When looking to generate leads and reach the right audience for your company, high-ranking content on search engine results pages (SERPs) is convenient. With Google holding 92% of the search engine market share, ranking highly on Google search can significantly affect the annual revenue of your business. However, getting to the top spots of the search results is hard work, often done by a top search engine optimization (SEO) agency.
SEO experts can be more affordable as part of an agency than hired one by one to work within the company. Still, it can be a complex decision to invest in SEO efforts knowing that results will take time — just how long to wait until SEO takes effect isn’t always so easy to pin down.
How can you estimate how long your SEO strategy will take and whether you should invest in one top SEO agency over another? This post guides you through the definition of SEO, how long Google says it should take, what elements go into deciding that, and why SEO is worth the investment and the wait.
What Is SEO?
SEO improves online practices to better rank on Google and other search engines. This approach considers a set of best practices that helps search engines perform better. For instance: Since search engines “crawl” or examine websites to understand their content and promote it to the right people, SEO is all about making content easy to understand for crawlers by improving the quality and reputation of that content. That way, the content is more likely to be recommended.
How Long Does SEO Take?
SEO efforts are long-term investments that take 4–12+ months to show results. This time period is because SEO is a multi-faceted approach with many factors. Let’s learn a bit about what factors influence SEO success.
Elements of SEO Strategy
An SEO strategy has to work intricately between the different branches of optimization. It’s not the same to build an entirely new site and try to rank with limited resources than to attempt the same with a well-established domain and unlimited funds. Here are the elements top SEO agencies like Single Origin Media work on the most when ranking clients higher on Google:
- Age of your site: Reputation and credibility are game-changers for search engines. They want to recommend the best, most credible content for readers. To do this, they trust how long a website has been around and how they’ve focused their content on a set of topics — age and topic authority go hand in hand.
- Your site’s competition: Are other more reputable websites targeting the same keyword? This factor will prove essential when choosing which content to create. Go after many keywords with low competition and medium-high search instead of a few with sky-high search volumes.
- Scope of SEO efforts: If you’re a company with limitless resources, you can approach your SEO strategy from every angle, create content constantly, and invest in all the tools. If not, you’ll have to pace yourself one factor at a time, which will take a bit longer to show results.
- Technical factors: Content is vital with SEO, but how well your site works is also crucial. If you have 404-page errors, slow load time, or your website isn’t mobile responsive, your SEO efforts will take a hit until you resolve these issues.
- Content strategy: Understanding what type of content to publish, what goals to go after, and how to keep readers coming back will be a factor you want to prioritize during your SEO efforts.
Backlink strategy: Since Google relies on reputable sources — such as high Domain Authority (DA) websites — to figure out who’s credible and who isn’t, getting links o your site from high DA sites is one of the most effective ways of climbing SERP rankings. You can look up a website’s DA with tools like Website SEO Checker for free.
Why SEO Results Are Worth the Wait
Despite taking about a year to show results, SEO efforts benefit your business on many fronts. These efforts help in optimizing pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, supporting public relations (PR), helping you rank locally, and supporting leads throughout the entire sales funnel.
Hire a Top SEO Agency To Secure Results
Now that you understand why SEO can take a while to work and the intricate factors that go into optimizing your websites, you’re ready to start putting effort into it. If you’re looking for a trustworthy agency to do your digital marketing and SEO, Single Origin Media prioritizes results and long-lasting relationships with clients in a wide range of industries. Choosing the right agency will make the difference to see the best results as soon as possible.