How long it takes to get real results from an SEO campaign is probably one of the most asked questions in internet marketing. Take a look at some of the SEO forums and you’ll find it asked multiple times and answered in multiple ways. Of course we are aware that there are plenty of black hat SEO methods which can create some results in a very short time. But these will be short lived as the sites will no doubt soon incur a Google penalty from which it is difficult, if not impossible to recover. Real results will not come overnight, but they will come.
SEO is a Long Term Investment
Handling SEO campaigns is a process and it must be given some time. The best thing to remember is that slow and steady will win the race. Even though results are not likely to come overnight, diagnosis building a long term business that is successful is much like SEO best practices – it will just take time. There is not really any way to just say a week, a month, a year and you’ll see results. Some may consider making any improvements in a sites SERP ranking as improvement and as evidence that SEO is working. This is not inaccurate, and simple growth may be seen as an indicator that the SEO strategies are beginning to work but it is far from the end. The bottom line is that an honest and reputable SEO expert in Boston will not be able to give you an exact figure.
How SEO Works and Why it May Take Time
SEO is really about closing the gap between you and consumers through the use of innovative and creative content development, online business development and site structuring. Until the gap is closed it is relatively certain that your site will not rank on page one of the SERPs. The SEO specialist is adept at making accurate measurements, choosing the right resources and using the right amount of each resource or strategy in order to close the gap. Using the wrong strategies or using too little of them will cause the job to take a lot longer.
What to Expect Month to Month
When you first contact an SEO specialist, they will strategically develop an SEO campaign based on your type of business. They will use a variety of SEO techniques in order to develop an effective strategy based on several elements and then they will usually release your page or site with SEO strategies in place. Your site will then begin to be cached by Google. This will take somewhere between 4 to 6 weeks in most instances. Over the next couple of months there will be fresh, unique and high quality content added to your site and perhaps the site will be developed further by adding more pages. An SEO professional may begin a blog to help increase the potential for new content and to build generic backlinks.
For the next 6 months or so your pages will be totally indexed by Google as well as other search engines. You’ll begin seeing your site rank and it should slowly climb as new content is added on a regular basis. Link building strategies will also be improving during these few months. Traffic should continue to increase and your page rank should move up for several months. The site may undergo quite a little bit of tweaking and content will always be added and improved to help your site’s ranking continue to move up in the SERPs.
Constant Monitoring
Over the next 2 to 24 months your ranking may fluctuate quite a lot. During this time your SEO specialist will be monitoring the site and measuring results to find out what is working well and what needs to be adjusted. It is important to note that your site ranking can change a lot since others are also competitively vying for that first spot. This is simply an incentive to continue to add fresh and new content regularly and keep other strategies updated.
