5 Reasons Your SEO Campaign Isn’t Giving You the Results You Want

Whether or not your SEO campaign is a success depends on a number of things. First, it depends on the resources you have available and the amount of time/effort you’ve invested in it. Getting moderate results for just a bit of work is a great deal.

It also depends on your industry and competitors. 

However, the perception of how well you’re doing won’t always match the reality.

Did you ever have a client who just expected you to do better, regardless of how well you did? You deliver amazing results, and they’re just unimpressed. You deliver decent results, and they’re livid, potentially even dropping you completely.

Well, this can happen in SEO, as well. Here are the five reasons why!

High expectations always cause disappointment. This is why no one schedules a Hawaii holiday because they’ve already bought a lottery ticket and are just waiting to cash it in, but they will get mad when they don’t get that promotion that was up. 

The simplest explanation is that one is more realistic than the other. The problem is that, as a layperson for SEO, you’re not really sure about how these things are supposed to work. You can’t manage expectations if you don’t know what to expect.

This is not your fault.

First of all, there are a lot of agencies out there that run their business pretty unethically. This means that they promise unrealistic “guaranteed SEO results” in hopes of dragging you in and charging you for at least a few months worth of profit (before you realize that it’s not worth it). By that point, they’ve charged and overcharged you but did barely any work (short-term), so this strategy makes sense.

So, when you do your research and see these kinds of offers, your expectations will be completely off. You’ll believe that if you’re not ranked No.1 on SERPs by the end of the first month, your team is not doing a good job.

The solution is very simple. You improve communication with the team you’ve hired. Start by doing research on their online reputation, and when you see that they’re trustworthy, ask them for their assessment. Ask them what kind of results they can promise. Don’t set the goalposts for this SEO campaign on your own and then assume that they’re underperforming because they didn’t meet your arbitrary expectations.

When you open any SEO guide, you’ll always encounter the tip that you have to make quality content in order to make it.

One of the most common SEO issues is the fact that you’re not really analyzing your content. Just because you like the way it’s written, it doesn’t mean that it holds any SEO value. Even if it did, chances are that you’re not exactly a literary critic, which means that even your assessment of the quality of writing might be dubious.

You see, SEO writing is not an artform. It has creative elements, and having a writer with the ability to express themselves proficiently is always a plus, but it’s not what will guarantee your climb on an SEO chart.

SEO writing is as technical as it is creative, and you need someone who can do both or, at the very least, be self-conscious enough to run the text they’ve written through optimization tools.

Everything in the SEO text is deliberate. The word count, the paragraph sizes, keyword density, the number of images used in the text, metadata, everything. Sure, it looks organic and spontaneous, but this only means that the writer has done their job right.

It is for this reason that people who really want to know how well their text is written or how well their content is performing prefer to use tools. Instead of trying to guess, they rely on tools to point them in the direction of technical issues in writing. This way, they can be improved, and the results can be reflected.

This starts with keyword research. When you start typing in your research, you’ll get all sorts of metrics, from average monthly traffic and complexity to competitiveness. This last part will give you an average idea of how many others are trying to compete for these same keywords.

The key to solving this problem lies in better keyword research. You need to learn how to find better keywords to rank for. Making long-tail keywords, being creative with your wording, and really understanding how search engines are used will make a world of difference.

The most important thing you need to learn is that just because you might not end up on top, this doesn’t mean that it’s not worth competing. 

Let’s say you’re running a convenience store and plan to invest a bit in marketing. Is there a point in even starting an SEO campaign when you’ll never be able to outcompete Target?

This is a ridiculous expectation, and no one would ever really expect it. The problem is that people don’t know enough about SEO, and when they read a phrase like result-based SEO, they assume that it’s some sort of a miraculous solution. They assume if you don’t rank first on every relevant KW, you did nothing. 

This is a bit of a subtle SEO issue, and it may leave people confused. You see, the algorithm changes, and it’s getting updated at every opportunity. This is why you can encounter a new content issue even though there wasn’t one present previously. 

People who are not familiar with SEO have yet to learn how quickly the landscape evolves. It’s honestly not their fault either; there are no other fields that evolve as quickly. Even in other forms of digital marketing (like email marketing or social media advertising), it’s not like there’s this one big event every year where a bunch of rules just gets changed (sometimes in a completely unexpected direction).

It’s in human nature to assume, so explaining to a specialist that the rules that were active just a month ago are no longer in place is very hard. They know that it’s not this way in their own profession, which is why it’s so hard for them to find an equivalent to this SEO problem or get immersed in this particular scenario. 

Algorithms change even when there are no massive technical shifts; however, when there’s something major taking place (like the AI revolution), these changes can be ground-breaking. 

You could spend a fortune on good human writers only for the next update to equalize AI and human-generated content. Then, you fill your site with AI content only for the algorithm to walk back on its decision.

The fact that this scenario sounds so realistic is a huge SEO problem and something that every SEO specialist is aware of.

So, you need a team that can keep up with algorithm changes and adjust as quickly as possible.

Finally, it’s possible that you’re not getting the results you want because you’ve decided to do your own SEO. As you’re about to find out in this scenario, there's a reason why this is best left to professionals. 

First of all, just taking the time to learn all the SEO techniques can be exhausting and incredibly time-consuming. There are a lot of technical challenges that you can learn how to understand (sort of) but not really do anything about it.

Moreover, we’ve already mentioned the SEO issue of other people spending more money on their SEO. Now, they’re already paying for top-tier agencies to create an incredibly high number of quality links while you’re trying to… tweak a few SEO issues on your own. Good luck with that!

Don’t get us wrong - even a DIY SEO campaign is better than no SEO whatsoever. However, the results will never be the same. 

The bottom line is that you should reread the title of the article. It’s not about your SEO campaign not giving you the results you deserve or even good results - it’s about you not getting the results that you “want.”

As always, it’s your desire that’s creating an issue. If you don’t know what’s realistic or have a hard time assessing the actual work that you’re putting into your campaign, you’ll always feel cheated. This is why, before you start throwing accusations, it might be a good idea to research the subject matter and get your desires in check.