It’s OK to Make SEO Mistakes
You’re not going to have a 100% success rate with every SEO strategy you make. You can’t succeed unless you fail. Making mistakes is okay… as long as you obey a few critical caveats.
1. Acknowledge Mistakes When They Happen
Did you invest hundreds of dollars into a pay-per-click campaign that yielded nothing but frustration and a hole in your pocket? Fine. Lesson learned – as long as you learn the lesson! Note your failures. Talk to people in the SEO industry about what went wrong and why. And be on the lookout for similar circumstances in the future to avoid. Be a scientist and do experiments with a real hypothesis and generate data to test and prove/disprove that hypothesis.
2. Making Mistakes is a Sign of Progress
Failure is essential for learning. Think about a baby learning how to walk. She doesn’t just hop onto her feet and start pacing around the room. She pulls herself up and then falls back down. She sits up and then slides off a toy and hits her head against the couch. And so on and so forth. Some sources say newborns fall literally thousands of times before they master the art of walking. So too will you fall hundreds of times as you master the ins and outs of SEO. This shouldn’t discourage you. But again, look to caveat number one – you MUST be honest with yourself when you make mistakes and take steps to be better in the future.
3. Take note!
The art of writing things down is critical to success – whether you are SEOing or doing any other kind of enterprise. Good data – numbers and observations – can help you overcome your inherent moment-to-moment biases and emotions that blind you to your inaccuracies. This will also save you from experimenting the same thing again in the future.
SEO to the Moon
Think of your SEO as an attempt to launch a rocket to one of Saturn’s moons. There is no way you can launch a rocket right from Earth with one blast and get right to the moon. The rocket needs periodic course corrections on its journey – exquisitely timed so that the rocket can compensate for dynamic factors it encounters along the way. You can’t calculate everything out in advance. You need to have the ability to course-correct to get to your destination. More traffic, more conversions, more sales, more leads, whatever it may be, you’ll get there.