The Time It Takes For SEO To Start Working?
A golden question. And the answer is that it depends. So what are the influencing factors?
- How long your website has been around?
- How much SEO has been done on your site already?
- What shape is the website in?
- How much content is on the website?
- How competitive is the sector yours in?
- and many more.
No two websites are ever starting from the same point, even if they’re in the same industry and competing for the same customers.
However, here is a reasonable assessment of what your SEO efforts might look like during the initial months, and the results you might expect. How quickly we complete the stages are dependent on the hours worked.
Stage 1 – Research and discovery stage, website audit, keyword strategy and planning. If this research can be performed quickly, then technical changes may start being made to the website immediately. In larger projects, a thorough research and discovery phase can last more than one month. For smaller businesses, sufficient research can be completed within 4 hours.
Stage 2 – Begin technical SEO updates. Where we will be making the modification to the website code, structure and content based on site audit results. In some cases, the website needs to be overhauled or rebuilt from scratch.
Stage 3 – Start focusing on content creation. Blogging, FAQs, videos, whitepapers, articles, expanded product and company profile online, etc. Ideally, you would have started on this right after the strategy and planning, but often budgets restrict what can be done at once before any stage 3 activities are approached, your technical infrastructure (stage 1) should be showing scores in excess of 80%.
Stage 4 – Continued content creation, technical optimisation of the website, and development of a healthy link building plan (This may include cleaning up low-quality links). By this stage, you could expect to see a marked increase in rankings, traffic, and lead generation. It won’t be anywhere close to the improvements you should achieve 12 months into your SEO efforts, but it should be significant enough that you know SEO is working.
Stage 5 – By stage 5 or perhaps earlier in the process we will be looking to incorporating social media & promotion into your plan in order to amplify your content, our prefered method of promotion for brand discovery is YouTube Video. On a recent YouTube campaign in the display network, we had 18,000 views of under 30 seconds which were free. And 5,000 paid for views of over 30 seconds. We did this on an Ad spend a budget of £45. The same budget in the search network would have generated a maximum of 30 clicks! Any increase of direct traffic to your website from social media campaigns or paid promotion can lead to a healthy, growth to your link profile, which as a form of targeted promotion generate leads in itself.
Stage 6 – By stage 6 we should be seeing a significant improvement in your traffic, by this stage we would be examing your CRO conversion rate optimisation to improve upon how traffic is converting into leads and/or sales. From this point on, our activities are generally focused on content creation, promotion, targeting and tracking. The specific activities can vary and are dependent on the type of business you own.
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