Borrowing from a Chinese proverb: The best time to invest in SEO services was yesterday. The second best time is today.
There’s actually a great deal of truth to this. The short answer as to how long SEO takes is we may start seeing small victories even just one month into an SEO campaign. However, SEO is a long-term digital marketing strategy. But wait. Invest in SEO services now? Does that even make sense given our current economic situation?
Believe it or not, business is still happening out there. I’m seeing client leads in my inbox every day that originated from their websites, search engine optimization and being found in an internet search.
SEO has been and continues to be a cornerstone digital marketing strategy for companies in virtually every industry. With an investment (either time or money) in SEO services comes improved search engine rankings. With improved search engine rankings comes more visibility. More visibility means more potential buyers and leads. Low risk, high reward, what’s not to like?
I’ve personally seen the effects of how SEO can transform a business. One of my early clients was an owner of an industrial heating company on the verge of retirement due to a lack of business. That was six years ago, and retirement has been put on hold thanks to a new website, and an SEO strategy that has brought in enough new business to put off retirement.
In another case, I had a client (manufacturing company) call me up four months into their SEO campaign and said “Scott, my employees have a complaint about your service”. This definitely caught me off guard. “Wow. OK. What’s wrong?”, I asked. He replied, “My guys were complaining that we should’ve done this sooner!” He then went on to say “I can’t tell you the difference this has made for our business”.
He followed with examples, but you get the idea. I vividly recall during a conversation with this company. I asked them if their website was producing any lead activity for them. Their answer: “we’ve had one lead” (their website dated back to 1998). Things are much different for them today.
What’s interesting, is this is a company in an industry that wouldn’t normally come to mind when thinking about SEO services. Not only that, he blew me off for over a year because all of their business came from “word of mouth”. I knew I could help. I wanted to help. He wasn’t interested. That one internet lead is what made him reconsider SEO as a marketing strategy. Needless to say, it has paid off.
I’ve got a great deal of belief and confidence when it comes to SEO as I know the impact it can have (and HAS had) on our clients. However, I do expect that the SEO playing field is about to become more crowded and competitive. Why?
Does it still make sense to invest in SEO services, given the Coronavirus situation? Think about this. The internet is the one sales and marketing channel that is and will remain freely open for business.
As a result of this, companies are considering options to improve their status online, and SEO is at the top of the list for many. We’ve already seen in increase in inbound SEO inquiries, and I suspect many other SEO agencies are as well.
Yes, some companies will make knee-jerk reactions and pull the plug on SEO services or digital marketing services altogether. Whatever the reason, it’s a decision that most likely isn’t going to help their future sales efforts.
Other companies will adapt to our new business climate and choose to hire an SEO agency. Ultimately they’ll claim those top rankings once occupied by companies who made the decision to discontinue their SEO services.
No they’re not. Hanging onto search engine rankings can be as difficult, or in some cases more difficult than it was to achieve them. By ceasing all SEO strategies that earned you rankings, you’re likely to be overrun by other companies who are more active online.
In light of the COVID-19 epidemic, companies who’ve been on the sidelines are forced to find new ways to generate business. How do you generate new business on the internet? Generally speaking, you’ve got paid advertising (Google AdWords, retargeting, Facebook ads, etc.), email marketing, and then you’ve got search engine optimization.
In other words, you’ve got to get busy out on the internet. That 3 year old blog post and 10-year old website isn’t going to get the job done.
If you’re on LinkedIn, or visit company blog pages, have you seen an uptick in content writing and marketing videos since the Coronavirus lockdowns? I sure have! People and companies haven’t given up.
They’re looking for new ways to generate interest in their products and services. Content is like food for the search engines, and creating fresh, new, informative content is a great way to give your SEO a boost.
So let’s go back to the original question at the top of this article.
Here’s one answer. “It depends”.
Here’s another: “Define results“.
What’s your goal? More website traffic? More inbound phone calls? More email signups? Page one or bust, or is an upward trend in keyword rankings what you’re after? In each of these cases, success would be defined and measured differently.
After we gain a bit of insight into your current situation, and your goals for SEO, we’re often able to make an educated ballpark guess, but the reality is there are no guarantees when it comes to SEO.
What’s your competitive landscape look like?
If your competitors are ten times your size and investing thousands each month with a top SEO agency, that’s definitely going to have an impact on our short-term success.
Take “Used cars” for example. If you were to reach out and tell us you wanted to be on page one nationally for “used cars”, the reality is that just isn’t going to happen. It doesn’t matter if you were to throw $50k per month at SEO, you’re just not going to unseat Carfax, Autotrader or Cars.com.
When we consider that Google has over 200 ranking factors that affect your SEO, as well as your competitive landscape, and your goals we’ve got a few questions to answer before jumping in.
With SEO, the sheer number of variables make this such a difficult-impossible question to answer. Not only do we have to factor in your own website, but we also have to explore those same variables on your competitor’s websites.
Who’s doing well in your space and why? Because of that, we’re not able to give you an exact timeline. However, in general we CAN give you an idea of how and when we should start to see some improvements.
Step one is to do a thorough analysis of your online footprint, including both your on-site SEO and your off-page SEO. What is off page SEO?
Think of your off-page SEO as the roads, bridges and highways that lead directly to your business (website). In the physical world, busier, better roads, and a better location bring more traffic, right?
The same holds true with your website and the internet! Websites that have better roads (strong backlinks, social engagement, reviews, etc.) do better than the lonely websites that don’t have any off-page activity. Popularity matters!
In the world of SEO, building this off-page infrastructure involves many different activities. A few of them include:
If your website is already doing extremely well with both on-page and off-page SEO, your timeline will look different than another company who is just getting started with search engine optimization or trying to recover from a Google penalty, for example. Every situation is unique.
Add Google’s wildly changing and frequently changing algorithms and we’ve got another layer of uncertainty to contend with. What worked two years ago might get your website banned or penalized today.
Here are a few:
Not just the number of competitors, but the quality and number of pages you're competing against will affect your SEO timeline. If you've done zero SEO to date, and your competitors have been investing $5000 each and every month for years....well...we've got a long battle ahead. If, on the other hand, your competition is limited and we've got websites ranking that look terrible, that's a pretty good indicator that we can expect to see short term results.
Yes, links still play an important role with SEO. The emphasis now is more on the quality of backlinks rather than the quanity. Backlinks are like votes for your website. If Reddit is linking to your website, that's going to be a much stronger vote, than say "Al's Car Repair". What does your current backlink profile look like? If we're starting from square 1, that's just fine, but the results will take a bit longer, than if you have a strong backlink profile already.
Domain age does matter when it comes to SEO. Not just because it's new, but a new domain isn't going to have any backlinks/signals that give it strength. If you're a startup, that's just fine. We've produced results for many startups.
Your website provides the foundation for SEO, so it's important to do it right. Strong page titles, header tags, properly tagged images, quality meta descriptions, and of course, high quality keyword-rich content will all help with SEO results. Other factors including fast page load speeds. Easy, logical navigation, and properly done internal and external linking contribute as well.
Proper keyword research is critical to the success of any SEO campaign. If you’re targeting keywords that are too competitive you may be sabotaging your SEO efforts by reaching too high. Targeting keywords that no one is searching for isn’t going to help either. We’re looking for the hidden gems with keyword research. These are keywords we can rank for, that buyers are actively searching. THIS will help speed up the amount of time it takes to see results from SEO and get your phone ringing!
Even if you’re in a highly competitive niche, that doesn’t mean that we won’t have quick, small victories along the way.
With proper keyword research, we’re often able to uncover valuable search terms that have search volume, and we can rank for. These are called long tail keywords, or long tail search terms. Going back to the “used cars” example, if we get a bit more specific, say “affordable used cars in Minneapolis”, we’ve got a much better shot of ranking for those keywords.
Not only that, but someone typing in “affordable used cars in Minneapolis” is much more likely to be a buyer than someone simply searching “used cars”. Part of our SEO onboarding process involves thorough research.
We want to show up for search terms that your potential customers are using. In order to do that we want to uncover buyer intent. Buyer keywords are keywords that an active buyer in your space is using. How do we do that?
This is really a separate topic altogether, but think about the solution you offer, and problems that it solves. What would YOU search if you were a potential customer? Here’s a hint: It’s generally not going to be an industry acronym.
Next, you want to make sure that you are providing rich content that addresses those problems, and in a natural manner includes those specific buyer keywords and synonyms in the page title, header tags, image tags and content. .
That’s a great starting point!
SEO definitely doesn’t work like a light switch. If you’re looking for overnight results, you might consider Google AdWords (PPC), or Facebook Ads. The payoff with SEO is you own the real estate rather than renting it on a per-click basis.
Also, organic search results receive many more clicks than paid ads do. We will work hard to set proper expectations up front. In general, our recommendation is to prepare for at least four months of quality SEO services at a minimum and then reassess to see how it’s working.
At HyperX Design, we pride ourselves on our commitment to quality SEO services, and in return, our customers’ trust and commitment to the process. As with any service we provide, we’re not in this for transactions. We value our longstanding relationships, and work hard to earn our clients’ trust.
Wondering about how much SEO costs, or want to learn a bit more about search engine optimization? Reach out to us for a zero-pressure conversation. We’d love to analyze your website, your competitive landscape and give you solid action items that you could start doing today to help improve your search engine rankings.
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