SEOIt happens to the best of us: you make your best efforts at doing the SEO work on your website and you feel as if you’re ready to tear your hair out at the roots because you simply can’t seem to get the job done. “What am I doing wrong?” you ask, over and over again. Well, there are a number of possible answers. Here’s what you need to know:

How Much Effort Have You Really Put In?

Let’s start with the most obvious question: just how much effort did you really put in? Have you been diligently building links, running guest blog posts on other blogs and doing everything you can to build yourself up? Have you consulted a professional to make sure that your on page SEO is everything that it could be?
Often, I find that those who say that SEO isn’t working for them will have put in a solid weekend or day of work and think that they’re done. The reality is that SEO doesn’t work that way. You need to put in a steady commitment to make this thing work smoothly.

How Long Have You Been At it?

The next question is directly related to the first question – just how long have you been doing this? Another common situation is that people who complain about not being successful at SEO have simply not been doing it for very long.
A week or two for example is not enough time to really see results. Most SEO campaigns will take a few months to start showing real results and those will only show results if you are working diligently every single day on it.

Is Your Content Worth Anything?

Yet another common problem that I see from people who think that SEO is easy is that they put crap content onto their websites and think that that’s all they need to do. I’m sorry to tell you that paying someone who barely speaks English $1 for a 500 word article is not going to cut it anymore. If you want to make money online, you need to invest in a quality copywriter.
Even if they get the SEO part of it right, including plenty of keywords, the reality is that junk content will get people to either not look or click away quickly.

How Competitive Is Your Niche?

If you are trying to make money in the “make money online” or “weight loss” niches, then you are in good company. However, you’re also in crowded company. The sad reality is that millions of people are trying to make money in these same niches and your SEO efforts will need to be not just good but positively stellar to make anything at these businesses. It’s not that you can’t make money doing it – it’s just that the amount of work to get ahead of the competition is going to be much harder.

The Flip Side

The flip side of the niche question is whether or not you have a niche which is so unusual that there simply isn’t a market for it. For example, if you run a website about creating a collection of interesting bits of belly lint, you may find it fascinating, but I doubt you’ll find too many fellow aficionados of the same hobby. This means that you simply will not make money, no matter how good your SEO efforts are (and frankly, if your hobby is collecting belly lint, then you probably have bigger problems than coming up with a good SEO campaign anyway).

When All Else Fails

Now, when all else fails and the SEO efforts simply aren’t working for you, there is one final answer: tweak or try something else. If it’s not working, then there is probably a reason which isn’t covered here or which you aren’t seeing. Often however, tweaking your stuff or even trying a completely different online business will do the job.