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Google and other search engines evolve just like humans do. They constantly adapt to the changing world around them, they upgrade to accommodate newer features and change their algorithm to serve mankind in the best possible way. All this also brings up SEO challenges that most marketers are unable to anticipate. 

Most of these challenges are in the form of maintaining search engine result page (SERP) rankings, generating leads, and forming long-term meaningful relationships with target audiences. However, as the algorithms change, the level of these challenges also climb up the ladder. 

While SEO is the best tactic marketers can use to increase their SERP rankings and dominate the world of content marketing, the tools of SEO come with their own limitations and challenges. So, in this guide we help you manoeuvre through the SEO challenges that your business can face in the years to come as technology advances, competition rises and search rankings update their signals of what they consider as “great content.” 

But before we dive into that, let us first understand the relationship between SEO and content marketing. 

What Is The Relationship Between SEO & Content Marketing? 

Every search query you feed into a search engine responds to you with a pool of content.

For example, make a Google search with this query “Best website design agency in Bangalore.” 

You will see a list of Google My Business listings as a part of Google’s local pack, under which there will be a bunch of ads and websites that precedes the blogs that are written about the best web agencies in Bangalore. 

Everything that went into getting these website links on the first page of Google is a combination of SEO and effective content marketing. 

The connections between content marketing and SEO are clear. If you want your content to efficiently reach your target audience, you must optimise it so that the appropriate person sees it at the right time and place. Without SEO, your content might not appear prominently in search results, and your SEO strategy would fall flat if there was no content.

Content and SEO correspond at the following areas:

• Keywords
• Search volume of queries 
• Trends 

You or your content writing agency can use these three key things to create your content and generate topics to write content on. 

Now that you have understood where the backbone of SEO lays, you can easily understand the SEO challenges that we are about to discuss. If you have not anticipated these challenges, you can use these as the starting point to prepare to overcome the challenges that come with it. 

Not Aligning Content With The Search Intent 

In the world of SEO, one item has managed to endure: key phrases. Google now examines your website at a high level to get a full sense of its authority, tone, and relevance rather than just looking for keywords.

Simply put, you’re out of luck if you think that using keyword phrases alone would improve your ranking on search engines.

Instead, the goal of using key phrases is to understand user intent, or the larger problem that your users are trying to address. With this knowledge, you may adjust your content strategy and larger, overall advertising and marketing plan. Check out this insightful article for tips on incorporating consumer intent into your keyword strategy.

Additionally, monitoring the search volume for your selected keyword phrases might help you figure out the cause of an unexpected increase or drop in website traffic. For instance, you can write additional blogs about a given topic if a target search phrase is seeing an increase in search volume.

What Can You Do To Avoid This? 

Make a list of potential keywords that may serve as a guide for the topics of your blog posts and publications, but this is just one element of the game. The second step is to understand the user’s search intent.

SemRush categorises search intent into four groups: informative, navigational, commercial, and transactional. The user’s intent when they type a long-tail keyword that can be categorised into one of the four intents depends on where they are in their marketing funnel.

To fully comprehend search intent and search volume, you might need to first carry out a competitive keyword study before incorporating it into your content. You must consider the customer’s path while performing a competitive keyword study. At every stage of their journey, potential clients will be given a variety of options. Your duty as a marketer is to pick and choose your battles. Choose the keywords that are in great demand and have less competition so you can rank.

Not Ranking Higher On SERPs 

While we are aware that SEO takes time to provide results, in order to obtain them, we must follow SEO guidelines and Google seems to update them now more frequently that it ever did before. This has given rise to a number of SEO challenges that businesses face and most of them manifest into not ranking high on the SERPs. Therefore, in order to get a decent position on Google’s rankings, every little thing you do in terms of SEO matters.

Even if some websites have absolutely fantastic material, they neglect to accomplish things that appear frivolous yet are crucial, such as: header tags, alternative text, secondary keywords, author’s signature, internal backlinks, and recommended practises for keywords;

based on a subject cluster approach, create the content.

When these elements—along with many others—are absent, Google doesn’t consider the material to be high quality, and your ranking is likely to suffer, particularly following an update that takes those elements into account. For example, Google recently shared its insights into what it considers as good metadata and snippets. 

What Can Be Done To Avoid This? 

There are a number of things that you can consider if you want to dodge the SEO challenges that lead to lower SERP rankings. 

Creating Unique Metadata with Relevant Information 

When possible, accurately describe each page in your descriptions. Use page-level descriptions elsewhere and site-level descriptions on the homepage and other website pages. Try prioritising your content if you don’t have time to create descriptions for each page; at the very least, write descriptions for essential URLs like your home page and the sites that receive the greatest traffic.

The meta description doesn’t have to just be sentences; it’s also a great place to provide information about the page. For instance, news or blog posts may contain author, publication date, and byline information.

Generate High-Quality Backlinks And Beware Of Toxic Backlinks 

Toxic backlinks might hinder your SEO activities and lower the ranking of your website with search engines. Backlinks may be deemed poisonous if they lack editorial relevance, don’t appear natural, or originate from low-quality referring domains.

Connections of this nature are typically formed because of inverse link techniques, black-hat SEO techniques, link farms (strategies that go against Google Webmaster guidelines) or even irrelevant links if you have bought or sold backlinks. 

Toxic backlinks can occasionally be hard to spot. Ask your digital marketing company to monitor the backlinks that your website receives and to take down any that might harm your domain authority (DA).

You can generate high-quality backlinks by encouraging guest posting on relevant topics and collaborating with bloggers that share the same target audience as your business. 

Another ethical link-building tactic is to get indirect backlinks from competitors. Search for websites that your competitors link to to do this. You can request that people mention your business on these websites.

Without a doubt, the websites that your competitors connect to are reliable and respectable. You may benefit from their SEO worth by requesting that these websites link to yours. You’ll also get a covert backlink from a competitor.

You could wish to employ the moral link-building tactic of reviving dead links. Broken links are undesirable, thus this offers company owners an opportunity to make money. Due to domain changes or page migrations, dead links may surface. All you have to do to restore the lost SEO value of broken links is to take advantage of them and search for those that you can replace.

Creating Higher Quality Content 

One of the most prominent SEO challenges that content marketers face is maintaining the quality of their content. With Google’s helpful content guideline that clearly states the consequences of publishing low quality, inauthentic and low value content, content marketers have been forced to go out of their way to publish content that adds value to the lives of the readers. 

This is a good thing in all perspectives. However, it also means that marketers can no longer publish content for the sake of publishing it in order to remain visible on SERPs. 

The people-first approach introduced by Google requires content marketers to write content first for the readers and then for the algorithm. This means that you need to strike a balance between optimization and value-addition. You can approach good seo content writers to do that job for you.

Some of the basic mistakes such as inappropriate linking, keyword stuffing and other black-hat SEO practices can plummet your page rankings. So always be considered using of white-hat seo techniques. 

What Can Be Done To Avoid This? 

For starters, when using keywords in your writing, avoid seeming robotic. Create your content in its whole and add the keywords later rather than conducting keyword research in advance and attempting to integrate a long list as you write. 

Locate opportunities with your SEO agency to use and incorporate long-tail keywords. By doing this, you can make sure that your content naturally incorporates popular search keywords and phrases. 

Next, you can invest in running your own research and reports. While this requires specialised skills, you can work with marketer searchers and pay common users to attempt surveys that can help you spot your own trends. This can help you publish original findings that others can source in their content, bringing you higher quality backlinks, which then signal Google that your content is a value addition to its search results. 

Keeping Up With Mobile-First Indexing 

Google now uses a mobile-first indexing strategy. This implies that when indexing and ranking pages, Google takes into account the mobile version of your website. The term “mobile-first indexing” refers to Google’s preference for indexing and ranking material that is available on mobile devices. 

In the past, the index mostly used a page’s desktop version of material when determining how relevant it was to a user’s query. Google will now mostly crawl and index pages with the smartphone agent because. According to the search engine giant, the majority of consumers access Google Search through a mobile device. 

What Can Be Done? 

On both the desktop and mobile site, use the identical meta robots tags. When your site is set up for mobile-first indexing, Google may be unable to crawl and index your page if you use a different meta robots tag on the mobile site (particularly the no-index or no-follow tags).

When a user interacts, don’t lazy-load the main content. Content that needs user input to load (such as swiping, clicking, or typing) won’t be loaded by Google. Make sure Google can access stuff that has been lazily loaded.

Publish your resources for Google to crawl. On the mobile site as opposed to the desktop version, several resources have distinct URLs. Verify that you are not using the disallow directive to block the URL if you want Google to crawl your URLs.

SEO is a long game. It takes time to be built and maybe even longer to produce results. However, the investment you make in time and money all pay off when you look at the tangible benefits it provides you in the form of higher search visibility, more following on social media, leads and more. 

In order to stay ahead of the SEO game, you need to be aware of the SEO challenges that rear its head every now and then. This happens because search engines consistently update and upgrade to match the needs of its users. 

All the best!