With a bit of patience, you’ll still be reaping the results in years to come!
SEO is one of the most effective marketing strategies, but not everyone is immediately on board. Why? Because a good SEO strategy that will continue to deliver results in the future is a long-term strategy. It takes 6 to 12 months before you’ll see clear results. And by clear results we mean more visitors, more leads, and more revenue. As soon as you get started, you’ll see your website climb the search result rankings slowly but surely, but only when you reach the top 10 will you see the best results.
Why Does SEO Take Such a Long Time?
The goal of a long-term SEO strategy is to improve organic rankings in search results and build a strong online presence, both of which take time. There are a few reasons as to why that is:
- Organic indexing by search engines: search engines, like Google, run on complex algorithms. It takes a while for the search engine to find your website, index it, and give it an appropriate ranking in search results based on your page’s relevance and website’s authority.
- Competitive environment: competition online can be intense, especially for popular market segments. It will take time to make yourself stand out from your competitors concerning both the quality of your content and your authority.
- Content creation and optimisation: creating valuable content that is relevant to your audience does not happen overnight. You then also have to optimise that content for search engines, which is a continuous process requiring patience and consistency.
- Link building: link building is an important part of SEO, but collecting those links organically takes a long time. You can gain backlinks through outreach, content marketing, and forging connections with other websites.
- Technical optimisation: another important SEO factor is the technical side of your website. Things like page speed, responsive web design, website architecture, and keeping your website up to date all contribute to your search result rankings.
- Algorithm updates and changes: Google and other search engines regularly change and update their algorithms to increase the quality and relevance of their search result pages. Those changes can impact your website and rankings, which could require changes to your SEO strategy to correct.
Can you speed up the process?
Have you found an SEO agency promising to achieve 10 top 3 positions in only 2 months? Don’t celebrate too soon! Results like that are very hard, if not impossible, to achieve without the use of Black Hat SEO techniques. That, or that agency has cracked the Google algorithm, which seems highly unlikely.
There are of course also a few White Hat SEO techniques that will deliver results more quickly than others, but which ones those are depends on your project. We don’t mind sharing the ones that have worked best for us in the past, but we can’t guarantee that they will speed up your results.
- Focus on long-tail keywords: long-tail keywords are a lot more specific and generally attract less competition than short-tail keywords. By including plenty of long-tail keywords in your strategy, your website could climb the rankings more quickly and attract more visitors.
- Optimise for local searches: if your business is active in a specific area, like a bakery, plumber, or barber, try focussing on local searches in your SEO strategy.
Tip: don’t disregard keywords with low search volumes, especially not if one lead covers the cost of your web page. It is usually a lot easier to achieve high rankings for low-volume keywords.
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