Quite a good article came to my inbox today that I felt really made some good points about SEO. Although the article was about weighing up the SEO with more traditional methods of gaining traffic to a website, it nonetheless made a very poignant statement about SEO – Patience.
Coming from a SEO professional to a website owner or novice in the online world, that seems like quite a good stall tactic for not getting the results. However, what most people don’t want to realise is that this is a profession that requires a lot of hard work and a degree of time. As any website owner will be aware, you either find out about SEO by wondering why no-one if finding your site or somehow it finds you. The latter usually appears by means of an email or phone call with such promises as; “we can get you to the top of Google in a week”, “will will give you the secrets that Google doesn’t want you to know”, “guarantee hundreds of high quality backlinks from PR5 sites” or the best “special money back guarantee”. Anyone who is aware of the competitiveness and dynamic nature of the search engines should know that offering a guarantee is somewhat impossible.
Recently, we have seen more businesses use SEO as part of their online marketing mix as the value of gaining natural search traffic is highly important. The biggest misunderstanding that most website owners make about SEO is that it is ‘free’. If you were to carry out all the SEO work yourself then of course you would make a saving on marketing costs, however consider the cost of time. SEO is hard work…very hard work. This makes a challenge for us professionals but also a problem of time. The most frequently asked question we get from people is “how long will it take to get me to the top of Google?” Of course, this is something that we cannot answer with any degree of accuracy. Lets explore a few reasons why:
1: Depending on the competitiveness of your market; a niche market would always be easier to optimise for than, say a site selling iPods. Alternatively, if a service based business is targeting a local area than the overall time for gaining high rankings would be a lot shorter than if they were targeting a national, or international, market.
2: Time; the saying of ‘you get out what you put in’ is very true of SEO. If you were going to spend around 2 hours a week on SEO, the results would be quite different if this was only 2 hours per month. What is also important to point out here is maintaining the effort. Google is looking for a natural growth in activity, not huge sudden spikes followed by nothing at all. Activity that peaks over the normal organic, viral growth looks suspicious and therefore harder to classify as natural. Once you have started the natural cycle of growth, maintaining this is vital if you are to remain where you are.
3: The activity of competitors; your site has progressed well and you have achieved the number 1 position over your competitor after your second year in business. Fantastic. However, if a new site crept up on you and overtook your position, would you stand for it? Quite so, you’d be getting busy to re-gain your position. Therefore, you have to be prepared to fight for your top position as this is the one everyone wants and they will know all about SEO too.
4: Anything can change; Google et al are always trying out new ways to deliver the best results to the users. This means that quite often, what was important yesterday can suddenly be valued differently today. Therefore, if you’re putting all your eggs into one basket with SEO (such as relying on blog posts only) any algorithm change to the contrary might have a huge impact on your rankings.
So it can be tough to answer but the bottom line of SEO is that is the best means of online growth. More importantly sustainable growth that can change your business. Sometimes the challenge is not to get to the top but to manage the activity once you are up there. That would be a nice problem to have thought, right?
To learn more about SEO and what it can do for your business have a look at our Search Engine Optimisation page, or better still contact us to see what we can do.
