SEO: Be Patient, Be Clear & Be Realistic

Beginner Level

There are certain SEO projects that a smart Search Optimizer will avoid at all costs. They are inevitably the projects where a client wants to be ranked for a broad term in just a few months, or is venturing into an extremely competitive landscape and expects to see results immediately, for a small price.

Before you set unrealistic expectations for yourself, or set unreachable goals for your agency or in-house Optimization team, keep in mind the 3 golden rules of SEO:

• SEO takes time. Especially in competitive environments.
• Be very clear of what words you want to optimize your site for (including geo-targets).
• SEO is meant to drive prospects to your site. It’s your sites job to help convert them to customers. So, make sure you have an aesthetically pleasing, easy to use website.

Give SEO time to work. In our agency, we will not even take on a project for less than 90 days, as it takes at least that long to start to see results. Any clients that want a 90-day optimization are expected to provide a short and concise keyword list they would like to optimize their site for. You cannot optimize a site for hundreds of keywords in less than 90 days. Check your competitive landscape and your Google PageRank to see where you stand on engines prior to deploying SEO techniques. If you receive monthly reports from your agency, take the time to understand & read them each month. Work with your SEO team to fine tune your strategy based on the data in front of you.

It is also important to note the importance of developing back link programs. Every time a website links to you it will increase your link popularity, and is a very large factor in securing top organic rank for your keywords. The more highly trafficked and trusted sites that link to your site - the better. That said, this should be an integral part of your SEO strategy. The catch here is that developing and maintaining a program like this is EXTREMELY time consuming. If you cannot do it in house, allow an agency at least 120 days to fully develop this program and reap its rewards.

Clarity & Control

Ask yourself: What keywords do I want my site to rank for? If you are having problems coming up with an initial list, recruit your employees or even customers. Provide this list to your SEO team. They will check on related terms that are frequently searched and add them to the list where appropriate. Work with them to refine and finalize the list of terms. If you only have 6 months in which to work with them, make sure the list does not contain hundreds of keywords and that they are not too broad in nature. Be clear, be concise and focus your efforts. This will allow better control over the elements of the site you have optimized for a specific keyword. It will also allow you to show results at a faster pace.

For larger websites, try creating "Tiers" in which you will identify terms of the most importance (where Tier 1 may contain 20 terms of the top priority and Tier 5 may contain 20 terms of a lower priority). We tend to see better success rates for "long-tail" search terms. These tend to convert much better as the search is more specific. Someone searching for "child care services in Newark, NJ" or "HP LaserJet 1020 Printer" is generally further ahead in the purchase/sales process and wants easy answers right now. However you decide to generate and prioritize your keywords, just make sure you are concise and allow the appropriate amount of time to optimize the site for those keywords.

In Reality

We’ll be honest….we do usually see SEO techniques take hold, and keywords get ranked on page 1 or 2 in engines(for terms a site never ranked for before) within 15-30 days. We begin measuring the "time to rank" after new or modified SEO pages have launched on the site. This timeframe is for very specific, long-tail terms, not anything competitive or broad in nature. Keep in mind, it can take engines 2-3 weeks just to crawl & index the pages on your site. After that, you need to fine tune your SEO strategy to maintain & improve the ranking over time. As a final tip, we will urge you to keep an eye on your competitors. Once they see you are making a move into prime search engine real estate, they will aggressively try keep up with you. Complacency equates to a drop in rank, so make sure you stay on top of your internet presence (and your competitor’s)!

For a more comprehensive overview, download our SEO whitepaper.

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