When it comes to improving your website’s SEO it is important to keep in mind that you will not see dramatic improvements over night. It takes companies weeks, months and even years to improve their search engine rankings, depending on how much competition they have for their chosen keywords and the actions they have taken to achieve the results. In this article we will provide you with a guide to SEO results and the various different factors which can affect the time it takes to see results.
Organic SEO results can take a while to emerge, however providing you keep up the good work, they will be long lasting.
The dreaded question
One of the most common questions all SEO professional get asked is ‘how long will it take for the SEO strategies to produce results.’ This is a dreaded question as it is quite difficult to give an accurate answer. The time it takes to see results from search engine optimisation campaigns will vary depending on a number of factors such as the age of the website, the amount of competition a business has for their keywords and what SEO techniques they have used in the past.
Whilst this may sound like an evasive answer, it is the truth. The length of time results take to appear will depend on these factors which we will go on to discuss in more depth below.
Age of the website
If you have just set up a brand new domain then it is going to take a while to gain the trust of search engines. You need to spend time building up quality links and filling your website with unique and relevant content. Business owners with new domains should not expect to see results from SEO campaigns straight away. They need to give search engines time to crawl their websites and evaluate their content. This is why a good web design structure that supports crawling is necessary. Search engine crawlers need to be able to find high quality, unique and relevant content on your website that shows you as an expert in your industry.
Keyword competition
The amount of competition you have for your keywords will also have an effect on the time it takes for you to see results from your SEO campaigns. If you are part of a niche market with very specific keywords (with low competition) then you are likely to see results much sooner. Whereas if you are part of an industry with millions of competing businesses, then you are likely to have to wait much longer to see results from your SEO campaigns as the keywords you will be using will be much broader terms. A good SEO consultant will be able to provide you with advice on selecting the best keywords for your company.
Previous SEO attempts
If your website has been penalised or banned by search engines in the past, then you are going to struggle to get positive results from SEO campaigns in the future. The reason why your website may have been penalised in the past could be down to using black hat SEO techniques. This type of SEO is considered unethical and is therefore something all businesses should avoid. In order to stand the best chance at seeing results from your SEO campaigns, it is important to work with a reputable SEO agency that only uses white hat SEO techniques to produce long-term results.
An on-going process
It is important to remember that search engine optimisation is an on-going process. Businesses need to keep it up if they want to maintain or improve their search rankings in the long run. One of the ways you can do this is to constantly update your website or blog with high quality, fresh, unique and relevant content. It is also important to monitor your keywords to ensure that they are the most relevant for your business. You will need to evaluate your SEO campaigns in relation to performance to see if any changes need to be made to your strategy. This is something that an external SEO consultant can help you with.
