Anybody who has worked in the field of search engine optimization for some time understands the difficulty and complexity of the field. While many aspects of SEO are straightforward, they can be time-consuming and technical, requiring a vast amount of information in order to execute successfully.

Learning new techniques in the world of SEO is commonplace: even if you have all the answers, you won’t have them forever. Despite the vast functionality and applications of SEO, there are some situations where it either requires an extreme amount of effort or cannot deliver any results at all.

Below, we’ll review a few situations where SEO is difficult or downright impossible to execute properly.

Lost in Translation

An increasing number of brands – particularly those offering products and services via the web – are targeting international audiences for greater effect. Pinging servers with your offerings in multiple languages can be an effective strategy, but it is not always easily done within the confines of SEO.

Auto-translation services can help visitors get the gist of what you’re saying, but without a comprehensive, manually-translated website, targeting various SERPs in different languages can be almost impossible. Even if the content itself is translated, various differences between languages may mean that said translated keywords are not the relevant equivalents you should be targeting.

Social Media-Dominant Presence

Because of the popularity and ease of use of social media, a plethora of brands are focusing their full attention on these networks. With sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat reaching hundreds of millions of people, the potential for cultivating loyal audiences is immense.

Unfortunately, SEO and social media are at best indirectly linked. While various related social media posts and blurbs can appear in search results, it does not inherently produce meaningful ROI in terms of SEO gains. As such, brands that are based heavily on social media have a difficult time gaining traction in their relevant search results. While this is unfortunate, some social media-dominant brands feel no remorse over their decisions; through organic and paid strategies, their audiences are already sufficiently large enough to drive traffic through other means.

A Lack of Content/Offerings

Some new bloggers and business owners learn about the power that SEO can provide and immediately want to begin reaping benefits. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really work that way. SEO is a gradually-improved situation that can take months or even years to deliver real results.

Websites and blogs that are newly-formed have difficulty generating meaningful results due to one simple reason: a lack of content. While the age of a website can play a small role in overall SEO performance, a website with relatively few pages and/or a lack of detailed content will never be able to ascend the ranks of search. As such, brands should focus on generating as many pages and relevant pieces of content as possible  if they want their SEO efforts to pay any dividends.

While some think SEO entails pinging servers with links and keywords, there is much more to the art. Most situations allow for meaningful, gradual improvement in terms of search rankings – but some present unique challenges. Whether it be due to a prior presence on social media exclusively, a lack of content or different languages, some obstacles will have to be chipped away at bit-by-bit before SEO can provide notable improvements in search engine results.