics tool is designed to analyse your site and identify the causes behind indexing issues. Combined with the support of a Semalt SEO expert, we ensure that every one of your web pages can be found on Google.

Estimates vary, but in any given year it's been said that Google tweaks, updates and changes its algorithm between 500 and 600 times. What's more, Google keeps these changes a secret to avoid people taking unfair advantage of them.

This means that SEO professionals must use trial and error to figure out what the algorithm does and doesn't like, and given the amount of factors that Google considers, a huge amount of resources need to be invested in staying up to date.

At Semalt we take a two-step approach to the challenge presented by algorithm updates. Firstly we put a heavy focus on fundamentals - the things that we know that Google likes, and will always like. Secondly we share the responsibility of keeping on top of algorithms updates across a large team. Different people and teams focus on content, on-page, off-page, white hat and other areas of SEO, to ensure we maintain our place at the leading edge.

Which keywords should you be targeting? While the answer might appear obvious, it rarely is.

The fact is that your customers will often use completely different words to describe your products and services to what you use. They also won't be consistent amongst themselves. Knowing what your customers are typing into Google is perhaps the most complicated yet most important element of a successful SEO campaign - there's no point in being at the number one spot for a certain keyword if none of your customers are actually using it.

As part of our FullSEO service, Semalt uses market-leading proprietary technology to collect and analyse keyword data. This results in our experts selecting the most relevant commercial keywords that are designed to attract the largest target audience possible.

I'm sorry to say, but your website will never be 'complete'. This is because the Google algorithm will never be finished - there will always be updates and adjustments being made, and your website needs to change with them. Both it and the Google algorithm are living, breathing things, and need to be treated as such.

Site maintenance isn't a simple thing. Between updating and maintaining content, fine-tuning focus keywords, optimising alt text and meta tags, fixing broken links and adjusting your text-to-HTML ratio, there is quite a bit to think about.

As part of our FullSEO product, you'll enjoy a full-time support person who ensures that your website continues to be as Google-friendly as possible. This person will direct our internal teams to areas of focus, whether they be tags, links, content or keywords, so that your website continues to maintain a high ranking for the most relevant keywords.

If a site or page takes forever to load, the user experience (UX) inevitably suffers. And with the Google algorithm putting an ever-greater focus on UX, smart businesses are pouring resources into ensuring their websites boast superior performance. In fact, page speed optimisation is now one of the most common and effective SEO strategies for improving SEO performance.

If there's a sudden drop in your website traffic, it could well mean that bad performance is to blame. Perhaps you overloaded your page with content. Perhaps you made the wrong choice of web server. Whatever the case, you need to fix things, and fast.

The Semalt Website Analytics tool has been designed to dig deep into the performance of your website, and offer a comprehensive view of your current situation. The answers can be found in the zeroes and ones of your website data, so we take a long hard look to find out where things might be going wrong. The presence of large files is the most common cause of performance issues, but in reality there could be any number of issues that need to be addressed. Whatever they are, you can trust our experts to find them and fix them.

Some of the most important elements of SEO lay outside of your direct control. An example: backlinks. Google uses these to gauge the authority and trustworthiness of your site. If you have a large number of third-party sites linking to yours, it is seen as proof that you are influential and trusted in the space.

Obtaining backlinks is hard, and unfortunately there aren't really any shortcuts - this is a game of trust, after all. This can make obtaining said backlinks a real challenge for many websites.

Obtaining backlinks is about creating good content. It's about knowing what your customers are asking, and offering answers to those questions. It's about creating a blog, and writing quality articles based on keyword research. Do all that, and you'll not only enjoy a better ranking on Google, you'll also position yourself as a thought-leader in your industry.

Just a couple of decades ago your competition was probably limited to your street, suburb or city. Now businesses find themselves competing against the entire world, including those multi-national organisations that measure their marketing and SEO budgets in millions.

When you think about it that way, competing against these giants can seem an impossible task. But the truth is that you aren't actually competing against a whole multinational organisation. You're only competing against the small part that is targeting the exact same customer as you.

Instead of trying to get you ranking higher than a big corporation on a specific keyword, we instead look at relevant alternate keywords that they aren't focusing on. We help you to find other ways of standing out, like through social media, content creation and brand building.

But most importantly, as part of our FullSEO package we put a focus on local SEO, concentrating on the terms that people in your area will use. There's no point in trying to compete with a major brand on a global scale, but if you bring the fight to your own backyard, you've got a good chance of success, as customers will appreciate the fact that you're home grown.

SEO isn't an easy business - in fact it's rather difficult. But as global leaders in SEO, at Semalt we bring the experience you need to get onto the first page of Google.

Our complete suite of proprietary technologies, including AutoSEO, FullSEO and Semalt SEO Dashboard have helped over 650,000 registered users and over 1.5 million websites to improve their ranking, while our committed personal managers are always there to guide you through your journey.

It's time for you to jump over the SEO hurdles that stand in your way.

It's time for Semalt.