SEO is an essential part of digital marketing as it helps your online brand be visible to its audience and get more recognition overall. While the term SEO is widely known, it takes a bit of time for business owners who are not familiar with it to know what to expect in terms of the time and effort needed to achieve SEO success.
To save you the disappointments that inevitably follow unrealistic expectations, we will present in more detail how SEO works and what you can expect from your strategy.
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How Much Effort Is Needed for SEO?
The short answer is that constant effort is needed to be successfully achieving your SEO goals. SEO results can be seen with constant effort and a long-term plan. Eventually, your SEO strategies will become a routine in your marketing strategy.
Let’s see what a basic SEO strategy involves, and we will get back to our main question with a detailed answer, later in the article.
What Does a Basic SEO Strategy Have?
Having an SEO strategy implies that you make efforts and invest time in a number of methods, actions, and tools that will get your brand closer to the ultimate goal: to be chosen as one of the first results in the search results.
SEO is short for Search Engine Optimisation, and its basic definition would be “making your website be seen as relevant by search engines”. In reality, you will have to have both search engines and your human audience in mind when you think about your SEO strategy.
Here are the basic steps you need to take to build your own SEO strategy:
Know Your Audience
Any SEO campaign should be based on a primordial thing: targeting the right audience. Before you get into more detailed analytics, make sure you know who your target customer is. Have that profile in mind whenever you implement something.
Find Topics to Write About
Not so long ago, business owners were thinking about their products and services as the main things to promote. In today’s organic marketing world, top rankings are obtained by finding the topics your brand is an expert in.
After establishing your target audience, find the topics that spark an interest for these people and see how your expertise in the industry can contribute to the discussion. For example, a business selling solar panels can contribute to discussions on sustainability, global warming, and green living.
Refine Your Strategy with the Right Keywords
Keyword research is an important part of SEO, even if search engines are evolving to recognise topics of discussion that they can match to search queries instead of looking for the exact match on a web page.
The keywords that you target should be competitive enough to be worth the effort, but not too popular in your industry so that everyone is targeting them. Finding the perfect solution takes experience and a constant effort of testing, researching, and implementing.
Get Backlinks
Link building is more than just spamming a lot of websites until some will “exchange links”. Black hat tactics like these are way outdated and can hurt your SEO. Instead, make your brand worth sharing and mentioning by keeping the quality level high and connecting with your peers.
Monitor Your Competition
Check what your competition is doing. Know what keywords they are ranking for, where they get their backlinks, and so on. A lot of inspiration can come from there.
Keep Your Media Compressed
User experience is important in SEO, and it will become even more, as Google announces Page Experience to become one of the basic indicators of a page’s ranking. Keeping your media (images, videos) compressed is one of the simplest steps you can make to keep your page from loading too slowly and messing the user’s experience.
Create Content on a Regular Basis
Publishing content is a well-known principle in SEO, at least during the last decade. While you do want to keep your content fresh, nowadays it’s more about the quality and originality of what you post and less about the frequency.
Learn to Read Your Reports
Analytics and other reports are not there just to bore us. They always contain useful information that indicates your SEO success. Get familiar with reporting tools like Google Analytics, the Google Search Console, SEM Rush, etc., as they are the best tools for SEO.
How Long Does It Take to See Results?
This is the kind of question that can’t be given a universally valid answer since it depends on so many factors unique to each business or brand. With SEO, it’s even harder to give a reliable estimate of the effort or time needed to see the results, since the effort is constant and the time is relative.
But.
For a small business with an uncomplicated list of products and services and a good understanding of its audience, results may appear in up to a year of constant SEO efforts, such as posting high-quality content and engaging with the audience.
If your business doesn’t have a lot of competition online and it’s highly niched, you may achieve results sooner. The condition is that you do know how to reach the people who haven’t heard of your niche at all but might be interested.
If you already have a website that’s been online for years and you have the experience of targeting your products or services, you might be able to see results in as little as 3 months since first implementing an SEO strategy.
How Much Effort Do You Need to Put into SEO?
We talked more about the time it takes to get there, what about the effort that needs to be put in?
Again, it really depends on what cards your business dealt with, so to speak. If your industry is fast-paced, you will have to constantly put effort into creating new content and keeping up with the latest news. If you’re activating in a stable niche, your progress will be slow, but steady, and the effort might not need to be so great, but it still needs to be constant.
The thing with SEO is: you can’t stop working for it. Even if you made it in the first three Google results, you can’t stop there. You have to keep on doing a great job to keep your place, as the rules of the game change constantly.
Achieving long-term results can only be done by constantly implementing SEO tactics and monitoring your performance.
Do You Need a Pro to Handle Your SEO?
If you want to invest time and effort in an effective SEO strategy, but you don’t want to go through the trial and error phase everyone has when learning a complex subject like this, hire a professional.
We at Australian Internet Advertising are SEO experts with plenty of experience. We know the latest updates in the industry, approach your SEO as a part of a big plan that involves social media, content marketing, email marketing, and other tactics, and focus on results.
Contact us for a free consultation and we will be able to accurately predict how long does SEO take to make your brand top ranking.
