In terms of increasing your rankings on search engines, SEO tools and assistance are amazing investments to help you do just that. However, what many don’t realize is that great things take time. Will you see immediate results when you start using SEO to improve your search rankings? The short answer is it depends. Everyone’s SEO experience will be different depending on their specific website and what tools and tactics were implemented in the site before you add anything new into the mix, and they will work at different paces. But when you do start to see the results, it will be worth the wait and the investment. Especially when you think of how much you could be gaining from ranking higher on search engines vs. how much you have to invest in advertising because you haven’t invested in any SEO strategies and therefore aren’t showing up near the top of search engines. But, where do you start when you’re not an expert in SEO? Well, first off you’ll want to ask yourself…
What is your expectation when adding an SEO strategy?
For many business owners, when they think of SEO, they hear ‘top of the search rankings.’ If this is your goal with using SEO tools or having a skilled marketing agency work on your SEO, you might need to re-evaluate your goals. Yes, search rankings matter, but that shouldn’t be your only focus on SEO. You could have a high search engine ranking, but none of that matters if you’re not generating leads and sales. So really, your focus shouldn’t be just on rankings, but on leads and sales as well and how they go hand in hand. Why? Because you can hit that number one spot but, if someone comes to your website and you don’t ask them to buy, you might be missing a crucial step in your customer experience.
How can you reach your SEO goals?
Fist, evaluate your current situation.
Before you start coming up with a billion keywords, you need to evaluate your current situation first with a self-audit. Remember, every website starts from a different place, which is why your race may take longer than others to complete. For example, if you built your website yourself without knowledge of what search engine algorithms want you to include in your website, you could have a lot more work ahead of you as opposed to if you had an experienced web development team build your website where they likely made sure that the site was well optimized when they launched it. If they did optimize it for you before it was launched you might just need an on-going plan to optimize your site in terms of SEO which will take less time than if you’re starting from ground zero. If you are starting from scratch this is completely normal and nothing to be ashamed of, but you’re going to have to put in some work.
Then, start making changes.
First, in the beginning stage, you’ll need to or the SEO team you hire will need to review everything about your current SEO and website. How old is your website? How much content is on it? What are its link profiles like? And so on. Once you’ve done that, now you know exactly what changes you need to make and where to start working. The bigger your site is the longer the to-do list will be as well. Also, the more tools available to your website the longer the list will be as well. What does that mean? Well, WordPress for example, has lots of plugins that are tools that can be used to optimize your site’s SEO. Wix.com or a GoDaddy website builder on the other hand have very minimal tools you can use to optimize your website’s SEO.
How long will it take before you see results?
There is no set timeframe of when you will start to see results. However, typically if you haven’t started seeing any changes within a year, you might need to go back to the drawing board in terms of what tactics you are using. What’s important to take away from this is article is that you shouldn’t give up after a couple of months. Many businesses start using SEO and immediately get discouraged because they’ve put in the time and money over three or four months and still haven’t seen any changes, so they give up. Our word of advice at 3SIXTY Marketing Solutions is this: don’t give up. It’s an on-going, long-term marathon not a 2 minute sprint to success. If you need assistance with your SEO and want to start seeing real results, we can help you. Let us audit your current website and put together a search engine optimization plan for you! To get the ball rolling give our experienced SEO team a call at (705) 252-4180 or take a look at the SEO services we offer.
