General SEO Risks: To Take or Not to Take

Business success stories frequently focus on risk taking—the actual careful preparation and the fast beating I-don’t-know-if-this-will-work heart part of the story, however, is frequently kept under wraps. It’s significant to take risks in business, but risks don’t always pay off. Being nervous is natural, but being unprepared doesn't usually get you where you want to go. Before you take a risk in business, you should believe whether or not that risk is one you should really be willing to take. Some SEO decisions might come to you in the spur of the moment, but having a little bit of background information on some choices you might have in the future will help. This doesn’t mean you won’t be taking a risk, it just means you’ll be taking a calculated risk (only the best kind).

SEO Risks worth Taking

Taking a risk basically means going for something that has the potential to go wrong. Now of course everything has the probable to go wrong if not planned properly, but with risks it’s tougher to plan. It’s more of a leap that you just imagine will go well.

For those of you who have followed my writing, you know I’m a traveling writer. I like to think of it this way: When I jumped off the bridge in New Zealand with a bungee attached to my waist—it was a planned choice. When I went cliff diving in Thailand and looked down and thought, “It doesn’t look that far,” that was a risk (and one I recommend). The same thought goes for SEO.

There are many similar aspects of SEO that leave one to wonder what’s going to happen, and a lot of the time that’s completely OK. A few of these risks take in:

Hiring a writer with no SEO experience. This is something that regularly trips people up, but as a writer, I don’t consider that it should. Writing for SEO purposes or writing about SEO is different than what someone might have learn in journalism classes, and it might be more hard than personal blogging, but that doesn’t mean a writer can’t do it. Take a chance on a good writer and give him/her good training. It might be well worth it in the end.

Changing your website design. People are often afraid to change their website design since it can have some bad SEO affects (scare away readers, confuse search engine bots if something goes wrong with the source code, losing link juice, etc.). However, website design is something you can alter back and it is something that can succeed if done right. If it’s something you’ve been thinking about for a while but are scared to try, it’s generally a risk you should be willing to take.

Hire a social media expert. This can definitely be risky because it’s such a new situation. Many people think they can be a social media “expert” because they have social media accounts. This is not the case, and if you get someone that doesn’t recognize how social sharing works for business, you could lose out on time and money. However, this spot is quickly growing, which means more skilled candidates are also to come. Interview carefully and understand that social media is somewhat that someone can make a full time job. Soon, this will be general practice.

When it really comes down to it, it’s all about determining the risk versus the reward. If you take a risk and the failure isn’t going to hurt you as much as the reward will help you, or the failure is something you can reverse or recover from quickly, you’re in the clear. For example, if you hire a writer who knows nothing about SEO, you might fail and have a few pieces of poor content out there linked with your company that you’ll have to go through and delete. If you succeed, you might have a great writer on your hands before anyone else realized the prospective.

SEO Risks to Avoid

In some cases, it’s not worth it. You might feel impulsive and get that whole “no risk, no reward” mentality pumping through your veins, but that excitement will certainly end when you see something go wrong. Below are a few risks you might be tempted to take that will undeniably get you down:

Outsourcing SEO Copywriting. There are quite a few things that can go incorrect with outsourcing SEO copywriting—improper English, plagiarism, double outsourcing, etc. Although you might get lucky and with research you might be able to make it work, I generally suggest trying to hire in-house so that you have more control. Sometimes when it comes to outsourcing something you have to sign into a contract, which can get messy if things go wrong.

Cloaking, negative SEO, and keyword stuffing. This should go without saying, but some companies are still trying to take these types of risks. The industry leaders call these “black hat” SEO tactics because Google hates when companies try and do this. It might appear like a good idea at first, but rest assured that Google will find you, penalize you, and make it hard for you to recover. You can learn more about black hat tactics here.

Development issues. It can be tempting for a company to try and work with the source code of a website. You might want to set certain tags up so that your content is indexed on other websites, so that link juice remains when you switch domains, etc. You read these things online and they seem like a good idea; however if you’re not a developer it’s harder than it looks. Messing with the coding of your website can get costly, so it’s really not a risk worth taking. Spend the extra cash and find somebody who is very familiar with that type of work.

What are your thoughts on dissimilar SEO risks? Are there any other quick decisions you’ve had to make in the past? If so, what were they and do you think you reacted properly?