How Long before I See Results in SEO?

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In my years of working with clients in their organic SEO efforts, I’ve been asked this question over and over again. As a business, I think it is imperative to capitalize on the time at which you can expect good returns from your investment. And SEO being part of your marketing strategy is no different.

Unfortunately, there is not yet a black and white answer to this question. Although your SEO consultants / vendors may have told you that it may take 3-6 months to a year to see results or maybe even more than that. Personally I’ve seen core keywords rank in as short as a month to a longer period of 18 months.

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*Photo courtesy of Borkur.Net

Organic SEO results will depend on these following factors:

1. How competitive your target keywords are – During my early years in organic SEO, I used to be very careless with agreeing to optimize for keywords that clients are pursuing in a time frame that is often too short and impossible to achieve. Oftentimes these keywords are overly saturated with competition that despite of establishing a bullet-proof on-page optimized page, it will take you to build links at a rate beyond Google’s unnatural radar.

   Solution: Choose the low-hanging-fruit or long-tail keywords at the start of your SEO campaigns. Every website behaves and performs differently than the other. Observe how your fast your pages can climb the ranks of the results and expand gradually to more competitive keywords when you’re more experienced.When you have a successful PPC campaign running, you can do tests on Google Adwords to know which keywords your customers are using (or converting) with lesser competition to get a clear idea of which ones to pursue.

2. Flexibility of Your Engineering Team – There is a reason why web developers and SEO’s have a sensitive relationship. SEO’s oftentimes will have modifications to on-page factors, URL rewrites and redirects, tracking codes to be installed which the development team may not implement ASAP due to reasons like scheduled web releases, compilations, staging and testing. Believe me this is quite irritating at times as an SEO but you really need the web development team’s cooperation to succeed in your SEO campaigns.

   Solution: Open communications – Learn to communicate with your development team in a way that they can understand your objectives. How? Show them results of small changes to the website. Both of the parties have only one objective in the end and that is to make your website perform better. Another tip is to plan ahead of time with any on-page and backend implementations you may need for SEO. If you’re going to start tracking your pages, it would be good to send your development team codes for your Analytics, WebmasterTools, WebSiteOptimizer codes all in one email for them to upload in one go.

   I won’t forget what my head of IT told be back in the days – Just tell me your objective and I’ll create the solutions for you instead of thinking what solutions make for your objectives. Well he was right all along.

3. Amount of Site Content – Search engines will always be looking for quality content to deliver for its end users. Recently, SEO experts have emphasized on the component of QDF or Query Deserves Freshness. This may mean that SE’s are now looking for fresh content for certain queries that may need updating. To sum it all up that is Consistent Quality Fresh Content (CQFC) this is just my own invention, don’t quote me for it LOL!

   Solution: Build a content marketing strategy that will enable you to create continuous quality content to last a certain period for your SEO campaign. You can brainstorm with your content writers and marketers for content that will be evenly distributed for 6 months to a year. You can either build individual content pages regularly or establish a corporate blog that you can update easily.Remember that I place emphasis on continuity / consistency in your content. Your visitors will be expecting fresh content once you have established that frequency.

4. Link Building Frequency – This is a very tricky subject and as much as I wanted to avoid touching on this subject, link building is a given in every successful organic SEO campaign. Build links rapidly and you get flagged by Google but if you’re dilly-dallying then you get left behind by competitors.

   Solution: Sadly there’s no definite formula for an exact number of links to be acquired on a weekly / monthly basis. I’m sure link building experts can pitch into this topic. But as far as my experience goes of training and working with in-house link builders, I don’t acquire links more than what we can maintain on a monthly basis. One thing to remember is that – the quality of the links will be far more important than the quantity.

   So if my team has achieved an average of 80 quality links (coming from trusted domains which are highly relevant to my niche), then that will be my benchmark. That will be better than having 200 links per month with more than 50% of it coming from rubbish domain links. We’ll deal with more of link building issues later.

5. What are your objectives? – So what are your objectives? Is your site an e-commerce site which would mean sales as conversions, a lead generation site which would mean registrations as goals, or a corporate brand which would mean that your objectives may include traffic generation and increased exposure in social media and the rest of universal search. Each of these objectives have different time frames in achieving.

   Solution: It’s as simple as knowing your goals before diving into your SEO campaigns (I know this should have been the first item to this list). Lead generation and sales conversions may involve usability testing, landing page and conversion rate optimization, and therefore can take more time than pure rankings and traffic objectives.

How Long before I See Results in SEO? is a post from: Small Business SEO Tips – SaktoSEO