Why you need a keyword-research plan
December 21, 2015
10 Tips for Optimizing Your Images for Search part 1
December 25, 2015
Search Engine Optimization involves a significant investment of time and effort. It’s not something you simply set up in an afternoon. You’ll spend a lot of time over the coming months researching and building on your strategy, refining it, by reviewing the data, and adjusting your course of action based on what your competitors are doing. Eventually, your SEO will start to pay a return on that investment, but it’s a long-term strategy, one that can often take upwards of four to six months before the real results become visible. Now, it’s easy to get overexcited when you start seeing big wins early on in your efforts.
As you rapidly build the early parts of your strategy, you’re bound to generate some interest from Google and other search engines. They’ll crawl your site, better understand your signals in an effort to investigate what you’re doing, might provide you with an early gain in rank, and then, nothing. It might feel like you’ve fallen off a cliff within the first couple of months. My advice here is to remain encouraged and continue pressing forward with your strategy, as long as it’s a good one. Scott Clark of Buzzmedia created a great illustration I wanna share with you.
Here he charts what he calls “The Gap of Disappointment” in SEO. You have a ton of effort early on that comes with a lack of results, but, eventually, things start to click. Your strategy reaches maturity and the twins arrive. This gap is the hardest part to press through. I want to set the right expectation for you. SEO is hard, and it’ll be an uphill battle at times. But if you’ve implemented the right strategy, you’ll eventually see meaningful results. Now, another mistake is looking at the roadmap ahead and deciding to put off for later.
No matter how long you wait, there will always be this time that is required for your SEO to settle in. The longer you wait, the further off your results are, and the further ahead your competition can get. While you work on your SEO, it’s important, however, to have diversification in your marketing efforts. You may wanna set aside a budget to run search advertisements, explore local or more traditional marketing efforts, and continue building your social media presence. Now, I wouldn’t risk it all on SEO. Make sure you have a backup plan in the event your strategy doesn’t pan out exactly like you hoped.
By having realistic expectations about the project ahead, you will avoid pulling the plug too early and wasting that initial investment.
