Seeing common challenges in the SEO field, I decided to write about mistakes SEO specialists often make that can hurt their careers. While working in both an agency and in-house, I noticed these errors can stop SEOs from reaching their goals, like getting resources, pitching ideas to management, and convincing others of SEO’s importance.
In this article, I highlight the top 10 mistakes SEO specialists make and give tips to avoid them.
1. Reporting On KPIs Not Related To Business Metrics
When I first started to work in an agency, I inherited two things from the previous consultant: a very complicated client and even more complicated dashboard with daily evolution of average position for 50 different keywords. Every follow-up meeting for me was a torture: every week at least one of those would decrease and I had to prepare an explanation and a plan how to recover it.
That situation taught me to choose metrics to report on more carefully. If you give the stakeholders all the metrics you track, one of two things will probably happen:
- Stakeholders will never start to care about SEO, since some KPIs don’t have a direct correlation to leads or other important business metrics
- Stakeholders put too much pressure on irrelevant metrics, and make the SEO professionals’ life a living nightmare, having to report weekly on every KW and finding explanation why any single one of them is losing visibility.
So as much as we may care about thousands of keywords internally, it’s better to use business related metrics to report on the SEO success in order not to overwhelm stakeholders and show the real value of your actions.
Action tips:
- Think about what KPIs are important to your company or client. That could be visits / leads / logged users or something else. Use those metrics for reporting on the SEO project.
- Educate stakeholders on what metrics really matter, and manage their anxiety. Don’t let them panic if some keyword goes from position 6 to 7.
- Avoid reporting on specific keywords. Use business metrics instead. Focus on the value SEO is bringing to the company.
2. Not Aligning SEO Strategy With The Company Priorities
I think using SEO checklists is something most SEO professionals go through when they start their careers. Even if they ask about the company or client strategy, they often jump into generic SEO audits right after the kick-off. This usually leads to a backlog filled with tasks like “solving 404 errors,” “ALT text optimization,” and “title and meta-description optimization” across the entire website.
These check-list can barely be described as a “strategy”.
In my experience, the best SEO strategies come from analyzing the business needs of the company. For example, if a company is struggling with profits, it’s crucial to identify the most profitable products and categories on the website and find ways to boost traffic to those sections. This could involve optimizing product descriptions, FAQs, guides, or creating new landing pages to match users’ search intent.
On the other hand, it does not include trying to optimize every single category of the website!
Without a strategic approach aligned with the company priorities, the SEO initiatives will not be able to compete with other actions in the backlog. This leads to SEO being perceived as something “nice to have” instead of “must have”.
Action tips:
- Find out what your company’s or client’s short-term and long-term objectives are. Talk to different departments and ask what are their quarter goals, KPIs and OKRs are. Find a way to help them to achieve them.
- Review your SEO backlog and deprioritise generic tasks that are not aligned with the company objectives.
- Think of the impact the rest of the tasks will have on the company goals and pitch them to the stakeholders. This will help yo to avoid the siloed perception of SEO and integrate it into the company´s business strategy.
3. Not Coming To Meetings
In the past 6 years of my career, I have worked both in agency and in-house. The amount of meetings in both cases was overwhelming.
In the agency, I had mostly weekly and bi-weekly meetings with clients, but also catch-ups with fellow specialists. In-house, I currently have non-stop meetings with marketing teams, product teams and other departments to align priorities and coordinate efforts.
I firmly believe that the real value of meetings isn’t just in their outcomes. It’s about building connections and relationships that will help you reach your goals in the long run.
Some benefits of meetings are:
- It is the place where decisions are made. Since SEO is highly dependent on product and other departments, coming to meetings (even though you think they are a waste of time) is as important as doing any other SEO task.
- Meetings help build connections and trust with stakeholders and colleagues you’ll definitely need at some point.
- Meetings give you access to crucial information about business strategy, company priorities, pain points, and insights from different stakeholders.
To implement a successful SEO strategy and drive change, you need many stakeholders on board: decision-makers, product managers, frontend and backend developers, content strategists etc.
In my experience, the best thing you can do for your SEO career is to attend the meetings you’re invited to, see how you can help others, and build relationships with them.
Action tips:
- Don’t skip meetings.
- Ask to be included in meetings where you can meet senior stakeholders. If you need their support for your strategy, try to secure time for a pitch in the agenda.
- Use meetings to show the value of SEO and build connections. Come up with ideas to help your colleagues achieve their goals and solve pain points.
4. Using Complicated SEO Terms
Most people don’t understand what is SEO, how it works and what benefits it can bring. Using technical terms, like “SERPs”, “EEAT”, “CWV” without making sure that your target audience understands those concepts is going to confuse people even more.
Confused people will not advocate for your strategy or act on it. They will rather prioritize something they can understand.
Whenever you communicate with internal or external stakeholders, use the simplest concepts and explanations you can. Explain how Google works, what “indexing” and “crawling” are, the business impacts of poor SEO, and the potential benefits in terms of leads and revenue. Make sure your listeners understand these concepts.
Action tips:
- Organize beginners SEO workshops for different types of stakeholders: sales department, marketing, product etc.
- When you are making a pitch, stop and ask your stakeholders if everything is clear.
- Even if you explained something 100 times before, take a few seconds and repeat it again. Most people need to hear it several times before they remember.
5. Not Branding Yourself
It’s a common misconception that full-time SEO managers don’t need to build a personal brand. However, while freelancers who fail to brand themselves don’t get clients, in-house specialists get overlooked for high-profile assignments and struggle to secure resources for their projects.
The external branding tools are well-known: speaking at conferences, writing blog articles, doing webinars, etc.
Internal branding tools include training stakeholders, participating in hackathons, and sharing SEO project results through emails and meetings.
Action tips:
- Identify three main strengths you bring to the workplace. Consider what sets you apart from your colleagues or other specialists.
- Subtly remind others of your achievements. Mention them in weekly/monthly updates and share “best practices” from your experience.
- Participate in company events and hackathons.
- Don’t shy away from difficult assignments. Volunteer for presentations to senior stakeholders, and lead high-profile initiatives and projects.
- Be helpful, friendly, and generous.
6. Setting Unrealistic Expectations
When I first started working at the agency, I often overpromised on things I had no control over. I’d claim we could recover from a major migration drop in three weeks, thinking that working day and night might make it happen.
I eventually realized that slow or no results in SEO don’t mean I’m a bad specialist. However, promising something and then not delivering does.
The best thing you can do for stakeholders and your career is to know what you can and can’t control. You can promise to implement a project in Q3 if your team has the capacity, but you can’t guarantee it will bring in 200k monthly visits two weeks after launch.
Action tips:
- Base your forecasts on real data insights: A/B tests, market and competitive research, and similar projects implemented in your company. Lean towards conservative predictions rather than optimistic ones. If needed, provide different scenarios: negative, neutral, and positive.
- Always mention risk factors like competitor actions, algorithm updates, and technical errors.
- After the action is launched, do regular updates to report how the actual results compare to your prediction.
- If you feel uncomfortable giving a negative forecast, imagine how uncomfortable it will be not to achieve the positive results you promised. Use negative scenarios to your advantage to ask for more resources and highlight the importance of SEO actions.
7. Focusing On Quick Wins Instead Of Strategic Initiatives
Quick wins are always easier to pitch because they bring fast results with minimal effort. This makes it tempting to prioritize small actions that the product team is more likely to pick, leading to small improvements instead of pushing for big developments.
However, to truly change the SEO trend, quick wins aren’t enough. You need to focus on strategic projects that will improve your organic positions compared to competitors and uncover new growth opportunities for the business.
At Fotocasa (a Spanish real estate marketplace), one such initiative was launching street URLs. After analyzing 23 competitors, I found that most were getting local traffic from people searching for housing on specific streets. Fotocasa didn’t offer this. The project took several months of coordinated work across teams, but the result was worth it. This initiative had a much higher impact than smaller tasks in the backlog, leading to a significant increase in organic traffic.
This would never have been possible if we had stuck to optimizing titles, H1s, and schema mark-ups during that time.
Action tips:
- Identify the most impactful strategic projects on your backlog and pitch them to stakeholders. Highlight their impact on business objectives, the resources needed, and market research. If you have data on how much traffic these projects bring to competitors or the potential advantage they offer, use it to strengthen your case.
- Even if you focus on smaller actions, discard those with no business value. If your website has millions of URLs, don’t waste time fixing a few dozen 404 pages.
8. Not Looking for Areas of Collaboration with Other Departments (Siloing SEO)
For some strange reason, many stakeholders see SEO as a separate project. I’ve often heard things like, “We’ll solve SEO now and work on the blog content later.”
For an SEO specialist, the hardest situation is being isolated from other departments and having to create separate SEO actions.
Even if SEO isn’t the company’s top priority, there are always ways to support other departments with their strategies. SEO specialists can help the content department with blog articles, the marketing department with new landing pages, and the business team with optimizing new product URLs.
Action tips:
- Talk to other departments frequently to find areas of collaboration and ways to help them achieve their objectives.
- Work on changing the perception of SEO from a separate project to an integral part of the business strategy. Use UX specialists as a reference—they are often invited to provide input for new projects or changes. Aim to do the same whenever possible.
9. Accepting the Current SEO Set-Up
As much as I love being part of marketing departments, I strongly believe SEO needs to be integrated into Product and Tech teams. Unfortunately, it’s still rare, and SEO is often seen as just part of marketing.
This limits SEO strategies. Without direct access to product resources, SEO has to compete for the limited resources Marketing gets, pushing SEO initiatives to the backlog with CRM, PPC, and other marketing tasks.
I believe this set-up should change. SEO specialists should advocate for direct access to product teams. This could mean having a separate SEO product team or making SEO the responsibility of an existing team.
Action tips:
- Think about the set-up that would allow you to work effectively, and pitch this idea to the stakeholders.
- Be prepared for a long battle. It might take months or even years to change the current set-up.
10. Panicking and Letting Others Panic
One thing I’ve learned in my six years working in SEO is that incidents happen, and panicking only makes things worse.
If your website suffers a huge algorithm hit or loses visibility due to human error, take 20-30 minutes to calm down and assess the situation before communicating with stakeholders.
Develop an action plan: what needs to be done, how urgent it is, and who can solve the problem (frontend/backend developers, external agency, etc.).
Once you’re calm, then you can communicate the situation to the stakeholders.
Action tips:
- Don’t spread panic. When communicating incidents to stakeholders, include the steps you plan to take to resolve the situation.
- Ensure you have all the necessary information before jumping to conclusions.
- Communicate the reasons for the incident and its business impacts transparently. Provide stakeholders with a realistic recovery timeline without overpromising.
Note: this article contains only my personal research and opinion
