When Does SEO Efforts Bear Fruits?

Suppose a new business starts a website. They hire the best SEO manager to enable their website to stand out. The manager implements the latest SEO techniques on the webpages right from great content to keywords and links. Every thing seems to work smoothly. Subsequently, this gives rise to an obvious question. When will the SEO methods start working? How soon will the traffic to their website flow in? All very good questions but a tad too early. Things don’t work this way in the web world.

Starting a bricks and mortar store

That reminds me of a new bricks and mortar store which commences business in a commercial location. They advertise their products throughout the town using banners, pamphlets, local TV channels etc. And they wait eagerly to see their customers start flowing in on the very next day. In fantasy land this could happen—customers start flowing in since morning and by end of the day all the products are sold out. But in real life things are different.

Starting an online website

In real life customers start to come to know of a new store in their locality. Slowly the trickle of people starts one by one. Gradually the growth picks up and eventually the store has a considerable clientele. The same happens to a new website. Even if you use the latest SEO techniques, traffic does not start flowing from Day 1 or even Day 10. People think as soon as a website is launched, Google takes notice immediately and starts crawling and indexing it. They expect their webpage to rank on the first page as soon as possible.

Success factors of bricks and mortar store

Well things are further from the truth than that. Just to simplify the SEO process, refer to the above example of the bricks and mortar store. There you can see few customers at the end of the month. If you have a really great business model, with good service, attractive layout, ease of transactions you can see a stable flow of customers within 3 to 4 months. In a year, customers start referring your store to other clients and you can considered yourself established in the market.

Success factors of an online website

That brings us to the question ‘How long does it take for a website to show up on google?’ For a new website to show SEO results, it takes around 4-6 months time period. This period is required by Google to rank your website. This also shows Google views your site as trustworthy. By the end of the year you can fairly see a steep rise in organic traffic. That is to say if your SEO manager has done a fairly good job in getting in the good books of Google. There are several factors why a particular website shows faster SEO results while another takes longer. These factors are the time period of the website launch, your rivals, the content, the funds allocated for SEO and several other reasons.

How to hasten up the process of SEO?

So now you must be wondering whether there is a way you can speed up the process of getting organic traffic. Well it depends upon certain factors such as:

• Low competition keywords: We all know how keywords are important to rank higher in search engine results. But when you are using the same keywords remember your competitors are doing the same. In fact, online businesses which have started before you have already used the same keywords and are ranking high. So how do you beat them? The answer is to use low competition keywords which others are not using. Though this is not simple as it sounds, but if you have selected the right SEO manager he should get your website out of this situation as smoothly as possible.
• Investment on SEO: The amount of investment you have set aside for SEO also determines how fast your website shows results. If you pay peanuts, you get peanuts in return. Get my point? If you are spending ‘x’ amount on SEO, your rival is probably spending ‘2x’ if not more. Obviously he is getting better results than you. In short, understand the importance of SEO and be willing to set a proportional budget for it.
• Webpage optimization: This term refers to the activity a website takes in order to improve its search rankings. I am not going to go in the nitty-gritty of this feature as that would be a completely new article. All that I can say is that there are two ways a webpage can be search engine optimized: On-page and Off-page. On-page refers to everything you do on your website like addition of HTML and meta tags, internal linking, proper URL structures, mobile friendly pages, etc. On the other hand, off-page refers to all activity outside the website such as link building, social networking, etc.
• Domain age: The period your domain exists on the internet also determines how soon your website will rank on search engines. But that does not mean if your domain was purchased 5 years back, Google will treat it as 5 years old. Rather more importance is given as to when your website was crawled and when it was indexed.

So these are some ways to get your website rank faster. A bricks and mortar store gathers business by providing quality services and goods to clients. Similar an online business website can gather rankings by doing everything that is ethical and acceptable by search engines. Any move to get quick traffic using negative SEO techniques can earn a bad reputation and will be penalized by Google and other search engines.