One of the biggest challenges facing any business undertaking SEO is understanding how long it takes. SEO should be considered like any other traditional marketing item – it can take time for meaningful results to filter through. The number one thing to remember is that SEO is a marathon not a sprint. And if your website is new, then you’ll have to be even more patient.
A new website won’t just pop up into the search engine results overnight without some SEO basics applied to the site first. Following that, search engines then have to find and index your site. And even once they’ve indexed it, it’s often another 3-6 months before any meaningful results occur.
Unfortunately, in most cases, results are not going to happen overnight. There are a number of external variables that are out of your control that can play a part on how quickly and successfully your website climbs up the ranks.
Firstly, the search engine algorithms are constantly changing as Google, Yahoo! and Bing endeavour to continually serve the most relevant search results to its users. Therefore, it’s highly beneficial to outsource your SEO to a SEO company who would continually monitor these changes in the algorithm.
Secondly, the competitiveness of the industry and search terms that you are targeting can also influence your ability to move up the rankings with ease. Generally broad search terms, such as “events” or “cars” will be much more competitive and more difficult to rank for than specific, targeted keywords that are relevant to your business and your website, for example “corporate events Brisbane” or “cars for sale Brisbane”. Usually, it will be much easier and quicker to rank for specific keywords that are less competitive and more relevant to your business. Additionally, if you choose your keywords strategically, you’ll also be more likely to get much more traction and draw high quality traffic to your website.
Finally, there’s no way to control what SEO tactics your competitors are using. Therefore it’s vital that you employ a long term SEO strategy to ensure that your website is constantly optimising against your competitors. If you stop applying SEO to your website but your competitors continue with their SEO, it won’t take long before you drop out of the ranks as your competitors overtake you.
In most cases, SEO is not going to happen overnight. The reason for this is because of the number of variables that cannot be controlled. However, by putting the right strategies in place, and by keeping an ongoing long term view of SEO, you’ll start to see meaningful, worthwhile results and add value to your business.
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I heard it was 1 month last time i checked with a client…. i don’t believe if you have a strategy, a decent website and some original content that it will take that 3-6 months.
But 3-6 months is a good time frame for any marketing campaign, any longer with no results means something is wrong either the strategy or the targeting and any less and you will get the benefits but short change the company or consultant who you have engaged as the results will continue to show after they have finished.
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This was my action plan for getting my site setup and indexed asap in major search engines:
- Built on Wix and purchased domain name URL (http//:www.BrisbaneGojuKarate.com);
- Setup Analytics;
- Register in local directories (Hot Frog, TrueLocal, MyLocal, Yellow Pages, DLook);
- Submit URL to Google, Bing and Yahoo;
- Ask affiliated sites to add my URL to their links pages;
- List on Google Places, Setup Google Adwords.
My site was completed on 1 April and was first indexed by Google on 10 April. I kept a record of how often it was crawled by keeping a record of the cache history and found it was happening every 5 days.
I think listing on Hot Frog was one of the best directories because as soon as you list in Hot Frog you show up in google search results when searching directly for your domain name.
Originally I thought it would take 1-3 months which is what most people were saying on the Wix forums but yeh…10 days. Was pretty happy. I was also pretty active on the Wix forums which meant I had a lot of my traffic coming from Wix referrals which would have increased my exposure to wix crawlers.
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I built a site for my cousin and as soon as google indexed it (under a week) it was number one for it’s keywords – gas mechanic brisbane – and top 5 for a whole lot of other gas/lpg mechanic type terms.
I’m not saying that’s how long it should take though, I was completely amazed myself, I expected it to take a lot longer. But that’s the result of thinking of SEO from the very beginning.
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A competitive keyword will take longer at the initial stages than a website that has non competitive keywords. I have built a site in a non competitive industry and within one week I am on page one for my chosen keyword. I like to view SEO as investing in the long term health of the business…a bit like investing in machinery. If your machinery is not performing then your business is not running to the capacity you require to be profitable.