Companies have long devoted extensive resources and revenue in the effort to generate leads through SEO. When successful, it can transform the reach of your company, gaining you immense traffic that converts into sales. First, what does SEO even stand for? SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. We consider SEO an art! It’s the work of optimizing a website so that Google ranks it better in search engine results. SEO can be performed on a local, national, or international level. The main difference between local SEO and national SEO is that you’ll optimize your website for the cities, towns, and states you service. 

However, SEO is a complex marketing strategy that takes time to develop. Through technical SEO, content creation, and backlink accumulation, your website can move up in the rankings and start gaining the results you want to see. 

Just when you feel confident with the system, they change it. That’s why we spend about $400 monthly on tools to track positions and audit websites in order to help find new ways to optimize websites. However, an experienced SEO expert also needs to know when not to trust the software because not everything is determined by one round of statistics. You can’t determine results that soon!

If businesses are investing in SEO, their number one question is usually: “How long will it take for me to see results?” Unfortunately, there’s no definitive answer. It takes time and strategy-building to develop the success you want to see in your company, but let’s talk about what contributes to SEO and how long it takes to be successful and see true results.

SEO is Constantly Changing 

First, we need to talk about the tricky part of SEO: it never stops changing. The Google algorithm is constantly updating, meaning a website’s ranking will fluctuate over time. Take this example:

Traditionally, marketing companies target a small group of keywords with the goal of increasing traffic to a website. However, there’s not one keyword that will guarantee success. That’s because it’s easy to become lost in the competition, meaning a website won’t always reach the audience it’s trying to influence. But recently, natural language search (like Siri and Google Assistant) has caused an increase in searches that are phrased with questions instead of individual keywords. The objective then should not be to rank for a few top keywords, but rather to focus on questions and long-tail keywords.

With changes like this and so many more in SEO, you need a marketing company that keeps up with SEO developments and adjusts its strategies accordingly, doing its best to maintain your ranking.

How Are You Measuring SEO Success? 

When a company starts your website’s SEO campaign, it’s important to be transparent about the type of growth you desire. Are you focused on website traffic, or is your number one goal to rank in a particular city? Companies will measure success in different ways, which makes it hard to pinpoint the effectiveness of your SEO strategy. However, we suggest using goals and KPIs to stay on the same page with your marketing agency. 

Goals: The end outcome you are trying to achieve. Typically, a company will be striving to increase its revenue over time.
KPIs: These are the metrics that measure the success of your goals. This could be growth in traffic, rankings, conversion rates, and/or sales.

Where Do You Start with SEO to See Results?

After finding out how you will measure your website’s SEO results, a marketing company will consider your website’s history and current standing. Then, they’ll begin building content and starting keyword research. Over the first 6 months, it’s important to focus on creating keyword-rich content and building a substantial backlink profile. It is also important to ensure a website maintains all the points of technical SEO, including consistent crawling and indexing, high site speed, duplicate content, data markups, and tracking behavior metrics. These are the tactics that we emphasize when starting a new SEO campaign for our clients. 

Top SEO Methods

• Content creation for website pages and blog, backed by in-depth keyword research
• Page speed optimization 
• Responsive design across devices
• Branding to highlight the uniqueness of your business or product
• Link building from quality websites
• Schema markup 
• Google Business Profile and local listing optimization 
• Regular audits to ensure your website is free of errors
• Writing engaging, optimized titles and meta descriptions 

SEO is not a one-time effort; it is an ongoing process to keep your website relevant in the sea of similar content. Whether your SEO efforts are going towards writing new website content or connecting with other businesses for a link-building campaign, investing in regular SEO helps you fight the competition and attract relevant leads to your business or product. 

Ongoing SEO includes:

• Freshening up content every 8-12 months and consistently adding new content.
• Monitoring your search results by viewing website traffic through Google Search Console or Google Analytics.
• Creating a blog and posting regularly to establish yourself as an industry expert and attract new website traffic.
• Staying involved on social media to show the community how your business is unique.
• Checking on the competition to see what changes they are making to their website or business model, and how you rank compared to them.
• Submitting your business to new directories and linking to other businesses to increase your credibility with Google. 

How Long Does it Actually Take to See Results? 

So let’s get down to the real question: How long does it actually take to see results from an SEO campaign? Generally, you’ll start seeing results at 4-6 months. SEO is a long-term marketing tactic, which means that it takes time to build. The reality is that it may take 6-12 months before you see any significant results, and a year or more to see the results you want.

The majority of companies underestimate the time and cost that SEO takes. They want to see a payoff within a few months. If that doesn’t happen, they may conclude that their SEO campaign isn’t working and cancel it. If you invest in SEO, it’s important that you gear your mindset and budget towards a 6-12 month plan. Otherwise, it’s just not worth your investment. 

Keep this in mind. Don’t prioritize speed over sustainability: A well-developed SEO strategy is a worthwhile investment that can work wonders for your company and produce a major ROI. This happens over a long period of time with well-developed strategies; it won’t happen overnight.

Best SEO Tools We Use at Markinuity

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a keyword tool that can crawl even the largest of websites. Ahrefs maps out keyword rankings and monitors any changes in positions. You can find keyword search volume, SERP overview, related keywords, and the difficulty level all within seconds on Ahrefs. Another great feature Ahrefs offers is backlink analysis. The number of backlinks and referring domains is easily trackable with Ahrefs, as well as a website’s domain rating. Ahrefs is a great tool to use not only for client websites but also for tracking competitors.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console gives you a glance at the performance of a webpage and finds any potential threats to the SEO score. You can also use Google Search Console to ensure a website is being indexed by Google. Google Search Console can even help find spammy links that could cause a negative effect on rankings.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is an extremely powerful tool because it tracks all of the traffic coming from a website. This free tool gives you a detailed analysis of things such as new users, sessions, and bounce rates. Google Analytics is a key tool when it comes to seeing how a website is performing overall and showing you the results.

BrightLocal

BrightLocal is an excellent tool for doing SEO. BrightLocal offers local marketing, reputation management, and citation-building tools. This is a one-stop shop to track Google My Business profiles, citations, traffic, results, and reviews.