How Long Will It Take to See SEO Results?

The great advantage of pay-per-click (PPC) marketing is that the results are nearly instantaneous.

You can engage in a PPC campaign in the morning and refine the campaign based on stats in the afternoon. You can know very quickly if you are making more money than you’re spending – or vice versa.

As long as you are making money, all is wonderful. But, it would not be unusual to find that you begin a PPC campaign by losing money and will need to burn through some amount of cash in the testing and refinement process to determine if you really can make money or not, with PPC, for your given product/service and market.

Of course the irresistible allure of generating traffic via search engine optimization (SEO) is that you don’t have to buy the traffic at all. And the downside to SEO is that the results are not as immediate and not as exactly quantifiable.

Two Primary Criteria for Estimating SEO Results

1) Competitiveness of the Market
2) Age of the Domain

If the market is really competitive, then it can take a while before satisfying results are realized. On the other hand, if you are optimizing a website for a specialized niche market with nominal competition, then it is much easier to push a website up the search rankings.

An older domain has more search authority than a new one, so if you are working with a brand new domain, you’ve got a tougher battle ahead of you. When dealing with a brand new domain, it may take at least three months, but often closer to six to nine months, to gain the necessary “trust” for rankings for broad competitive terms. With a more established domain, you should start seeing results much faster.

Further, if you are optimizing a website for a brand name that is well established in an industry, then the opportunities for higher rankings will be more readily translated at a faster rate.

The main point to respect is that SEO is not as immediately satisfying as PPC, in terms of results, and it’s difficult to accurately assess how quickly SEO work can be translated into profit. However, the advantage is that once your traffic increases as a result of your SEO activities, the traffic continues. And of course with PPC, your traffic only continues while you’re paying for it.

In an ideal world, you would incorporate both an SEO and a PPC strategy into your marketing efforts.

The Two Biggest Barriers to Hiring an SEO Pro

There are two barriers that complicate your attempt at finding an SEO professional for your needs.

SEO Hiring Barrier #1

Optimizing websites to improve search engine positioning is predicated upon understanding the ways that search engines utilize complex factors to determine which websites to rank higher. But the exact ways that such are accomplished is not only a highly guarded secret, it’s also continuously being refined and changed by the search engine companies.

Stated another way, the details of the best way to get SEO results for any given website are subject to some misunderstandings, not only among the individuals seeking to hire a professional for guidance, but even amongst SEO professionals themselves. Talk about an opportunity for “The blind leading the blind!”

Case in point: if an SEO professional seeks only to optimize technical factors on your website, without executing necessary offsite actions (such as inbound link building), then a significant portion of potential search ranking opportunity will be left wanting.

SEO Hiring Barrier #2

The reason most businesses are interested in engaging SEO services is to make more money. But there is a broad area between the “strategy” of how to use SEO effectively, and the “execution” of it.

Stated another way, you could potentially hire someone for economical rates to “execute” on-site SEO factors, but you may be missing the boat in terms of what is the best strategy to monetize the very site that you are attempting to improve.

SEO is a marketing channel, but there are SEO consultants who have no marketing background. In other words, you could potentially hire a highly competent technical practitioner who may sincerely execute an SEO campaign for you, but alas, you may see no increase in profits.

Do not fault such an SEO technician.

Such a person is a not a professional marketer.

Case in point: I recently spoke with a potential client who was interested in on-site SEO guidance to improve search ranking and to generate more money from the firm’s website. However, as this person was not a professional marketer, and was interested in keeping costs as low as possible, this person had pre-determined that money could be saved by optimizing only one component of the website. Unfortunately, this component had the least long-term potential for generating ongoing profit. The end result of such an arrangement would yield higher search rankings for the client for the determined area, but not the expected profits. And more to the point, not the return on investment that this businessperson was attempting to maximize.

BOTTOMLINE: There are not only misunderstandings among those tasked with hiring SEO professionals on what to expect, there are also varied perspectives among SEO’s on how to best achieve a given SEO goal. More specifically, because SEO encompasses the execution of many technical factors, the actual strategy of how to make money with SEO may be largely missed if the consultant is technically savvy, but has very little marketing expertise and experience.

What’s the Solution to the SEO Barriers?

It starts with you.

If you happen to be a seasoned and experienced marketer, including with SEO, but don’t have the resources to actually accomplish the necessary actions to achieve what you know needs to be done, then you don’t need to hire an SEO consultant for strategic profit making purposes at all. You simply need to outsource SEO execution. In other words, simply hire someone to put your strategy into practice.

On the other hand, if you are NOT confident about the best ways to use SEO to MAKE MONEY for your business and website, then you would be wise to seek and speak with an SEO professional who not only has experience establishing high search rankings, but whom is also an experienced Internet marketer with a focus on making money and improving your marketing ROI.

Making Connections and Engaging With People

I like this following quote from Frank Watson at Search Engine Watch in regards to search marketing:

You can read and test your way 80 percent into the oh-my-god-space, but the final few steps are done from a greater distance and a bigger commitment of time.

It simply articulates that a lot can be gained in the world of SEO with some vigorous study and application. But that last 20% requires a greater devotion than the earlier 80%.

Further, he states:

Being involved in forums, attending conferences, and reading as much as you can is the essential way to become a skilled practitioner in this space. Make connections and engage with people on the forums or blogs. You may be surprised who you can become.

I would add to these latter sage words that the same concept is pertinent to making an impact within most any industry and serves as a simple statement that encompasses personal networking and social media networking.

Check out the entire post here: There Are No Search Rock Stars.

Chronology of SEO Processes

One of the hazards of search engine optimization is that it is a moving target. Some strategies and tactics that worked in the past, don’t work as well now, or have generally become devalued. Most have changed in relative importance in some way, whether significantly or less so.

Think of “keyword stuffing” which garnered search engine favor a long time ago. That expedient of placing lots of relevant keywords on a page can actually work against the purpose of making a page more attractive to search engines and users.

OK, that’s an obvious example, but what else has changed over the years?

Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz has created and published some graphs of his perspective on the relative value of different SEO processes, over time.

The two graphs depicts the relative value of user-focused SEO tactics as well as search-engine-focused tactics from 1997-2009.

Click here for the link to the article: Terrible SEO Advice: Focus on Users, Not Engines.

The Changing World of SEO

Leave it to Aaron Wall at SEObook to continue to provide innovative perspectives and high-level content on the nature of SEO. Here he provides a large graphic on How the SEO Industry Went Corporate which not only outlines a relative history of SEO and search marketing but also points to the future.  (You may need to click on the graphic again, after it appears, so that it can be enlarged further).

You can also access the graphic via the original blog titled, Corporate SEO Services.

2009 State of SEO Ranking Factors

SEOmoz just released their Search Engine Ranking Factors for 2009. This report is a result of 72 SEO professionals answering surveys about their research and/or understanding of search engines. Although the most important data that surfaced may not be particularly surprising, it’s nevertheless useful to see comparative and quantified perspectives from the top practitioners in the industry. Following are a few of the points.

On-Page (Keyword-Specific) Ranking Factors

• Keyword Use Anywhere in the Title Tag: 66% very high importance
• Keyword Use as the First Word(s) of the Title Tag: 63% high importance

Effectiveness of Link Building Tactics for SEO

• Linkbait + Viral Content Creation: 67% very high value
• Blogging and Engagement with the Blogosphere: 66% high value
• Classic “Create Valuable Content” Strategies w/o Promotional Marketing: 58% high value
• Public Relations (beyond just press release publication): 56% high value

Additional SEO Data

• Question: Which of the following statements best represents your opinion of how Google will treat links as part of their ranking algorithm over the next 5 years?
• 48%: Links will decline in importance, but remain powerful, as newer signals rise from usage data, social graph data & other sources to replace them.

To read all the compiled data, click the following link:
http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

The 60 Minute SEO Site Audit

The 60 Minute SEO Site Audit, by Eric Enge, outlines steps, tools and techniques for gaining a rapid overview of a website’s problems and positive aspects. Eric notes:

This quick check isn’t meant to substitute for a complete and thorough site audit. However, it’s good to do this at the beginning of an audit because it will find a good portion of a site’s major problems. This can allow you to provide critical input to the developers on what they should work on while you move onto a more detailed audit.