So, you’ve launched your small business, and now you’re ready to start growing a strong online presence. You enlist the services of an SEO company (or maybe you learn SEO and tackle the job yourself), and then, you wait. And you wait some more. You keep waiting. Then, you start losing your patience, and you consider pulling the plug on your SEO campaign.
But wait. Don’t ditch your SEO efforts just yet.
Look, I get that you want to see results as quickly as possible. We live in an instant satisfaction society, but that’s just not how SEO works. Good SEO takes time, and the key to getting results is sticking with proven SEO techniques for the long haul. In other words, you need to give your SEO efforts time to work.
So, why does SEO take time? Here are 5 reasons.
1. The search engines only crawl your website occasionally. Just because you optimized your content doesn’t mean Google knows of your updates. The search engines aren’t constantly crawling your website, waiting with baited breath to see what you do next. The search spiders may only crawl by every few weeks or few months. So, until that happens, you won’t see any results because it’s your old content that’s being ranked.
2. Building links takes time and requires consistency. Link building is one of the most tedious SEO tasks there is. You won’t get loads of high quality links over night. Link building requires creating link worthy content on your website, getting listed in relevant directories, and using offsite tactics like article marketing, press release distribution, and guest blogging, to name just a few. Consistency is also important because it looks suspicious if you get tons of links in a short spurt and then no more links over the long haul. Consistency in link building breeds credibility.
3. The search engines have to find your links too. Remember what I said earlier about the search engines having to crawl your new content and that takes time? The same thing goes for your links. The search engines need to find those links, and that’s going to take time too. It could be weeks or even months until your new links get discovered.
4. Found links may not count immediately. The search engines don’t always give full credit to new links they crawl. Why? Because they know there are a lot of spammy link building practices happening out there. More times than not, spammy links will get deleted eventually, with the true, quality links standing the test of time. So, even after your links get found, they might not count for a while.
5. New domains take time to earn trust. If you just launched a website for your new business, you probably had to purchase a brand new domain. Unfortunately for you, it takes time for new domains to earn the trust of the search engines. Why? Because there are so many new fly-by-night, spammy websites that pop up one day and disappear a few months later. The search engines just want to make sure your site is going to be around for the long haul.
How long has your SEO campaign been active? Have you started seeing results yet?