Running an online business has long been considered a great idea. However, there are many struggles that come with running one, which you might not know. Below, we’ve listed the three biggest struggles of running an online business nowadays:

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Increased Competition

Generally speaking, competition is healthy in all areas of life. When you have competition, you’re pushed to improve and become better and better. The problem is, online businesses in 2017 face more competition than ever before. There are more and more business ideas starting up online, and more and more entrepreneurs are turning to the online spectrum.

What this means is that there’s competition for everything. You have competition for domain names, organic search ranking spots, bidding for ads; the list goes on and on. What makes things worse is that you’re not just competing locally, you’re competing on a global scale. There are online businesses all over the world that compete with you, and it can be hard to handle all of this rivalry.

Content Piracy

A big problem for all businesses that operate online is content piracy. If you don’t know what this means, it simply refers to when your content is illegally copied by someone else or other businesses. For example, you could write a really good blog post that generates a lot of traffic, and a rival business may see it’s doing well, and copy your content word for word on their site.

There are two problems with content piracy, mainly, if someone steals your content then they could benefit from it at your expense. People could start visited the site with the pirated content instead of your site. Secondly, it’s very hard to police and prevent. Granted, you can get things like a DMCA takedown service to scour the web and remove any illegal or pirated stuff that your company hasn’t authorized. However, it’s still a tough task, and it can cost online businesses a lot of money when you add up all the potential losses from pirated content.

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Search Engine Optimization

As we briefly mentioned in the first point, there’s a lot of competition for organic search ranking between online businesses. SEO is at the forefront of this, and it presents another big struggle in 2017. You see, search engine optimization all revolves around different algorithms. Primarily, people only care about Google’s algorithm as most people search using Google. If you understand the Google algorithm, you will know what to do to make your site rank highly in the organic results.

The problem is that this algorithm can change all the time. For example, compare the key ranking factors from five years ago to now, and there’s a big difference. In 2017, we could see even more changes to the algorithm which changes the way you set up your SEO campaign. This can be a struggle, and a lot of small online businesses find it hard to keep up with all the SEO changes.

This is by no means an article intended to put you off running an online business. Instead, it’s more to inform you of the struggles you might face. Now, you can prepare for these struggles and figure out ways around them to maximize your business potential.