Uncontrollable Factors Affecting SEO Success

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In order to succeed online today, it’s necessary for your website to be found in the search engines.  People turn to the search engines to find information about just about everything.  That’s why smart businesses are investing in SEO services in order to better position their site to generate more traffic and improve visitor growth over time.  Implementing a white hat SEO and link building strategy will help to better position a website in the search engines and online in general, but unfortunately all of the power isn’t in our hands.  There are certain outside factors that contribute towards SEO success that we can’t do anything about.  In some cases, these factors may weigh in our favor.  In others, they don’t, which can be frustrating.  When determining SEO campaign success, keep these outside factors in mind:

1.  Domain Age

The search engines take the age of your website into consideration when determining rank.  The search engines want to provide users with the best possible results, so they favor sites that are trusted.  Inbound links are one indicator of trust, but so is domain age.  To the search engines, a new site needs to earn trust and that takes time.  A website that has been around for a few years will succeed in getting a new page to rank for specific keywords faster than a brand new website.  Any website, regardless of age, should utilize SEO but an older website will see a quicker return.

2.  Competitors

Any smart business has a website and is marketing it online, which means that your competitors are hungry for the same search engine and online real estate that you want.  If your competitors are smart, they’ve been working at SEO for years.  Just getting started now means that you are late to the game and have a lot to catch up on.  Analyze their strategy to find a weakness that you may be able to capitalize on.  However, chances are good that it will be very difficult to ever outperform them if they’ve been executing a thorough white hat SEO strategy on a regular basis for awhile now.

3.  Search Engine Complexity

Google is becoming more transparent and is providing more information to webmasters regarding the algorithms, but we will never know everything.  The algorithms are always changing and personalization has become an important ranking factor.  It’s impossible to determine what the rank will be from one user to the next since results aren’t always the same.  We are at the mercy of the search engines and all we can do is play by the rules.

Conclusion

Just because certain ranking elements are out of our control doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t bother.  Business websites across all industries, new or old, need SEO to survive online.  Results won’t be immediate and depend on many factors, but they will come eventually as long as you keep at it and understand that it takes time.

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