Online marketing agency comes with So many questions like “ How long does SEO take to show results? ” This is a fair question to ask because for such a big investment in your digital market one should know when to expect the results input incured.
Unfortunately, it’s not easy just give a definitive answer. Rough timetables and estimates are certainly possible, but even those will differ for every business. There are many factors at play here. But first, let’s first look at search engine optimisation has evolved into an intricate digital marketing task.
How SEO used to be compared to what is today.
Long long ago (internet time) the strategy was to identify ranking keywords that were the most relevant to your business, received the most traffic, and were not too competitive. It used to be you would figure out 5-10 keywords that were your ‘’ and would bring in the majority of your traffic.
When someone comes to us and says “I need to be number one for some chosen keyword,” we know they’re stuck in some digital illusion. That keyword strategy is wrong, because with rarer and rarer exceptions, there is no one keyword, and no small group of keywords, that is going to drive a lot of traffic to your website—at least not compared to what you can get from the long tail of search. The bottom line is that if you’re focusing on a small group of generic keywords, you’re probably not being found by most of the people who are searching for you.
Google’s Rankbrain has changed the way people search which has seen SEO today being increasingly driven by natural language search, that is, people doing searches that are more like normal questions than two or three keywords.
This is because people are including more detail in their typed searches as they seek to find what they’re looking for faster. These keywords are much easier to rank for, because they’re not as competitive and therefore traffic from these keywords converts at a higher rate. And in aggregate, the number of searches in the long tail often adds up to many more searches than you would get from your “star keywords.”
Therefore the objective, when it comes to rankings, is not to rank for a few top keywords that remain the same over time, but to focus on a much larger number of natural language searches that is growing and changing rapidly.
To people unfamiliar with SEO, it often seems complicated, unpredictable, and questionable in value. SEO’s black-hat history and somewhat steep learning curve have led to countless business owners writing the search engine optimisation strategy off entirely. Those who have ventured into the waters of SEO without much foreknowledge on what it takes to run a successful campaign are often nervous or surprised when three months—a sufficient amount of time to test most marketing campaigns—passes and there are no results to show of or results are unimpressive.
Any SEO expert will tell you this isn’t a cause for concern; it takes time to see SEO results. But how long does it actually take, and what kind of results can you expect to see?
What Do We Mean By “SEO Results”?
SEO is about increasing the chances your web pages will show up as high as possible in the Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) when a user searches for a keyword related to your business. As your rankings increase to meaningful positions in SERPs, you’ll gain more traffic for your site, which means more brand visibility and sales. That’s what we mean by “SEO Results”.
Why There’s a Misconception between SEO Success and Failure
When watching in awe as a juggler effortlessly keeps multiple balls in the air? Dexterous and agile, he tosses them high, flicks them around, even does fancy stuff with them and still, not one of them bounces on the ground. You come home and decide to try it.
But even with two balls, it doesn’t work the same way. You fail. And fail again. “Juggling is tough,” you tell yourself. But it isn’t. Not if you learn how to do it. And then practice doing it. SEO is like that, too. Without knowing how it works, you’ll fail spectacularly often.
The early stages of an SEO campaign usually require a significant investment with little payoff; your rankings will probably either fail to cross the threshold of the first page, or will only apply to non-competitive, low-traffic keywords.
For business owners or marketers unfamiliar with the SEO real estate, a first month that yields little or no traffic increase may seem like a failure, when in fact there are significant improvements happening across the board, hidden from plain view. This is why keyword research and rank tracking is so important for measuring the true progress of an SEO campaign. You’ve got to know what keywords to target and track, and you’ve got to track and graph them over time to get a realistic picture of your campaign’s progress.
What Controls How Soon You Can Realise SEO Results?
Alright, after clearing the definition environment, let’s take a look at the six main variables that can influence how soon you see results from an SEO marketing campaign.
1. Level of competition on targeted keywords.
Keywords are words and phrases most often entered by users when doing searches online. The more often words are searched for, the more “competitive” Google considers them to be.
Have you looked at the metrics to figure out how much competition you’ll have on the targeted niche or keyword? If you have a strong competitor or many competitors dominating the rankings for the keywords you were hoping to target, it’ll probably take you longer to see results.
Picking a highly specific niche with few or no direct competitors should give you faster SEO results. An SEO competition analysis can help you understand who your competitors are, what the strengths of their campaigns are, and what sort of investment it will take to gun them down.
2. Strategic keyword research choices.
There are several strategic choices that will affect how quickly you see results—and how strong those results are. This will you start by targeting one pivotal keyword phrase, or hedge your bets among a number of different keywords.Those keywords can be high-traffic, high-competition, or low-traffic, low-competition? Proper keyword research at the very start of your campaign is absolutely crucial to its success.
3. Your Website’s Content Optimisation.
Considering Google’s recent communications and from our own researches, SEO is about more than on-site tricks and inbound links. To win Google algorithm’s attention in the current SEO environment, you need to have remarkable content pieces, a thriving social media presence and demonstrated user engagement on your site. If your website is a pain to users, you’re going to struggle to achieve any of these three factors, because consumers have developed a sixth sense for filtering out sites that are in it for the wrong reasons.
4. Your investment is a big deal.
The total amount of money, time and effort you put into your SEO strategy will have a major bearing on the speed of your achieved results. Put simply, you get what you pay for. Investing more will help you see better results faster. It should be also considered that how much your competitors are spending is of equal importance. If you are an operator of a business – spending $1,000 a month on SEO. Having an outflow of cash as a direct outcome of which is that you are experiencing no results. It could have been today’s scenario if your competitor had not spent $2,000.
5. Your Domain Authority
From Google’s perspective, domain authority is like your website’s reputation as a thought leader. The search engine uses your domain authority to make sure you can provide the highest-quality content about your specific subject matter. If you do, you’ll have good domain authority and Google will boost your content’s rankings. If you don’t, you’ll have bad domain authority and they won’t rank your content.
According to MOZ, to calculate a websites’ domain authority, you have to consider over 40 factors, like root domains and total number of inbound links. Websites with a large amount of high-quality inbound links, like Wikipedia, have the highest domain authority. New websites with little to no inbound links typically have a domain authority of one.
Now, the higher the DA, the faster you’ll be able to rank and see your SEO Results. If your domain is new, it’s going to be darn hard to get up there.
6. Are you willing to invest time in learning.
SEO is not the only solution that is needed. It is difficult to make this clear for newbies. SEO is a process that never ends. The wild claims of self-made experts and shady ones who promise “rank #1” and quick-fix solutions mislead many decision-makers who think cheating SEO is just a one-time deal and never to be repeated. This attitude is the reason your SEO strategy is destined to fail.
The biggest strength of SEO is that it becomes more effective over time as long as you continue to maintain and learn from your strategies. To abandon the effort will limit the extent of your success — after all, your competitors will never stop trying to beat you. SEO strategies effectively implemented will yield results over weeks, months, and even years… But it is only by nurturing your success continuously that you will achieve the desired results.
It is also clear that you must be prepared for a steep learning curve to SEO. If you are the one who is just learning SEO, you will make mistakes and it takes a while to get rid of them.