Today I talk about how long it takes to do SEO and for people that means a couple of different things.
How long does it take to show up in search results on Google or how long do you actually have to do SEO for your website? And what I’ve learned is that it can take anywhere from a couple of weeks to nine months to show up at the top of a search results page. As far as how long you should expect to be doing SEO? As long as you expect to be in business, right? Because competition is going to want to outrank you in those search results to take your place. If you’re showing up as a brand new company and there’s existing competition and you need to get ahead of them in order to make a profit, Right?
To start, you’ll need to make sure that Google knows that your site exists. The way to do that is by using the tools that Google offers for free. What that means is installing Google analytics on your site and setting up a Google webmaster profile, going to Google my business and setting that up as well.
You’ll also want to create real profiles for your business in as many places as possible, like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. You want to go to sites that are being checked frequently.
You want to make sure that Google knows all the different pages you set up because when Google starts out, they crawl your site, but they only look at the top level navigation, sometimes, not even the whole page, just to get a glimpse of what’s on the site and then test what they find in search results to see how people react to it.
People call that their sandbox. So they’ll test you in small areas and see what happens.
So you really want to get as many eyeballs as possible to your website in order for Google to reward you quicker. And one of the ways to do that is through pinging. There are some services like ping farm where you can actually tell them to crawl your site and then send a notification to all the different Google servers that a page has been added or updated.
You can also create a site map file through Webmaster tools and that will actually tell Google that you have specific pages that are being updated at a certain frequency and you want them to come and take a look at that. So there are a lot of things that you can do to speed up how long it takes for your website to show up.
On average with the sites that I build, it’s a slow patient thing. You don’t want to rush or hurry Google because it’ll send them the wrong signals. And a lot of the people who are doing things naturally have a slow, methodical marketing plan or advertising.
Another way to speed things up of course would be Adwords or paid advertising through Facebook and generate as many traffic sources as you can.
Then let Google have the opportunity through their analytics tool to observe how long people spend on your site, what they’re looking at, where they’re coming from… and that’ll give Google an idea of how people are reacting to your content and whether they like it or not.
Check your bounce rate, make sure that people are staying there for at least 30 seconds.
If they’re leaving in less than 10 seconds, then Google is going to know right away that there’s something wrong with the message on your site and people are not happy with what they’re finding. So again, as I’ve said previously, when it comes to my strategy with SEO, you really want to optimize for people and not Google.
The people who are trying to cheat the system are trying to play the algorithms.
I say focus your message on people and getting them solutions to their problems. If you get them results, then that means people are liking what they’re seeing. They’re going to be staying longer, interacting with your site, better, engaging with your content, and then Google is going to be giving you the rankings actually as a byproduct of just doing good business.
I hope that helps. Thanks.