Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most fluid marketing fields—it’s constantly changing, beholden to myriad algorithm updates. And this was before answer engines—powered by generative AI—disrupted things.
While staying flexible is crucial for SEO success, the channel also requires a substantial commitment of time and money. In this guide, you’ll learn the five biggest SEO challenges facing ecommerce businesses today and strategies to overcome them. You’ll discover how to navigate algorithm volatility, prove SEO’s value to skeptical stakeholders, optimize for AI-powered search results, and find ranking opportunities in crowded markets.
What are the biggest challenges in SEO?
- Ever-changing Google algorithms
- Getting buy-in on your long-term investment
- AI and zero-click search
- Saturated market and intense competition
- Topics versus keywords
The SEO landscape evolves every year, but these five core challenges are here to stay:
1. Ever-changing Google algorithms
Arguably, the biggest challenge companies face with SEO is the ever-changing nature of Google’s algorithms. Core updates roll out several times per year, potentially altering search rankings. Google says the changes are akin to revising a best-of list: New contenders might appear, while existing SERP winners are moved around (or removed entirely). It’s not necessarily a punishment of those older picks, but it’s a good reminder that once you “win” high positions on search, the win isn’t permanent.
Stay ahead by subscribing to algorithm update notifications directly from Google. Review your average positions and click-through rates in Google Search Console, and if you notice any surprising drop-offs, look to the latest algorithm update notice to see if changes on Google’s end may have impacted your rankings. When you spot a core update that coincides with traffic drops, you’ll know whether to adjust your strategy or wait it out—preventing panic-driven changes that could make things worse.
Subscribing to SEO newsletters like Search Engine Journal Digest and SEO Fomo can bring relevant SEO news to your inbox. Similarly, following trusted industry experts like Glenn Gabe, Barry Schwartz, Ethan Smith, and Lily Ray on LinkedIn can help you get quick takes on essential news in your social feed. These sources alert you to changes before they tank your traffic, giving you time to respond strategically rather than reactively.
2. Getting buy-in on your long-term investment
SEO is a long-term investment with high upfront costs and slow results. Getting stakeholder buy-in and support for your SEO efforts can be hard. While the return on investment for SEO is huge—for many major industries, an average of 33% of website traffic comes from organic search traffic—it can be hard to prove the value of your work today when results aren’t tangible for six to 12 months. Plus, success isn’t guaranteed.
As a result, SEO initiatives risk losing support over the course of the project. If stakeholders get impatient, SEO work can be deprioritized, which is a sure road to failure.
When stakeholders question SEO’s value, show them the numbers. Use SEO forecasting to project search-driven revenue. You can also use SEO quick wins to demonstrate small, incremental gains that show the long-term potential of your entire SEO strategy.
For example, if stakeholders are eager to see proof of your ability to rank, you might create relevant content targeting less competitive relevant keywords. Ranking quickly for an “easy” keyword shows a clear path to search visibility. Use this as the basis for more investment.
If you have a brick-and-mortar store, you could publish blogs on brand-relevant local news topics to expose your brand to new customers in your area. You could also capture visibility from competitors by creating comparative blogs that review your products head-to-head.
From there, highlight the costs and risks of not investing in SEO. What’s being left on the table? Which competitors are already winning space on the SERP and taking customers away from your brand? Use SEO tools like Semrush to estimate the traffic competitors are getting from non-branded keywords—meaning keywords that are relevant to their brand, but don’t include their brand name. That’s traffic currently driving competitor revenue that could be yours.
3. AI and zero-click search
Zero-click search is when Google answers a user’s query directly at the top of the SERP, eliminating the need to click into a site. That cuts off a previously-rich source of traffic. It’s not new, but with AI-generated summaries now appearing in search engine results, zero-click searches are on the rise. No clicks means no opportunity to get users to your website to engage with your brand and products. An entirely zero-click experience means, ultimately, a narrower pool of customers.
Start by checking the SERP when targeting keywords. If a particular search query is easily answered by Google on the SERP, choose another term.
Think about how your content can be better than Google’s snippet or AI summary. This is often thought of as 10x content—content that’s 10 times better than the best result and valuable to your well-defined niche. 10x content should be comprehensive and original, include elements that enrich the web page experience (like videos and interactive elements), and be emotionally resonant.
Creating valuable content can also get you cited in AI-powered tools, such as Google’s AI mode and ChatGPT. Insights based on original data—for example, a case study or survey—provide net-new output that isn’t available elsewhere on the internet. This is the type of content that AI is likely to cite, and it also offers readers real value.
Lastly, in the face of zero-click search, every person who does click to your site is suddenly more valuable. Ensure their on-site experience by attending to technical SEO basics like page speed and mobile design. Aim to capture their email addresses with a strong value proposition for your newsletter or email sign-up.
4. Saturated market and intense competition
Google has been around for more than a quarter-century, and ranking competition is intense. A few strategies can help you identify lucrative ranking opportunities.
Instead of targeting high-volume, highly competitive keywords, consider long-tail keywords, which have lower search volume but are also less competitive. For example, if your ultimate goal is ranking for the keyword “acne serum,” you might start by targeting the long-tail keyword “difference between vitamin A and C serum for acne.”
After ranking for some long-tail keywords, build out your content library to demonstrate EEAT—experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. Google wants to see these criteria met before ranking your site. In short: Create content that is written by known experts on key topics.
Perform keyword gap analysis for your direct competitors. This helps you identify search terms that drive traffic to your competitors’ sites. To win that traffic, identify where competitors’ content is falling short and tailor your own content to directly address the needs of the reader.
Finally, think multimedia and multimodal to stay ahead with both users and search engines. A single 90-minute video podcast, for example, can fuel a whole content ecosystem: Chop it into Instagram Reels, repurpose it into a blog post, and distill it into a newsletter. Each format creates new indexable content, signals topical authority to Google, and captures traffic across different search behaviors (video, text, audio).
5. Topics versus keywords
When Google said “things, not strings” in 2012, it shifted search toward understanding real-world entities and the relationships between them—not just matching precise keywords. Now, with the query fan-out technique (which powers Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode), Google has exploded that idea. Its algorithms now consider related information and intents from across the entire web, synthesizing them into a summarized result. This means good SEO content needs to answer all the questions a user could have—and answer them comprehensively.
Consider your audience’s entire spectrum of informational needs. Level up your keyword research to capture more reader search intent (i.e., what else might someone want to know about the topic?). For the keyword “vitamin C,” that might mean optimizing your content for basic queries (“what is vitamin C serum?”) as well as related questions (“difference between vitamin A and C serum for acne”).
Identify questions that deserve answers by getting to know your audience. Quick touchpoints like callouts on social media, polls in newsletters, and feedback forms can help you understand your users. One-on-one interviews and focus groups are more intense, often with better returns. These conversations are gold for content creation. Make this an ongoing process: Use research to inform content, and in each piece, ask for more feedback.
This approach goes both ways. Improve your ranking odds by talking directly to your audience—creating a strong off-site profile to demonstrate rounded expertise on a topic across the web. Answer relevant questions on YouTube, host AMAs on Reddit, and share tips on TikTok. This helps ensure you’re seen as an expert everywhere your audience hangs out online.
SEO challenges FAQ
What are the main challenges of SEO?
Five core challenges dominate SEO today: algorithm volatility, securing long-term buy-in, zero-click AI search, intense competition, and the shift from keywords to comprehensive topic coverage.
Why is SEO so difficult?
SEO is so difficult because it’s always changing and requires a long-term investment to see results. Unlike social media or paid marketing, which offer a more immediate return on investment, SEO campaigns take time. It also involves many components—technical, content, news, ecommerce, voice, AI, and more—making SEO broader in scope than many other marketing disciplines.
How do Google’s algorithm updates affect my site?
Google’s algorithm updates can impact your website’s search engine rankings, increasing or decreasing traffic. Major algorithm updates happen about every three months, and Google’s systems update multiple times daily, so a page that ranked #1 yesterday might not hold the same position today.
