TommyCarey
Level X3
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Many people in the SEO industry suffer from high anxiety, and some might not realize it. It happens to a lot of us, myself included, because we have clients that could file chargebacks while we're trying to rank their sites as quickly as possible without hurting them. We deal with clients that don't know what they're purchasing, which raises a lot of questions if they aren't ranked within the first week, and that is not only stressful but scary at the same time because they could leave a negative review even though you're doing everything right.
As you already know, SEO takes plenty of time to do right, and that means a client could be paying for 6+ months before seeing anything positive come their way. For this reason, it becomes very stressful at the end of each month, and you haven't hit Page 1 of Google yet, and now the client is asking more questions and complaining.
Below are a few things I've noticed that give myself anxiety when it comes to SEO other than clients complaining even though we are doing everything that works.
SEO takes a long time
Like I mentioned above, a strategic SEO campaign takes a long time, and that could scare off a lot of clients. It's also challenging to determine what will happen in 6+ months, and the unknown factor raises stress levels because you're never certain if one backlink placement will topple the entire campaign you've been working on for 6+ hours a day.
You're too worried about deadlines
When it comes to SEO, there shouldn't be any deadlines because it's a job with an undetermined amount of work that needs to be done before a website gets top rankings. Sure, you can say "Build XX high quality links this month," and that be one of your goals, but a deadline where you have to hit Page 1 within six months in unrealistic and stressful. Doing SEO means we're optimizing a website, so a 3rd party will rank it within their systems better and send more traffic to the site being worked on. If Google, Yahoo!, or Bing do an algorithm update and we drop in the rankings, we just took a step back, and now our deadline is tougher to hit.
You can't have deadlines if your work is dependent on a 3rd party.
You overthink, re-evaluate, and edit when it's not needed
There have been plenty of times when I'm going over an SEO campaign and think something needs to be tweaked, modified, or removed entirely so it's best for the client. All I'm doing is re-evaluating my work and second-guessing myself so much that I want to edit what I knew would work for them when I mapped it out.
There are a lot of SEO specialists that think like this, and it will only raise your stress levels because you'll always be thinking about if your SEO campaign is going to work. Stop worrying, it will work just like it has countless times before, and all you have to do is take it step by step and finish what you mapped out. When you're done, wait a little while then assess what's happening, and that's when you can start editing or tweaking.
You're always worried about changes
If you live your life being worried about things changing, you're going to hate working on an SEO campaign, and that's because it seems like things change every month lol. You can't be worried about change; you need to embrace it, and be happy it's coming because you're fantastic work will usually shine brighter with each update Google does to their systems.
Well, if Google messes something up, then you might be stressed about a rankings drop, but they're usually pretty good about testing before launching to the public lol 
Final Thoughts,
Anxiety is a big thing that can hurt your work progression or halt it completely and make you not want to get online at all. I've had anxiety in some cases, usually when dealing with high paying clients that don't know what they've paid me for, but I always tell myself it's going to be ok and that the work being done will be appreciated. You won't be able to avoid annoying clients, clients that pay you but aren't sure why, and clients that expect overnight rankings in an extremely difficult niche, but you need to keep chugging along and get the work done. Show the skeptics what you can do and make sure they pay you again for next month
Thanks for reading
- Tommy
https://www.seocheckout.com/user/TommyCarey
Hey SEOboyz,
Yeah, I'm sure you get this a lot since you do a fair amount of orders for customers.
You're right, a single bad email or message can ruin our entire day and set us off track no matter how many positive reviews we've gotten. It's difficult to handle bad feedback, especially when we do our best to fulfill orders, but we need to keep moving along and continue with our work if we want to stay successful.
It's difficult to do this type of work overtime because of the stress that gets built up all while we can't really go on vacation to take a break. If we work for a big company that allows 1-2 weeks paid vacation, then we can stop worrying so much, but most of us here are freelancers and that means if we stop working then we stop getting paid.
Most people have anxiety problems, some more than others, and we all chose to handle it in our own ways. I like hanging out with my kids, having a beer after they go to bed, and playing a few videos games to take my mind off of things in the real world lol :D
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seoboyz
Thanks again for this article. Wow, Really good article. I really enjoyed the post. We all can relate to this situation. Sometimes a single message ruin our whole day and add a backlog to our work. But we should not allow a single bad incident ruin our day , but move on and do our work cheerfully to deliver the best we can. Thanks again for this article.
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