Navigating the Frustrations of SEO: A Day in the Life of a Digital Marketer
SEO can often feel like an ongoing dialogue of plea and response—a persistent attempt to communicate your website’s value to search engines. For digital marketers and website owners, the process of optimizing for visibility often resembles a delicate dance, filled with hopeful requests and cautious corrections.
Consider a typical day working with tools like Google Search Console. The experience can sometimes be a series of polite, yet desperate, messages:
- “Please index this page.”
- “No, wait—avoid indexing this subpage for now.”
- “Could you kindly re-crawl this sitemap?”
- “Actually, the page’s Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) has improved—please re-index the landing page.”
- “Apologies for not setting the canonical URL earlier; I hope I haven’t caused any issues.”
This constant back-and-forth highlights the nuanced relationship between website owners and search engines. While SEO best practices have evolved to be more systematic and data-driven, there remains an element of hope—sometimes bordering on pleading—that your efforts will be recognized and rewarded with better visibility.
Understanding Search Engine Behavior
Search engines like Google continuously crawl, index, and assess websites to serve the most relevant results to users. However, their algorithms and crawling priorities are complex, sometimes making it challenging to get timely or expected responses. Marketers often rely on tools like Google Search Console to communicate with these engines—prompting indexing, submitting sitemaps, and requesting re-crawls.
The Frustration of Imperfect Communication
Given the automated nature of search engine crawling, it’s easy to feel like you’re talking to a capricious entity. When a page isn’t indexed promptly or a change isn’t reflected immediately, it can seem as though you’ve been turned down or ignored. Yet, these responses often stem from the search engine’s internal priorities, crawl budget, and indexing criteria rather than personal disregard.
Bridging the Gap
While the process can be frustrating, understanding how search engines work can help set realistic expectations. Regularly updating and optimizing your site, submitting clean sitemaps, and monitoring performance are essential steps. Patience and persistence are key; with time, your site’s signals are more likely to be recognized, leading to improved search visibility.
Conclusion
SEO is an ongoing relationship with search engines—one of advocacy, patience, and strategic effort. Rather than feeling like you’re begging for love, view it as building a professional rapport