One of the greatest challenges to SEO is to see results as soon as possible. We all know SEO campaigns can span months at a time. Why does it take so long in the first place?
To answer this question correctly, we need to know that SEO is not done in a vacuum. There are competitors constantly pushing their SEO campaign, and SEO results are dependent on what the campaign goals are.
Different businesses have different circumstances with different marketing campaign goals. For example:
- E-commerce goes after transnational intent product keywords vs. a general dentist looking for organic search visibility in their city or area
- A teeth whitening product company is looking to increase their organic search traffic year-over-year vs. a dental practice with multiple locations looking to rank specifically for cosmetic dentistry services
Depending on what your goals are, estimations will be highly dependent on the scale, amount of work, and SERP competition.
Although giving you an exact answer may do you injustice, within 3 to 6 months, progress can be seen. In order to speed things up, skilled SEO specialists will prioritize after “quick wins” optimization opportunities to improve keyword rankings.
By knocking them out immediately, we can see a lot of great progress in terms of organic search visibility (total keywords) and ranking improvements. Although improvements to organic search traffic is great, identifying high-intent, low-volume keywords is what will generate a high quality lead that businesses need to grow.
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is another aspect that SEO agencies understand. You can rank impressively on a high volume keyword (though this shouldn’t be the primary, senseless goal), but if your site isn’t set up to close potential leads, then it won’t help at all.
Content production and improving the topical authority of your site is another key aspect that SEO specialists focus on. Creating a few content pieces right away or over time can help indicate to Google that the target topic is what you are all about. With improved relevancy, you can rank sites without any backlinks building whatsoever.
Another factor to consider in SEO time to see results is how new your business domain is. Your domain is the address that people visit to find you. In Updriven’s case, it would be Updriven.ca. New sites need to wait for search engines to index them. They will also have to wait for a while to get out of what is known as the Sandbox. This is a theory that new sites are held back and rank poorly for some time. The idea is that search engines want to avoid abuse and manipulation from SEO specialists. It’s also the reason why SEO takes a long time: the slow timespan is a preventative measure against serious manipulation and abuse of the search results.
Paying more for SEO may not necessarily speed it up. Additional resources by upgrading your SEO services can help increase the performance in multiple keyword clusters.
Keyword clusters can be geo-based (say, Toronto and Mississauga) or product/service-specific (say, orthodontist service and dental veneers). Single-location practices can focus on the smallest package, and upgrade at a later date if they have multiple locations or are interested in ranking for multiple services. Multi-location practices can test smaller packages, but will ultimately want to ramp up further resources towards their marketing campaign goals because they cannot afford to wait.
