Why SEO Is Not An Immediate Fix
By Vanessa Salvia, 3/15/11
For a small business that is just getting established, spending any amount of money is difficult, and when the business owners spend what may be anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars on search engine optimization, they expect to see an immediate return on that investment. The truth is though, that it often takes months to reveal the impact of an SEO campaign.
Think about an SEO campaign as a marketing campaign focused toward a very unique the audience: the search engines. What I mean by "marketing to a search engine" is that with a good SEO campaign, you are making continual small changes on your site that are noticeable to a search engine. These changes may include more pages (increasing content), greater keyword concentration, and increasing incoming links. The search engine (such as Google) visits sites on a semi-regular basis; it visits a site more frequently if it sees regular changes on the site. If the search engine visits the same site and sees no substantive changes on the site for months at a time, it will gradually over time visit that site less frequently, and the site will most likely see a concurrent slide down the results pages as time goes by.
You might ask the question, how long does SEO take. Well, how long does marketing take? A good branding and marketing campaign develops slowly and requires maintenance, to build upon early successes, keep reaching out to new customers, and keep the current customers engaged. With marketing a small business, you don't just send out one email blast and then stop, considering your marketing job done.
Making small but significant changes gradually over time is the way to keep a search engine "interested in your site," which is very similar to how you would approach a marketing campaign.
When you're just getting started with a website, there are some things you can do to improve your search engine ranking. We've discussed the topic of "Ranking As Quickly As Possible With A New Site" in an article. What you are looking for are quick ways to jump-start the things that the search engine is going to look for to establish the credibility of your site, which can be aided in part by increasing incoming links from other websites and blogs (reach out to people so they link to you), establish realistic keywords that you can rank for, establish a baseline for your site metrics (through the major search engine's webmaster tools accounts), and utilize Google Product Feed if you are a retail site. The article gives lots of other tips to try to get your site on the search engine results pages as quickly as possible.
Generally speaking, for a new site or a site just beginning a comprehensive SEO campaign, 3 to 6 months to really see an improvement in most sites is a reasonable amount of time. In competitive industries, it may take even longer, up to a couple of years. One area in which a site can see faster achievement is in the area of local search. If there is limited competition in a geographic region and your site is well-optimized for your local geographic terms, your site can begin moving up the results page in as little as a month or so.
If you feel that your site is struggling, first take advantage of a strong local search presence through Google Maps, Google Places (and Yahoo and Bing, of course), Yelp reviews, and optimizing your on-site content (page titles and keyword concentrations) to include your local geographic names. Then lay the groundwork for a broader campaign by choosing your keywords carefully and increasing your content wherever you can. Consistently reach out to other bloggers and related websites so that they know about you and will be more likely to link to you. Create articles and blog posts for your site on a regular basis, to give people something to link to and for search engines to "digest" when they come to your site.
Powering through your site and optimizing all the pages of your new site is an important step and can be a big boost. But it is only part of a comprehensive SEO program. SEO should be considered a life-long engagement for your site. Every time you add content or products, it should be added to your site with SEO in mind (keywords, related content such as blog posts, images and descriptions, incoming links). Without this ongoing maintenance, the search engines will simply not find what they "want" in your site. Keep in mind too, that your competitors are likely going to be thinking the same way that you are, by adding products and content with the intent of making the search engines interested in their sites, so you've got to do what you can to be aware of what your competitors are doing and stay one step ahead.
Good quality SEO does cost money and does take time. It also does work. The more competitive an industry is, the more challenging SEO can be, but serious improvement can be seen. Just give it time and patience, and above all, don't consider the SEO job done just because you hire somebody one time. You may see an immediate lift, but your SEO efforts will require ongoing energy to ensure that your site is getting maximum placement in the search engines.
