I was so touched and inspired by a comment on my previous post, “5 Tips For Managing an SEO Team”. Yavor Milchev wisely commented, “I think motivation is also a very important ingredient. Motivation is very easy to lose and once people lose it, it gets very hard to get it back. I have seen people do amazing things with little knowledge and experience simply because of their devotion and strive for success.”

Yavor hit the nail on the head, especially as I’m sitting here a bit stressed by my own SEO job. Motivation is a crucial personality trait in SEO. Just think of how many times your team has ensured a site is meeting SEO best practices, worked continually on on-page/off-page SEO best practices, and yet the site’s non-paid search traffic and rankings still aren’t what you’d like them to be. Yet, despite wanting to strangle Google, you persevered, tweaked your strategy, and saw results change and improve over time. SEO is one of the most frustrating, “gray” industries out there, and at the end of a busy day, there’s always things on your mind and ideas for working to improve a site’s SEO.

Yet, we love SEO and amidst the stress, we love our SEO jobs. If you want to survive in this industry, you need to be motivated to succeed, always work to help educate your co-workers, and be dedicated to seeing your clients succeed. We work in a very stressful, sometimes thankless industry, but our desire to keep going and push ourselves motivates us through those tough days and SEO quandaries. When you’re having a tough day, take heart (and a drink at 5pm) – the rest of the SEO industry knows what you’re going through, and we commend you for working through it and emerging as a person satisfied with their desire to push ahead and further our industry.