With the majority of the businesses going digital, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is becoming increasingly popular. Digital marketing & SEO are becoming the go to for every business wishing to succeed online. While every business wants to hire SEO services for their brand, they all come up with the same question, “how long does SEO take to start working?”
A safe answer to this question would be 6 months. 6 months is a considerable amount of time to start seeing good results from your SEO strategy, provided that everything is done in the right manner. If you’re about to kick off SEO for your business, remember that SEO is an investment that needs a lot of work and maintenance, and it won’t yield good results immediately.
Let’s go over the entire SEO process.
The Time SEO Takes To Produce Results
Honestly, there is no precise and accurate answer to the time question. There are hundreds of factors that impact the result you want to see from your SEO efforts. Generally, you’ll start noticing visible results in the first 6 months if you’ve outsourced your work to an expert SEO executive or a digital marketing company. You might have to wait a little longer if you choose to work with someone who’s new to this work. There are sites that ranked within 3-4 months, while some have even seen great results in a month (but that only happens if you’re competing in a very non-competitive industry).
It’s true that there are certain methods that can help your site gain quick results. However, those efforts can only last for a little while. They’ll fail to benefit you in the long run. These are known as “black hat tactics”. You can read more about how these tactics can be bad for your business.
Google is growing smarter by the day and it easily catches all such activities on your site if it notices you’ve ranked high on highly competitive keywords in a short while.
There are some factors that if used well, can help you site rank up on search engines, and if done wrong, you’ll get penalized in the name of using unethical SEO methods.
The most important thing to note here is the fact that SEO is for the long term. If you don’t wish to wait and you’re eager to see results on an immediate basis, its better that you invest on other digital marketing disciplines like PPC campaigns or social media marketing. In order to achieve your goals through SEO, you need to sit tight and wait for things to fall into place.
Let’s face it – everyone prefers immediate results. We won’t mind implementing approaches that show quicker results and are ethical in the eyes of the search engines.
However, SEO is a synonym for consistency. It’s exactly the same as working to achieve your body transformation goals. You obviously want to achieve the goal in a short time, but is that really possible? No. You stick to a particular routine, you eat clean and you follow your exercise plan continually for a long time to get where you want to be. Similarly, you see small gains and results with SEO after every effort you put in month after month.
Let’s shed light on the different factors that impact your SEO strategy.
Website Authority & Domain
There are several factors that have an implicit and indirect effect on the overall SEO. One of these is the Domain age. Although Google has cleared out that domain age does not really affect the SEO, there are still plenty of evidences of sites that have been around on the internet for long, outranking the ones that are new.
There’s a plethora of SEO case studies that demonstrate that older domains are able to rank quicker than the newer ones. Why does this happen?
Old websites generally have a lot more backlinks as compared to the new domains. These backlinks help the website build its authority. On the contrary, new domains have to get a lot of backlinks from appropriate pages, and it takes time to do that. Shortcuts should be avoided at all costs.
When the domains get old, some backlinks will also appear naturally. This happens when the websites’ owners are performing some set of activities like submitting their sites to directories, continually putting up high quality content, and general promotion of their site. All these practices generate a great number of backlinks for the site.
That being said, it must be noted that it’s not just about backlinks. Old domains are rich with content of all types; articles, blogs, images, and even video content. So, even if the site owner hasn’t significantly invested in SEO, they would still be getting a lot of clicks from search engines because people are familiar with their brand. It’s important to know that Google considers content as one of the best ranking factors, which is why aged sites naturally rank on particular keywords.
However, this should not demotivate you if you’re about to kick start your SEO. It might take relatively longer for your site to outrank the oldies but you’ll get there if you keep applying the right SEO strategies.
Website Technicalities
The SEO strategy is obviously the main actor, but at times it alone can’t get the job done. Sometimes its your website. There are several technical issues that need to be identified and rectified immediately before they hurt your site.
Here’s a list of all these errors you might encounter down the road:
- Sitemap errors
- Page loading speeds
- .htaccess errors
- Poor website architecture
- Robots.txt issues
- 404 errors
- Cheap web hosting
- Broken links
- Indexation problems
- Missing meta titles and meta descriptions
And many more.
Link Building
Back linking is one of the most effective SEO techniques to build authority and get rankings. However, it takes time and needs carefully thought-out methods to get links from other sites.
There are several types of link building in SEO but keep in mind to NEVER rely on black hat back linking tactics. You’ll end up paying more when Google hits you with a penalty.
How do you go about it? The best way is to work on building high quality content on a regular basis. You can also leverage social media platforms as you share your content over there, you’ll attract volumes of users that will engage with your content.
Website Design Structure and Architecture
With Google’s new update of Core Web Vitals, the User Experience (UX) element has become more important than ever.
If you provide good experience to your users, Google takes it as a sign that you’re fulfilling their search queries.
Moreover, recent stats show that around 75% of people search from their smart phones, which is why it’s all the more important to make your site mobile responsive. In current times, Google has started to index mobile friendly pages before it indexes the desktop pages.
Furthermore, you need to ensure that the CMS you’re using is search engine friendly and that it’s open for SEO related updates.
Keyword Research & Competitor Analysis
When you jump into a highly competitive industry, you can only make your place by thoroughly studying your competitors.
Once you get a rough idea about your competitor’s strategies, you can take inspiration from there to draft your own. This way, you’ll know how to do your keyword research, how to structure your content, and link profiles. All of these factors are highly important for ranking.
Having difficulties analyzing your competitor’s strategies? You can simplify your work by using effective tools like SEMrush and SpyFu.
Content Marketing
There’s a rich profusion of case studies suggesting that businesses investing in content marketing are significantly outperforming their competitors.
SEO depends on quality content. You need to pen down superb content that really makes you different from everyone else. Think of your target audience, give them something they won’t find anywhere else.
Another important thing to note here is that content should be published consistently to show search engines that you’re working to continually provide value to your customers. Also, while doing all of this, make sure you’re always updated with the current trends and happenings in your industry to curate high performing content.
On-Page SEO
Making the right changes to your on-page SEO elements will quickly get you on top.
These include changes in the meta titles, descriptions, headers, images, tags, and some more things. Updating all of this will let you see good results within a few days. This is why you should focus on fixing your on-page elements before you devise a comprehensive SEO strategy.
Even if you’re new, updating your meta titles and descriptions will get you some visitors to get going. Just make sure these metas are relevant to your potential customers’ search queries.
Wrap Up:
We’ve tried to cover some of the most important elements that need to be taken care of when you devise your SEO strategy. Get this right, and you’ll surely start seeing seo results. When will it happen? We can’t give you an accurate answer, but these are the checkpoints you need to touch before you reach your target destination.
Think you need professional help with your website’s SEO? Get in touch with SEOHUB.pk today. We guarantee you top results as we’ve been successfully helping our clients from various niches get on top spots on search engines, for the past whole decade.