Being an entrepreneur and starting your own business is hard enough; doing it in this technology-driven age makes it both easier and challenging. Do you remember when small business SEO services suddenly became a must for any business?

You hear SEO come up in almost any marketing talk. Then you start to notice just how it has changed the way companies and businesses develop their marketing strategies. This gradual shift towards a less traditional form of marketing is real.

If you’re starting your own company or you’re a business owner looking for more revenue, you’ve also probably started to gear up and expand your own digital marketing forces. You may have hired an SEO analyst to ensure that your website appears in the top results of the search pages. You may have started to care a lot about on-page tactics (like optimizing the landing page) so your newly-built site and blog can rise among the ranks. After all, with the right execution, both off-site and onsite SEO-strategies may possibly lead to more conversions. 

But here’s a word of caution for you.

As with any potential source of success, SEO is a double-edged sword.

It can definitely hurt you just as much as it can help you.

It can be your vital key to online success or a rabbit hole you can fall into and get lost in.

So, while this popular digital marketing method may help your company gain more organic online traffic, it is also responsible for causing you that constant tension headache you experience.

Yes, it’s real.

Entrepreneurs and business owners can suffer from SEO-induced stress.

You may wish you are one of the big fish and tycoons who can weather their way through stress-related occurrences related to their businesses. Instead, you may be forced to face the gloomy reality that not all businesses are fortunate enough to bounce back from it.

As a small business owner or a solopreneur, you stand to be burdened by the great impact that SEO holds. As complex as the process itself, there are many forms of SEO-related stress that your business (along with the other small fish) will face in the vast sea of both service-oriented enterprise and the consumer market.

If you are wondering where your SEO-induced stress is coming from and if you are looking for ways to reduce them, here are some tips that might prove useful to you:

Be prepared for changes in Google’s algorithm

At the core of each search engine platform, a set of rules called algorithms exist and influence the results that turn up whenever you hit the search button. You do not even need to be in the SEO playing field long enough to observe how most companies often question how much do they know about Google’s algorithm and that of other similar search engines. The reason for this constant vigilance is that these search engine algorithms are constantly updated. With the magnitude of their effect on website rankings, even the slightest changes can cause panic to almost any business owner with a working website.

So, how do you cope with the stress received from the constant wave of algorithm changes? You need to be on the lookout for news and any related buzz on upcoming changes and SEO trends. While you cannot fully predict the content and all possible outcomes of these updates, you can ease your worries knowing that you have done your due research and created a backup plan accordingly.

Define SEO goals and delegate tasks

In the world of online marketing, your business will constantly be struggling to achieve everything all at once, it can be easy to get lost in all the commotion. But, if you have a set of defined goals, you can get back on track if some SEO pitfalls throw your game out of balance.

Having a set of pre-determined SEO-related goals, however, does not mean achieving them all by yourself. Small business owners are usually prone to this, not realizing that they are committing one of the biggest of mistakes especially when it comes to marketing and SEO strategies. When you bite off more than you can chew, you risk overwhelming yourself. And yes, you will get burned out.

So, instead of being a one-man marketer, know which tasks you can delegate and start handing out responsibilities to people you can entrust them with. Go ahead and hire a link building company that will ensure effective link-building and other off-page SEO techniques. Post that job ad you have been putting for so long and get a social media manager to relieve yourself of everyday tasks of content generation and overall account management. Sign up for guest blogging services if you need a boost in that department.

The sooner you learn to accept that some goals are better off out-sourced for them to be attained, the higher your chances of freeing yourself from anticipated and experienced SEO stressors.

Find a common ground

Search engine optimization can be a stressful venture, especially if you do not take enough time to delve into the basics. You can spend all your time checking if your gray hat SEO techniques remain valid and acceptable in today’s search engine algorithms, or you can go back and address a common ground: the users.

Time and again, search engines have been very open about their aim for the user experience. And the more your website can provide this for each visitor, the higher you will gain a spot in the rankings.

Does this mean you that have to stop trying to constantly figure out what the next algorithm update will be about? Not really.

But you can also wisely devote a portion of your time in rooting for the ultimate user experience (UX). It’s never too late to improve content quality to attract more traffic to your pages. Work on your site’s loading time and mobile-friendliness to increase user satisfaction and to lower bounce rates.  In the end, you will realize that having the user in mind will make it more natural and therefore less stressful to come up with and execute effective SEO strategies.

SEO is a must when building a business nowadays, but it doesn’t have to come with a lot of stress. Pick your battles as they say – and the same saying can be applied to your business’ SEO strategies. Despite its importance, SEO is not the be-all and end-all of your business. Use it as a tool and don’t let it become a source of business stress.