People love instant gratification – instant money, instant knowledge, instant everything. Unfortunately with search engine optimisation (SEO) you won’t get instant rankings. You won’t get instant traffic. And you sure as heck won’t get instant sales. With SEO, patience is key and it can take weeks and months for your website to see substantial results. Here is the pattern I sometimes see with business owners who do not fully understand just how long term the process of SEO can be:
They see a ranking boost
The SEO plan is implemented, initial link building is complete, and spiders suddenly see “Wow, this website is relevant to all of these keywords!” The first ranking report looks excellent – rankings are up on the first two pages for the majority of the targeted keywords and the site gets a nice traffic boost from organic clicks. The website owner is excited and is already expecting those sales to start rolling in.
They see a ranking drop
Then the rankings settle back down – in most cases because the link profile of the site is not yet strong enough to maintain the original boost brought on by the recent on page SEO implementation. The on page factors are all taken care of and monitored via ongoing enhancements, but the link profile is next to nonexistent and links are half of the equation. The client gets worried, thinks the campaign isn’t working – “Why did we go up so high last week and now we’re sinking again?!”
I’ll tell you why – it’s usually due to a weak link profile. Ongoing link building is a requirement to climb up the ranking ladder. In ongoing monthly maintenance I research and implement basic and advanced link building methods. You may see me recommending anything from a blog to article marketing to online tools for visitors to entice links – and maybe, if your budget allows it, even all of the above and more. This is important. Pay attention to these recommendations when your SEO specialist presents them. We aren’t just randomly suggesting stuff to do.
The gradual ascent
With ongoing link building and on page enhancements, the website begins to crawl up the ranking ladder once more – this time with more stable, reliable rankings as they are supported by strong, reliable, high quality links. This is where consistent traffic is gained via organic search and where rankings stop jumping around wildly and begin to go up with more permanence (although nothing is truly permanent when it comes to organic search) and stability.
I find the biggest hump for some clients to get over is seeing the rankings shoot up in their first ranking report and seeing the red “negative” markers in the next one. This is normal. If you learn the value of patience and wait for a few months (as I always communicate beforehand) you will see solid results.
