Getting a small business off the ground and later ensuring its continued success can be a time-consuming and frustrating process. Marketing plays a vital role in this, and SEO is a very valuable part of marketing in today’s competitive online environment. Despite this, many businesses fail when it comes to SEO, and for some shockingly simple reasons. It is important to invest in SEO properly and give it plenty of attention in order to make it work.

Not Having a Strategy

The first thing you need to do, either on your own or with an SEO specialist, involves coming up with a strategy for implementing your content. All too often, a business owner just “wings it” when it comes to keywords and phrases. For example, a baker might anticipate that people will search for things like “cupcakes” or “wedding cakes”. People will almost certainly search for those terms, but that does not make a complete strategy. What kind of cupcakes? In what area? These are the factors to consider when you develop your SEO strategy in order to ensure that the information you provide ends up in front of the people who need to see it.

Failing to be 100% Relevant

The entire purpose of SEO is to make sure that your business’s information comes up on a search engine when someone needs the products and services that you provide. Because of this, you need the keywords you select to be 100% relevant to potential searches. Now, imagine that you want to search for someone who can fix your air conditioner. You type “air conditioner repair” into Google, and you see the following two advertisements:

• A to Z Air Conditioner Repair
  On Call 24/7 to Keep You Cool
  Call Now!

• Robertson HVAC Service
  Specializing in Heating, Air Conditioning, and Ventilation
  Call for your appointment

Now, you, as the searcher, will compare the two ads in order to decide which one better suits your needs. Your primary goal is air conditioner repair. The advertisement for Robertson HVAC Service is quite relevant, indeed. It explains that they specialize in air conditioning and that you should call for an appointment. However, the advertisement for A to Z Air Conditioner Repair is even more relevant. They tell you that they will keep you cool around the clock, leading you to believe that they will tend to your needs more quickly. As you can see, it is important to choose your SEO keywords and phrases carefully in order to be as relevant as possible. Even a slight deviation could send business to your competitors.

Not Enough Changes

Some businesses pay outstanding SEO specialists to create their website content and optimize their AdWords campaigns for Google. Once this happens, that business simply shakes hands with the specialist and walks away. Unfortunately, SEO is much like technology – it is always changing, and it is always growing, and the things that people want tend to change over time. Because of this, a business must keep an eye on trending phrases and boost its content to match. Failing to make changes to SEO content, whether it involves text on a web page, a blog, or even an AdWords campaign, is detrimental to a business. What was once relevant may fall to the wayside and leave you in your competitors’ dust. Don’t blame the SEO person! SEO is not a one time step. It’s an industry that evolves everyday.

Too Frequent Changes

Whereas many small businesses set up their websites and campaigns with SEO and then fail to keep them optimized, others try too hard to maintain that optimization and end up shooting themselves in the feet. In order to achieve significance in the statistical scheme of things, you have to be consistent. Optimizing based on the statistics for a single day’s worth of searches is a bad idea. Optimizing based on statistics over a month or longer is better because it gives you time to develop your own significance and relevance among those statistics.

Poor Content

You have your trending keywords and phrases. You have successfully created your website, your blog, and your social media pages, and you have inserted those trending keywords and phrases into your content at just the right density. Did you check your page titles? What about your site map? How about the elements that your website visitors cannot see? Believe it or not, all of these things have an impact on overall SEO success. When search engines index content, it is about much more than what is visible to the reader’s eye. You need to follow a set of regulations and rules, including titles and non-visible content, which ensure that your content makes it to the top of the rankings.

Overall, it is important to remember that SEO is about much more than choosing a few popular words and phrases, sprinkling them into your website and blog text, and expecting them to boost your traffic and revenue. SEO requires time and effort, and it is always changing. If you do not want to fail at SEO, give it the time and attention it needs to help your business become relevant.