Being an entrepreneur was never supposed to be easy. From building your brand to getting noticed on the web to fulfilling customer expectations, the problems faced by entrepreneurs are extensive.

But being an entrepreneur is also, as you know, very rewarding. Creating something from nothing and turning it into your own piece of the pie is one of the greatest feelings of entrepreneurship.

The spirit of a true entrepreneur can’t be broken through problems or failures. An entrepreneur will continue to move ideas forward no matter what they face.

Many of the problems faced by entrepreneurs can be solved by understanding and implementing best SEO practices.

Here, you’ll learn about ten problems faced by entrepreneurs and how they can be overcome with solid SEO.

Now, let’s take a closer look.

1. How To Choose the Right Business

If you don’t choose the right business, failure is bound to happen. Even a great marketing strategy and SEO isn’t going to help.

When deciding on which business is best for you, consider the following factors:

• Does my product or service help people in a way they want to be helped?
• Does my product or service solve an obvious problem and provide a solution?
• Is it something people are actually going to want?

Figuring out the answers to these questions is going to take time and market research. The worst way to go into business is by getting approval from friends and family, then jumping in head first.

Without getting thorough and honest opinions from people outside your circle, you have no business going into… well… business.

Several years ago an acquaintance decided to start a high-end wine bar in a small college town of about 20,000 residents.

He had more than enough working capital to run in the red for about a year. He figured he’d start turning profits much faster than that.

The average price for a glass of wine in this establishment was about $9. That doesn’t sound too bad — until you consider that the majority of bar-goers in the town are broke college students.

After 22 months of failed operations, he had to close. There just wasn’t much demand for $9 glasses of wine there. Most college students expect to spend less than $20 on an entire night out.

He didn’t pre-plan and didn’t do market research.

He also ignored local SEO on his website. Basically, if you didn’t already know the wine bar was there, Google wasn’t going to tell you.

Had he spent time perfecting local SEO, there’s a much better chance his wine bar would have been found by town residents who would frequent a high-end wine bar.

“If you build it, they will come” is simply not true. In 2017, this needs to be revised to “if you perfect SEO, they will come.”

2. Getting Enough Financing is One of the Problems Faced by Entrepreneurs

Most start-up entrepreneurs aren’t sitting on a mountain of cash. This begs the question, “where do I get the money to start on my idea?”

Unless you’re one of the rare cases where money is not an obstacle, you basically have three options for financing your business.

1. Borrowing. This is tempting because it allows you to get started quickly. However it’s also very risky because if the business fails, you’re still in debt to it.
2. Finding investors. If your idea is new and groundbreaking you may be able to find investors that will finance you. Unfortunately they are going to want to own a portion of your business, and you may not want to give that away.
3. Bootstrapping. This is the best way to start a new endeavor. Use the money you have available to you and figure out creative ways to do things on a shoe-string budget.

Bootstrapping is easiest to do when launching an online business. In fact, many successful online businesses were started for less than $100.

You’ll also need an eagerness to learn internet technology and SEO.

When you understand how to implement SEO into your online business, you have an immediate potential to be found by thousands — or even millions — of customers.

This can start turning you profits quickly on a minimal budget.

3. Finding Customers and Getting Them to Find You

Without customers, there’s no business. No matter how revolutionary your product is, if nobody knows about it then nobody’s buying it.

Effective customer acquisition is one of the biggest problems faced by entrepreneurs. You don’t have the budget to start a nation-wide media campaign like the big boys. You might feel like you’re not on equal playing fields.

When it comes to SEO, however, you are.

While thousands of businesses pay big dollars to show first as an advertisement in Google search results, effective SEO can land you right below them — for free.

Spend a good amount of time writing down all search terms you can think of that a person who needs your product might type into Google. Think of different variations of those search terms as well and write those down.

Then start incorporating those keywords into your website in the following areas:

• Home page
• Sales pages
• Product Listings
• Blog Posts

Don’t go overboard though. A good rule of thumb is to incorporate about 2 keywords per 500 words of text. Also remember to occasionally use keywords in headings and subheadings.

Consistent blogging using SEO is one of the best ways to get customers to find you.

In your blog posts, remember to incorporate keywords as described above. Also include several internal and external links within each article.

4. Managing Time

With only 24 hours in a day and dozen of tasks to complete, effective time management is one of the top problems faced by entrepreneurs.

When you’re the one running the show, you have to become an expert in so many areas. Sometimes day turns to night before you even eat breakfast.

Figuring out the best areas to spend your limited amount of time can be a challenge as well.

Think of your time like a limited amount of money. You want to “invest” your time on tasks that pay you back over and over after you’ve completed the task — even while you sleep.

Time spent on properly executed SEO does just that.

You could spend 2 hours banging out a blog post just to “get content out there”. Or you could spend one additional hour perfecting the SEO of that blog post so that people are landing on your site day and night.

The extra hour you spend on maximizing SEO is like investing a dollar and watching it return $100.

Conversely, the 2 hours spent on writing a non-optimized blog post is like taking $2 and putting it into a slot machine. Unless you get real lucky, it’s wasted.

5. Not Having a Steady Paycheck is Stressful

Anybody who has lived as a full-time entrepreneur will tell you that it’s stressful not knowing where the next check is coming from.

Many of us are used to the idea that on every other Friday, I’ll get a check in hand for $X.XX. We plan our lives around that accordingly.

This is not how it typically works for the entrepreneur.

Depending on the type of business you’re in, it could be days or months between checks. The amounts vary as widely the ideas that come into your head.

Did you know that SEO can actually help alleviate this stress?

When your site is properly optimized for search engines, you’ll be getting a steady stream of qualified traffic to your site. Traditional advertising gives short bursts, but it normally dies down after the campaign is complete.

An SEO campaign never ends. The work you put in keeps paying you back with more visitors and buyers.

Assuming that you have a product or service that people want, and you present it in a way that turns users into buyers, SEO can give you back the feeling of a steady paycheck.

6. When Do You Quit Your Day Job?

This is a common question.

In fact, of all problems faced by entrepreneurs, this probably gets asked the most.

Quitting the relative security of a day job is a big decision and shouldn’t be taken lightly. The problem is, no matter when you choose to quit there’s going to be risk.

This makes it hard to pull the trigger on such a move.

In general, don’t consider quitting your day job until you have matched that income with your entrepreneurial endeavor.

You’re probably asking yourself how you’ll ever be able to do that with the limited amount of time left to dedicate to the business.

One of the best answers is SEO.

SEO works for you whether you’re working or not. There’s no better way to build your online business on relative auto-pilot than with great SEO.

Once you’ve surpassed the income of your day job, it’s time to make your business the day job.

More growth will follow.

7. Beating the Competition

Unless you’ve invented the time machine, your business is going to have competition.

As a new player in the game, beating the competition is one of the top problems faced by entrepreneurs.

What are the first websites that show up when you Google the search terms you came up with earlier?

These are the ones you need to beat. They’re doing something right.

The question is, what are they doing in their online marketing that you can emulate?

Go to their websites and figure out their keyword usage. Spend time on their blogs and see what they do to optimize their SEO.

How can you use some of the same practices and improve them for your site?

Understanding your competition is the first step to beating them. Pretending they don’t exist is a sure-fire recipe for failure.

8. Defining Who Your Customer Is

An entrepreneur fails when they fail to know and understand who their customer is.

Of the many problems faced by entrepreneurs, this is one is on the top of the list.

We get so excited about our product or service that we don’t take time to learn the type of person who’s going to buy it.

If someone were to ask you who your target market is, do you have an immediate and concise answer? Many entrepreneurs don’t.

Even worse is when we fool ourselves into thinking that EVERYONE is a potential customer. There are few absolutes in life, but thinking everyone is a potential customer is wrong 100% of the time.

If you don’t know exactly who your customer is, chances are they know you either.

The tighter you can define your customer, the easier it is to appeal to people ready to buy.

When you study your website’s SEO, what keywords are generating the most traffic to your site? This is key information about your customer that you can use to perfect your future SEO efforts.

Although you might think you know who your target customer is, chances are you’ll be surprised what brings users to your site.

9. Dealing With the Unknown

When we talk about problems faced by entrepreneurs, dealing in the unknown stands front and center.

How long will you be in business? How will next week’s marketing efforts compare to last weeks? When will I need to hire employees?

Every day involves dealing with unknown factors — some in your control and some not.

How to get customers to your website can also be a great unknown.

This unknown can be solved though. A top-notch SEO strategy is the solution.

10. Finding Solid, Trustworthy Business Partners

Customers judge a business on many factors. One of these is the company you keep.

In addition, partnering with the wrong business or individual can cost you thousands of dollars if the partnership goes south.

Keep an eye out for businesses that talk a big game. Find out who a few of their customers are, then interview them.

If you’re looking for a business to partner with for SEO, ask for specific recent results they have achieved. Get examples for at least ten of their customers.

Wrapping It All Up

Obviously these aren’t the only problems faced by entrepreneurs. Books are written about the various challenges you face.

However, we have covered problems faced by entrepreneurs that SEO can help fix.

And that’s a big deal.

For more free SEO tips, get in touch.

Yes, that did say free.

The more you learn about SEO, the better chance you have at entrepreneurial success.