Lucy has serious separation anxiety.

Whenever we leave for a walk with our daughter or go grocery shopping, she paws at the dog gate like a water wheel in a hurricane.

Training her has been a struggle despite countless YouTube tutorials, dog training products, and advice from other dog owners.

Her breed, her temperament, our interactions, her bed, and our home are all unique factors that contribute to the difficulty in training her.

If you've ever started a garden, raised a kid, built a business, or raised a dog, you know what I'm talking about.

Growing your website organically with SEO is the same thing.

Ultimately, you need to understand the fundamentals, but you need critical thinking and problem solving for your own Lucy predicament.

Endless SEO Situations and Environments

In SEO, industry, location, technology and size can all influence your strategies and tactics.

Industries have nuances and staggering differences that require their own approach, much like different dog breeds. You wouldn't treat a Saint Bernard like a chihuahua.

• Health and finance face regulations and a higher standard for factual information.

• News publishing is an SEO pressure cooker. The competition for Top News Stories is time sensitive.

• eCommerce requires structured data and high-quality visual content.

Location (or location agnostic content) adds a second layer of complexity to visibility in search results. Walking a dog in a city is a bit different than a suburban neighborhood.

• Local SEO requires proximity, reputation management, Google Business Profile development.

• International SEO addresses language, country-specific domains, and locally aware content.

• Location Agnostic SEO can drill into the potential Knowledge Graph.

Website scale and technical SEO introduce new complicated challenges for maintenance and development. Does your dog have unleashed freedom or are they crate trained?

• A large website demands an organized, logically structured site architecture and sophisticated internal linking.

• A small website thrives with exceptional content and high-quality backlinks.

• A simple, developer-friendly CMS can help simplify and benefit your SEO efforts.

• An old or complex CMS can inhibit progress, speed, and SEO elegance.

SEOs love to make blanket statements and proclamations. But what works for one website does not necessarily work for another.

No matter how similar two sites are, some best practices are just a house of cards. A wizard behind the curtain. A dog owner with a YouTube channel.

So next time you see advice about tactics that can solve a specific problem for your SEO strategy, stop. Look your Lucy in the eyes. Realize that your own ingenuity, critical thinking, and experimentation will be your best guide to rank.