A Brief Guide To Managing Your SEO Expectations
When you start a digital marketing campaign, you can have a goal and an ETA in mind. This is pretty standard with any plan you’ve put in place, since you’ll wait for certain types of results at certain points in the campaign. However, SEO is one of those campaigns that differs a lot since there is no real end date for the completion of the process.
SEO should be seen as a long-term investment instead of a quick fix to a digital problem you have. Below, we will detail how you can manage your expectations when you implement these campaigns.
How does it work?
As it is a long-term type of agreement, you may be wondering how the process really works. SEO is about building trust to make your website desirable for both users and search engine algorithms. While you should write all your content for real-life people, it should also be optimized for robots. You can do this by including keywords in your text so that robots know what your website is about so they can match searches that match your content.
In addition, the confidence factor plays a very important role in their classification. The more people you have visited and linked to your website, the more likely it is that a search engine puts you in a higher position on the results page. In such a way, you will find that a common method to improve your SEO is backlinking.
Backlinking is the act of having high quality content hosted on other pages that link to your own website. The content must be relevant and well written to allow a bot to track it easily and note that your website is the goal of a certain term, that is, a user’s search term.
Time frame
As we mentioned earlier, you should consider SEO as a long-term investment. That means that once you reach the lucrative number position on the results page, your work will not be finished. You need to continually improve your efforts to maintain your position. This will ensure that your competitors do not reach it, because if you occupy the first place, they will also want it.
With all that said and done companies that are investing in SEO agencies at least would like an approximate figure of when they can begin to see results. As a general rule, the minimum amount of time before starting to see real results is the 3 month mark. This allows the agency to renew and optimize its website and content while implementing other methods with which it has worked in the past.
It is also important to keep in mind that, although the 3 month mark is a rough estimate, it may not apply to all scenarios. Some search terms are easier to classify than others due to competition.
You should think of the results page as an auction with many different parts that bid on certain search terms. Terms that are more specific and not so common will generally be easier than those with more competition.
A good example is thinking of a shoe store. When you’re looking for a shoe store in a specific city, you’ll be overwhelmed with all the results with some high-level players like Nike and Adidas at the top. To avoid this, you can start your SEO efforts in terms such as personalized “name of the city” shoes or something else that is more specialized.