So you feel that you know the basics of SEO and would like to put that into practice. You go ahead and throw in some keywords and maybe even link your website to your social media profiles and you see a slight improvement in where you appear on the search engine results pages. This will, in turn, give you some confidence in that you are indeed on the right path, but even though you may at this point be doing things correctly there may very well be a lot of trouble in store in the not too distant future.

The problem is that yes you may very well see a change in your position, but these gains will often be short lived and the chances of you being able to capitalize on this are actually very slim. This is because a number of people mistakenly believe that SEO work is something that just has to be carried out the once and then everything is great with their site, but that is not the case. Instead, SEO is something that is constant and it is constant for a number of reasons, which we will cover shortly, so standing still is not an option or your competitors will simply swallow you up and you will fall back down those pages.

SEO is like a race

You see, SEO is like being in a constant race where you are battling against competitors in order to get into first place. You cannot try to push ahead at the start of the race and think that you have won and stop or they will go past you with ease and it is the same with this. You can try adding keywords, you can try using social media, articles, directories, backlinks, or anything else, but it must be done time and time again in order to stay relevant. Your competitors, and by that we mean people competing against you for the same keywords, are going to be constantly building their presence to not only rank higher, but to maintain their current position as well. If you are unable to run that particular race due to cost and the time spent on it, then you need to look for another race with another set of keywords that is perhaps not as complex.

Problems you could face when doing SEO yourself

We have already covered one of the problems in trying to do SEO work yourself, but there are several that you should actually be made aware of. Running your race is clearly going to be time consuming for you and people do tend to become pretty lazy once the novelty of doing something new has started to wear off. Trying to promote yourself online or writing articles and getting backlinks becomes a real task and it is one that website owners tend to want to shy away from whenever possible. A professional SEO company does this for a living, so by putting it all in their hands you are making your life so much easier and you also free up time to do other things connected to your website or business.

Another major problem is that Google is always making slight tweaks to how they rank websites and it is not unusual for changes to result in websites falling down results pages overnight. The thing about this is that Google will often make changes that can be confusing to a lot of people and of course there is then the need to come up with an alternative strategy in order to get that ranking back and get it back fast.

When you have no formal training in SEO, then it does often lead to you just trying to do the same things as you did before due to not fully understanding why your website has fallen down the pages. Of course this is then going to do nothing thanks to people not being aware that it was their previous actions that have indeed been penalized. People may then continue to do things that Google now frowns upon and that just makes the problem worse because the website will be pushed further down the pages by Google and then you are in a hole that you have no idea how to get out of. The result of all of this? The number of people visiting your site will drop and of course any revenue will head in the same direction as well.

What you can do to rectify the situation

The easiest way to rectify this situation is to avoid getting into it in the first place. By using a company that specializes in SEO it does mean that your website will rank higher and it will meet all of the terms and conditions as set out by Google. The cost of all of this will also be lower than you imagine and as was said earlier it does allow you to then focus on other areas of your business knowing that this important part of your marketing is in safe hands.

Contact us here at Webfoot-Designs on 815-468-1524 to see how we can help you with SEO and improve the organic ranking of your website.