While an organic SEO campaign isn’t exactly rocket science, there are a lot of moving parts. As a general rule, the greater the number of moving parts, the greater the odds are that something will go wrong. Just keeping on the good side of Google is a challenging task in itself. The Google search ranking algorithm consists of an estimated 232 different factors, which are adjusted and updated an average of 500 to 600 times per year.

Whether you’re a newcomer to digital marketing or a seasoned veteran, you can help assure that your organic SEO campaigns have the best chance for realizing your goals and meeting your objectives by steering clear of the following obstacles to success.

Failure to Set Realistic Goals
Lack of realistic goals for your SEO campaign is arguably the number one cause of failure. Wasting your resources pursuing the wrong goals, or even going after too many of the right goals simultaneously means that you simply can’t bring all of your resources to bear at the critical point and time, and you may well end up accomplishing nothing.

• If you offer a number of different products and services, don’t water down your efforts by trying to rank for everything at once.
• Select one product, optimize for it, get it ranked, and move on to the next product.

Setting Unrealistic Timeframes and Budgets
Not all niches and target keywords are created equal – some are more competitive than others and will simply require more time and resources to rank. Another timeframe constraint is imposed by Google itself; if your backlinks don’t appear to be occurring naturally, your website is at risk of a ranking penalty. Just as you can’t make a cake bake any faster and still expect a tasty outcome, you can’t rush a white hat organic SEO campaign and expect good results. If you feel that you can’t afford the time and resources necessary for SEO to work, you might be better off focusing on another method of building traffic such as pay-per-click.

Targeting the Wrong Keywords
Going after the wrong keywords is a common mistake and one of the leading causes of SEO campaign failure. Your target keyword list needs to be based on accurate data that reflects the actual search terms that your target audience is using; update your keywords on a regular basis – especially if traffic is beginning to drop off for keywords that you are still ranking for. Double-check your list with the keywords that your successful competitors are targeting to make sure that you haven’t overlooked some real gems.

Creating Website Content that Nobody Cares About
Content that fails to live up to your audience’s expectations is one of the primary causes of poor visitor engagement and low conversion rates. Your content should be written for humans, not search engines, and should engage the reader with relevant information and answer the questions most commonly associated with your products or services.

Failure to Use Your Data to Improve Your SEO Campaign
Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools provide all the data you need to analyze the performance of your SEO campaign. Don’t shortchange yourself by looking at rankings alone. By looking at all of the data points as a whole, you’ll be able to better see how one metric affects another and how changing one element can improve your overall results.