SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of increasing quality traffic to a web site from search engines’ organic (natural) search results.  Search engine optimization is not an over night process, it’s an ongoing evolving strategy. Along with the skills to do it correctly, patience is a must.

SEO is a long-term solution, and unlike pay per click (see Pay-Per-Click VS. SEO), your search engine listing can be clicked all day with no incurred click cost. And organic listings tend to get more clicks than the sponsored ads.

Elements of Successful SEO

Here are just a few of the things that go into making your SEO campaign a success:

• Keyword Research
• HTML Optimization
• Optimized title and meta tags
• SEO friendly
 Coding
• Ongoing quality related content creation
• Link building
• Local online optimization
• Off-site optimization
• Blogging
• the list goes on…

Why does SEO take time?

There is no way this can be done quickly, even if some of these methods are completed quickly you still have to wait for the search engine to crawl and re-crawl your site and position it for a given search result. Search engines typically crawl  a website every couple weeks to months. The more incoming links you have the process will speed up a bit but they have to be quality links from relative sites.

Your focus should be building your content, optimizing that content correctly to show Google, Bing and others that your site is worth better placement for a variety of your targeted keywords. You have probably heard “content is king” for search engines, and when you optimize original quality content you will start seeing a rise in targeted traffic….. search engines are smarter than you think..

Earning and converting web traffic

Your site has to come off as a source of information for whatever you do and what you can do for people interested in your services. A very important question to ask yourself; Is your website engaging enough to convert this new influx of traffic generated from SEO? What’s the point of increasing traffic if visitors are unimpressed with your site, and fail to take the next step? Keep an eye on your bounce rate; if you don’t have analytics tools in place there is no point of doing SEO, because you wont be able to measure performance and how you can improve results.

SEO is an ongoing process, your site has to EARN high rankings. And rankings should not be your main concern, rather converting your traffic into sales. You have to work on building more traffic and doing so takes time. Then it takes even more time for your website to earn better positioning for whatever you are optimizing for in search engine result pages.

Incremental growth is good growth.

After a couple years of continued attention to your website,  you will see that your growth in traffic has been exponential. Some keywords you optimize for can rank within a few weeks if your site has already been indexed, but it all depends on the level of competition for any given keyword.

Consistent results can take 3-6 months, and even longer for more competitive terms. You should optimize for long tail keywords as well because it is unreasonable to expect you will be one page 1 of Google for a broad competitive keyword any time soon. There are sites that have been optimized for years and are considered authority sites that have earned their spot on the first page. A small 10-20 page site cannot come close to competing with sites that have 100’s to 1000’s of pages and that have been optimizing for the same broad competitive keyword you expect to show up on the first page for.

You have to get creative with the way you optimize your keywords. The time it takes also depends on if you are doing local optimization where you are just trying to target local customers or if you are targeting nationwide or world wide. You can compare to offline marketing… it’s quicker and cheaper to send flyers out to your local area only, than if you want to send flyers across the nation… and the time it takes to get a response from the date your flyer is created.

In conclusion, you have to ask yourself if you want to take this on yourself and try to learn SEO or do you want to focus on your business and hire an Internet Marketing Firm that specializes in SEO.

Here are a few tips when looking for how to pick the right internet marketing company:

• be careful of those who guarantee page 1 rankings
• be careful of those emails you may have received that promise results, look at the email address… usually a random gmail address with no company info you can research
• look for a company that focuses on ROI by converting traffic rather than promising to get you on page 1 of Google
• it is common if you hire a company there is a yearly commitment for SEO since its an ongoing process
• if you are being offered keyword packages, go over them to make sure they relate to your services and that they are being searched
• SEO usually requires a monthly fee for ongoing work
• level of industry competition, keyword competitiveness, local or national campaigns can affect the price of SEO services
• some offer a large number of links to your site, make sure you ask if these links are quality links

So do your research and be patient because SEO takes time.

Feel free to contact us to see what we can do for you.

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