A brief guide to managing your SEO expectations

When you start a digital marketing campaign you may have a goal and an ETA in mind. This is pretty standard with any plan you have put into motion as you will be expecting certain types of results at certain points along the campaign. However SEO is one of those campaigns that differs greatly as there is no real end date for the completion of the process.

A brief guide to managing your SEO expectations

SEO should be seen as a long term investment rather than a quick fix to a digital problem that you have. Below we are going to go into detail of how you can manage your expectations when you are implementing these campaigns.

How does it work?

Since it is a long term kind of deal you may be wondering how the process actually works. SEO is all about building trust so that your website is desirable to both users and search engine algorithms. While you should be writing all of your content for real life people, it should also be optimised for the bots. You can do this by including keywords in your text so that bots know what your website is all about so that they can match it to searches that match your content.

Additionally the trust factor plays a very important role into your ranking. The more people you have visiting your website and linking to it, the more likely that a search engine will put you higher in the results page. From such 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 back to your own website. The content should be relevant and well written as to allow a bot to crawl it with ease and make a note that your website is the target of a certain term ie a user’s search term.

Time frame

A brief guide to managing your SEO expectations

As we mentioned previously you should be looking at SEO as a long term investment. That means that once you reach the lucrative position of number on the results page your work isn’t done. You need to continuously improve your efforts as to hold on to your position. This will ensure that your competitors won’t overtake you as if you hold the top spot they will want it as well.

With all that said and done, companies that are investing in SEO agencies would at least like a ballpark figure of when they can start seeing results. As a general rule of thumb the minimum amount of time before you start seeing real results is the 3 month mark. This allows the agency to revamp and optimise your website and content while also implementing other methods that they have worked with in the past.

It is also important to note that while the 3 month mark is a rough guess it may not apply to every scenario. Some search terms are easier to rank than others due to competition.

You have to think of the results page as an auction with many different parties bidding on certain search terms. The terms that are more niche and not as common will generally rank easier than those with higher competition.

A good example is to think of a shoe store. When you are looking for a shoe store in a specific city you will be overwhelmed with all of the results with some high players such as Nike and Adidas at the top. To get around this you can start your SEO efforts on terms such as customisable shoes “city name” or something else that is more niche.