After how long does SEO start to work? | Weboptim
The answer is not simple because the question is misleading.
New SEO vs. old SEO
Once upon a time, the strategy was to identify the keywords that were most relevant to your business, had the most traffic and not much competition. So we had about 5-10 keywords, called "golden keywords", which brought the most traffic.
This keyword strategy is wrong because there will be fewer and fewer exceptions, no one keyword, and no smaller keyword groups that drive significant traffic to the site - at least not compared to what the from long tail searches we can get. The point is that if we focus on a small set of general keywords, we are unlikely to reach most of the people who are looking for us.
SEO today is more and more a natural language search, meaning people are searching for terms that are more than normal queries, more than 2-3 keywords. This is because they use tools like Siri or Google news where they speak instead of typing. And that's why people type more details in their search to find what they're looking for as quickly as possible.
It is much easier to get ahead for these keywords because the competition is not so high. They are more relevant because they contain more detail and therefore traffic to these keywords has a higher conversion rate.
And in aggregate, the number of long tail searches is often higher than the number of searches for "golden keywords". So the goal when trying to get ahead shouldn't be to be ahead for a few top keywords that don't change over time, but rather focus on a larger number of natural language searches that are constantly changing and growing.
Rankings don't matter as much as we think
Places count. But it's not the indicators we need to focus on. If we think of the question "How long will it take for SEO to work?" as "When will I move up in the rankings?", we confuse results and outcomes.
To achieve ranking output (output), SEO companies can easily promise because they are emotionally satisfied, but they are not useful if they do not generate sales - the desired result.
This is why you need to hire SEO companies or professionals who focus on results, not outputs.
The question we need to ask
Now that we know that SEO has changed and sales are more important than rankings, the next question to ask is: "How long will it take for SEO to start generating sales?"
How long will it take for SEO to start generating sales?
We have the right question, the answer: it depends. Depends on what? Depends on how big the website is, how much SEO work has been done on it in the past, what the website format is, how much content is on it, what the link profile is, and many other SEO factors. No two websites here start from the same base, even if they are in the same industry and have the same customers.
At the same time, we have provided a possible scenario for the first few months and the results that can be expected based on these:
1st month
Research, website research, keyword research and Planning. If the research is done quickly, technical changes can start within the first month. In other cases, the research may take longer than a month.
2nd month
The start of the technical SEO works, the website amendments after the website audit. In some cases, the website needs a lot of improvements and this alone can take up to a month.
Other SEO activities such as link profiling or content creation can be done at the same time as the website overhaul. If you find yourself in such a situation, you can do SEO, but you won't see results yet, as the changes will only have an impact once they are done.
3rd month
Focus on the for content creation. Blogging, FAQs, articles, extended product descriptions, company information, etc. Ideally you can start this right after strategy and planning, but often budgets limit how much can be done at once, so the tech overhaul has to come first. We may see some improvement in the rankings this month. If the placements generate sales that's even better, but don't necessarily expect that just yet.
4th month
Continuous content creation, technical optimisation and healthy link profile improvements (which often include the removal of low quality links). This month you can expect to see an improvement in rankings, an increase in traffic and sales.
It won't be anywhere near what we have to do for SEO in 12 months, but it could be significant enough to know that SEO works.
5th month
This month, or perhaps even earlier, you should start social media management design to strengthen content and increase website traffic. This leads to healthy, natural links and, of course, generates sales. Continue to expand your content and get involved in some PR or media appearances. At this point we should see increasing traffic and as a result sales will increase.
6th month
If your traffic reaches 5,000 visitors per day or more, you may benefit from conversion optimisation in order to improve how incoming traffic gets to the point of purchase and sale.
From this point on, the focus should be on content creation and promotion, or you can do more creative things. Specific activities will depend a lot on what type of company we are and what type of website we have.
Many SEO companies will tell you that it takes 4-6 months to start seeing results. This is usually accurate, but remember that this is when you start to see results and those SEO results will steadily increase. Whatever results we get after 6 months will be significantly less than what we get after 12 months.
At some point, we may see results gradually diminish, at which point maintaining results becomes more important than increasing them.
Don't stop too early
Many companies underestimate how much time and money is required for SEO success.
Success, using any standard or strategy, rarely comes in the first 3 months, even with a healthy SEO budget.
If you don't have enough SEO budget for 6-12 months, it might be better to use the money for this elsewhere. Paying only for the first few months of search engine optimization is often a waste of money, it's not worth anything.
SEO is a long-term marketing tactic, not a quick sales-generation tactic. However, with the right investment and plan for the long term, SEO can be one of the best marketing tactics for ROI.
Source: forbes.com