When Can I Expect My SEO Strategy to Deliver Results?

Like any other form of marketing, digital marketing is a long game. It is especially true when referring to search engine optimization or SEO results. We understand this concept all too well, as it is similar to farming. No farmer expects to plant seeds and yield a harvest the next day. Instead, everything they did in the spring doesn’t come to fruition until the fall harvest.

The same is true with SEO. Marketers understand that every digital marketing campaign is about planting seeds in the market and yielding a high ROI several months down the road. SEO is about careful planning, timing, and execution to get the desired results. As a business owner, the desired result of a carefully crafted SEO strategy is simply this: Converting qualified leads into loyal customers.

Business owners who find the most success with SEO are the ones who partner with their marketing team to develop a strategy that will produce results down the road – not now. They understand that consistent planning and execution will get them more qualified leads and increase their revenue.

This is the reality of marketing and why marketers spend a considerable amount of time thinking about long-term marketing strategies for their clients.

There is a huge misconception about digital marketing that plagues business owners. It is that digital marketing – simply because it’s digital – can and should give you overnight results.   But it’s simply not true, and there are logical reasons why. Let’s dig a little deeper.

How quickly your SEO strategy delivers results depends on a wide range of key factors. While there are a lot of theories and guess as to how long it could take for you to see results, even the best SEO specialists out there cannot guarantee when or if your SEO strategy will be successful.

According to leading experts at top marketing companies like SEMRush, Moz, Yoast, Surfer SEO, Forbes, Google Analytics, and nearly every other leading marketing firm, you should expect to see results from your SEO strategy within 3 to 12 months.

Here’s a breakdown of what leading experts say:

As you already know, digital marketing requires a financial investment. Chances are you have a sizable budget already carved out for your SEO strategy, and because you’re spending all that money, you want results. It’s easy to get impatient due to the size of your budget. So, it’s no surprise that you would ask,“Why is it taking so long to get results?”  It’s a fair question.

Keep in mind that there is no single factor that determines ROI or how long it will take for your digital marketing team’s efforts to pay off. Instead, highly effective websites depend on a variety of factors that you need to understand a little better.

Keyword Difficulty

Keyword difficulty (or “competition”) is a metric that your team uses to determine how difficult it is to rank for a keyword. Assessing keyword difficulty can help you determine whether or not it’s worth your time and money to optimize an organic page for keywords.

Keyword difficulty indicates the number and quality of backlinks to the top ten pages in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) for that keyword – or how competitive those pages are based on how strong their backlinks are. SEO keyword tools gauge the “competitiveness” of a SERP by looking at the domain authorities (or domain ratings) and page authorities (or URL ratings) of the indexed pages.

The biggest challenge for SEO specialists is finding the right balance between keywords that are highly popular and keywords that give your website leverage in Google search results.

Here’s what you basically need to understand:

The keyword in your industry may be the most popular keyword in your area. You might be tempted to set it as your primary keyword. But, if it’s the most popular keyword, that means everybody’s using it therefore you are competing against all the other business owners using that word.

A better strategy may be to use a keyword that is not so competitive. It could help you rank better if your competitors are not using it as much.

Inbound Links

An inbound link is a link coming from another site to your own website. Inbound is generally used by the person receiving the link. Inbound links are also referred to as backlinks. While the concept of inbound links is easy to understand, it is incredibly difficult to master. Plus, it’s a time-consuming process.  When applied properly to your website, inbound links can be rewarding.

The biggest challenge to inbound links is developing relationships with other webmasters who are willing to add links to your website on their website.

As you might guess, the goal is to find websites that pull in lots of traffic to give your links greater visibility. More inbound links will help you achieve SEO success more quickly. But they also have to be good quality and come from websites that are relevant to your business.

Domain Age and Authority

Before we go too deeply into this one, let’s define the terms.

Domain Age

How old your website’s domain or URL is. It’s how long your domain has existed. Google can verify your domain’s age from the WHOIS registration data or by crawling your website.

Domain Authority

Predicts how likely your website is to rank in search engine results. Domain authority scores range from one to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater likelihood of ranking.

Although your domain authority score does not directly influence your SEO ranking, it can still impact the results of your SEO campaigns. Higher domain authority scores usually correlate with higher search engine rankings.

Your Domain Authority is important because it is representative of how you rank on search engines. It helps you better understand your site’s credibility in the eyes of the search engines and you can see how you compare to your competition.

Website Update, Promotion, and Engagement

There is no such thing as a finished website. Your site will always be in a state of development, as you add, delete, or update content and structure. Whether you are adding blogs, services, images, news, pages, or other elements, you should always have something new to offer your audience.

Furthermore, you need to promote every site update. For example, if you do a weekly blog, you should promote it on every online platform you occupy. Announce the blog on your social media sites, partner sites, email campaigns, text messages, and everywhere else.

If you add a new web page, the whole world needs to know about it. You may think that the new problem page you added to your site is insignificant or that viewers will just pick up on it. However, if you don’t promote the problem page, you miss out on reaching an entirely new audience.

The bottom line is that if you don’t promote and update your website regularly, it won’t rank. Google rewards sites that contain fresh content regularly.

Now that you have a better understanding of SEO strategy, the SEO timeline, and what contributes to your website’s performance, you may be wondering how to move forward.

If you are like most business owners, you outsource your marketing efforts to a digital marketing agency.

The best place to start is by sitting down with the digital marketing team and having an open and honest conversation about what to expect over the next 12 months. A trustworthy marketer will speak candidly about the SEO process and dispel any false misconceptions about your website’s performance.

The marketing team will (and should) keep you updated with analysis and reports on how well your SEO strategy is working.

Last, it is understandable that you may feel that you are wasting your marketing dollars because you don’t see instant results. However, you need to understand that marketing is a long-term proposition with few early wins. Don’t quit in the middle of your marketing campaign. As mentioned earlier, if you need leads right now, consider running paid ad campaigns while your SEO strategy matures early on.

If you bounce around from one marketing agency to another, you’ll never see a marketing strategy come to fruition. That’s where you waste thousands of dollars and never get a return on your investment.