"We did so much work and the website traffic has only grown 5%."
"The traffic dropped by 5% this month compared to last month."
These are some of the things that business owners could experience every month when tracking their business statistics. Of course, tracking statistics and sales are not just for SEO - it's everything business related: advertising, branding, walk-in sales etc etc.
We work so hard on our business growth that we sometimes forget to appreciate the invisible results.
What if we hadn't done all that work? How much worse would it have been then? What if we didn't do that advertising campaign, make that collab deal, do that keyword optimisation? Would that growth have been even lower? Would that drop have been even more significant?
Unfortunately since we don't have a time machine nor the ability to see the options Sliding Doors style (remember that movie?), we have to assume that every choice we have made is the best one, the most appropriate choice we could have made with the information we had available at the time. There were reasons WHY we made that choice, and we made the choice with the best intentions.
Sometimes a choice is wrong, but we don't know it until after we make it. The extra information we learn from making the mistake joins the bank of knowledge that we have, and therefore the choice we make next time has more information to consider, and we maybe make a different choice next time.
Beating ourselves (or our service providers, or our consumers) up about not getting the exact results we hoped for truly isnt helpful. Even when we know so so much about our business and set reasonable goals, there are an unending amount of unknown factors and variables that are out of our control.
Why didn't your latest launch do well, even if you did everything perfect? You had the perfect ads, the perfect SEO, the perfect collabs, and a flawless branding message!
Maybe a new insane president of the United States gets elected in the same week and everyone is too terrified for the state of the world to buy a new pair of earrings or knitted sweater.
Maybe there's new research released stating that the cost of living crisis is expected to worsen, and people have to save even more of their money for their heating bills.
Maybe another competing brand came out with something incredibly similar only days before you, and beat you to the punch. Maybe you beat them to the punch last time.
There's so much unknown in business that it takes a lot of courage, trust, and grace to continue fighting after the first, second or even third time that things aren't perfect.
New businesses experience this a lot - a brand new brand could take off immensely at the start, having a huge launch, a lucky viral post, or a perfectly timed and immaculately themed product. However, that insane jump and growth trajectory experienced may not be consistent or sustainable.
The concept of capitalism, shareholder expectations etc have broken our brains. We have been led to believe that "profits of 10% increase over last year is a failure because we expected profits of 20% increase". What are you actually talking about? You still increased profit by 10%! That's not a failure! I'm tearing my hair out.
This all reminds me of advice I was given when I worked backstage in theatre, as well as when I had a short stint as a waiter in an Italian restaurant. "If you do your job properly, no one will notice anything". As in, the goal is to be so seamless and unassuming that people imagine it all simply happens, rather than noticing that you're working.
I hated this - I love to be appreciated for the hard work that I do, and I love for there to be visible results to acknowledge. But sometimes, the work of SEO is this invisible work. If your website traffic goes down 5% this month despite all of the hard work we've been doing, I might be tempted to beat myself up about that. To think I didn't work hard enough, I'm not smart enough, I'm not good enough. I'm not enough.
But what if I hadn't done that work? Would that website traffic have dropped by 10%? 20%? 100%? It's impossible to know, and we never CAN possibly know. We have to have faith that we're doing the best we can, that we're working as much as we should be, that we're smart enough, that we're enough.
I'm enough.
You're enough.
