We are back with another SEO-basedpodcast for your listening pleasure. Today I wanted to talk about why SEO is a marathon and not a Sprint. We get a lot of people that come to us and think that they’re going to get instant results from SEO or it’s going to be something that happens within a couple of days potentially a month. So I want to talk about what the overall expectations are when you’re starting an SEO campaign with either our agency or you know if you decide to hire another one. What you shouldn’t do. But if you decide to what you can expect from that.
And generally speaking, how long it’s going to take to receive some type of results? Now I have done another video on this where I talked about how long SEO takes to have an effect, but I really want people to understand that this is not something that is going to be a one and done even if we do something once. Even if we do something for a couple of months that it’s really an ongoing process.
So let’s go right into it. A lot of people have a general idea of how SEO works, but they don’t really understand how long it usually takes to work and they have unrealistic expectations and it’s really important to understand that process. So here’s a couple of strategies that we can use. To stay in the SEO game for the long term, first part of that is to understand the SEO timeline.
Let’s break down some of the standard things that go into a standard SEO campaign. First thing is going to be the site audit our website analyzation. Generally speaking, this takes between two to five weeks. We’re going to take a look and see what’s going on with the site we are going to do an audit and break down everything and outline everything that needs to be changed by either a content team member or a developer. Second thing is going to be the technical changes this generally takes about two to three months.
You’re also going to have keyword. Research which takes about one to three weeks. This is going to involve going through the site and understanding what keywords you’re trying to target using different software such as semrush or Mage Pro or something like that to where we have the proper targets. Because I’ve talked about this in the past where the volume of a keyword can have a difference. Even if you’re searching for the plural version like let’s say lawyers versus lawyer contractors versus contractor, even having it plural can have a huge impact on the popularity or volume of that search.
Link acquisition campaign that can take three to four months, so building up the links, content expansions, generally speaking, this is ongoing because you’re going to evolve your blogs. You’re going to evolve your geographical based content. If you’re like a local type of business FAQ articles. Basically expand that content. That’s something that’s never going to change, so let’s break down these things one by one. So let’s talk about site audits or the website analyzation. So what’s going to go into that is? Identifying the problems that need to be fixed. We don’t want to just go in without a plan, so taking a look at things like the site load time looking at the Domain, authority ranking, looking at the robots rules now, what does the robots rule? A robots rule is basically a rule, usually a text file or a rule set in the back on the site that says.
Here’s the pages that you should index. Here’s the pages that you shouldn’t index. We have people with WordPress based sites that have all kinds of stuff that are indexed that you really shouldn’t have index and Google can’t identify what the proper pages they should index into their search results. On site content O looking at everything from your homepage to the blog to the FAQs, we really have to understand what’s on there and what needs to be produced in order to rank properly.
H tags or commonly called header tags. So giving your articles context and structure, the site map taking a look at the list of the websites pages. What is the entire site map look like? How are you interlinking things? Are things categorized properly? Do you have proper what they call URL nesting which is having your sub pages underneath the top level pages? Can Google.
Easily go through the site and see how the site is structured in order to give themselves a clear understanding of how to index things and also taking a look at media content so your title tags your meta descriptions. I mean these are foundational baseline elements of SEO that you really need to take a look at, and often it’s the first thing that people see when they’re looking at your site and search instance. If you’ve ever seen a search result page or what they call a SERP or search engine results page, that’s going to display the sea of Blue Links and the usually the links.
What shows up is the title, so that’s a critical part that you want to get right and you also want to make sure that you’re targeting the right things. Let’s talk about technical changes are generally done after we’ve done the initial research, so eliminating duplicate content, fixing or removing broken links in pages, decreasing the sites load time which we already talked about, making sure that you have SSL and SSL is essentially when you look in the browser URL bar, it’ll say secure or it’ll have like a green item meant the site is secure sockets layer identifying and disavowing any backlinks that are toxic, such as if you’ve ever done a backlinking campaign yourself or you had another agency do it.
Chances are you’ve got some pretty ugly links that you don’t want to be associated with. We want to disavow those and say look we want no part of these. We’re not sure how these got here. Don’t include these in our backlink history. Creating and submitting an XML site map so making sure that Google has that proper site map to where they can crawl through the entire site.
Looking at the structure and making sure it’s easy for them to access. Making the pages accessible to crawlers. Optimizing your site for mobile and also making the site secure with HTTPS, which is what we were talking about with the SSL. So these are all going to be things that go into a technical changes portion of your campaign. And it’s usually something that you have to start right off the bat.
It’s once we’ve done the initial research, we get started on the technical changes right away. Once we’ve communicated with the client, and again talking about the SEO timeline, just those steps alone are going to take a couple of months just to get started. So when we’re talking about this marathon versus Sprint, you can see right now. Just off the things we’ve talked about already. We’re already two months in, right? So, and granted, there’s going to be changes that take place during this time period, but a lot of the first month is just finding out what’s broken. And just starting to fix it, you don’t want to rush anything in terms of organic SEO.
Granted, we all know that people want results from this as quickly as possible, but you don’t want to rush things because with organic it’s not like Edwards or other paid media where you can change something right away. You know if I need to change something in AdWords ad or I need to change something in a Facebook ad or social media, ad, etcetera. I can change that right away. I can go in, I can change it. I can resubmit it and boom, you know, 15 minutes later it’s going to be up on the Internet and that’s going to be the newest version with organic.
If we put out a page title meta description to a header or something like that. It’s not going to be reindexed that quickly, so you want to make sure that you’re doing your proper research right off the bat and you want to make sure that any things that you’re implementing are done correctly the first time, and this is a thing that we also see a lot of people struggle with. Whether they’re doing DIY SEO or they’ve got a poorly performing agency is you’ll see these mistakes or problems that aren’t fixed for a period of time, and then when they have to fix them and resubmit them, it can take a period of time before that’s actually addressed.
So let’s talk about keyword research a little bit, so keyword research. We need to understand how people are getting to your site, so brainstorming lists of topics related to the products or services that you offer. Understanding the proper way of how to target those thinking of the most important words or phrases associated with the things that you offer. Looking at Google to discover popular keywords, there’s a ton of different things besides Google that you can use. I have mentioned Maz Pro and Semrush multiple times again, both of them great tools for doing your initial keyword research.
You can also just use Google, you know start typing into Google and seeing who comes up. And how that information is presented using Google is also a really great way, because you can better understand somebody’s intent. You can easily see what type of results you’re getting once you start typing things in. So if I type in the wrong keyword phrase that’s not directly related to like intent to hire, I’m probably going to get a lot of how to DIY or guides or something like that versus my intent to hire.
Like if you’re a contractor and you type in something regarding fixing your bathtub or your sink or etcetera is my intent to hire, or is my intent to find research? And once you start typing those things in, you’re going to start. You’re going to start to understand pretty quickly how Google is indexing these things based upon what you’re typing in. So again, making sure that you have the right keywords is going to be critical. I can’t really stress that part of it enough. You should also target both long tail and short tail keywords, long tail keywords to understand that phrase a little bit better.
This is going to be like at least three words, so generally speaking it’s three to five words. It’s more specific. Typically they don’t get a lot of search volume as much as. The short tail keywords which is going to be, you know your three or fewer words, which is what a short tail keyword is. But the long tail keywords are typically less competitive. Generally speaking, it’s better for articles you’re going to see some interesting results when you switch from a short to long tail keyword, but ultimately you don’t want to limit yourself to just one or the other.
Short tail keywords should be targeted within your top level type of pages or your service pages, or your product pages, and then your long tail keywords should be targeted on your blogs, your FAQ’s etcetera. But you also want to narrow down your keywords. You don’t want to just. So many different things you’re trying to target because it’s going to be difficult either for yourself or for the agency. You have to just really put out that much content and you don’t want your content all over the board.
You want to keep it focused. You want to keep your overall plan structured to where you’re not trying to target too many things at once, where you’re targeting things that have the most search volume and also with the right intent. O, let’s talk about the content revamp and the content expansions. One of the biggest parts of an SEO campaign. Again, going back to the marathon versus a Sprint and you can just hear from all the things I’ve mentioned so far. It’s not a quick process, right? So creating useful and engaging content.
If you’ve ever searched for things on the Internet there, there’s web pages and blog posts on every possible topic imaginable. Really focus on what is going to bring the value to your readers and not getting lost in this. Just sea of blue links on you know, page one through whatever of Google creating engaging content, creating, engaging. Titles, meta descriptions engaging blogs engaging FAQ articles for your top level pages making sure that those are structurally focused on.
I’m looking for this. Therefore, this is the best page based upon what I typed in it really takes weeks, if not months, to start the research on figuring out what to target and then also it takes many months to create that much contact. Our agency creates hundreds and hundreds of pages for all of our clients every single month, and we’re very transparent with people. I just had a meeting with a client. Yesterday and he was talking about the long term goal versus the short term gratification and it was one of the most rewarding meetings that I’ve had in a long time because we actually met with the client that understood that, you know, he was on his I think at this point we were the third agency that he had hired and it’s nice when people understand that everything that we’re talking about is going to take time and the initial part of this video talking about the two to four weeks, the two to three months of one to three weeks, the two to three months, etcetera.
Based upon all the different elements that I had mentioned. Just getting started can take a couple of different months. That’s why we’re talking about some marathon, not a Sprint, and that’s not even going into. Once we get all these things in place, a critical point to remember is that as you take over additional rankings and search, your competitors are not just going to give up those spots easily, right? They’re going to respond to what you do once they realize that their search engine rankings are dropping because you’re taking over their spots and a lot of times what we notice is specifically on larger campaigns that have higher amount to spend.
It’s not going to be a business. Versus a business per se, it’s going to be more of an agency versus an agency, and that’s where it gets really competitive because you have one team of talented individuals versus another team of talented individuals. And they’re both doing the best that they can for a client. So when we’re talking about that long term marathon type of mindset, you really need to understand that you have two competing teams that are both fighting for their clients as hard as possible.
And once we achieve rankings, there’s no guarantee that we’re not going to have to fight for them again. You know, I’ve had clients in the past that say. Why do I need to keep paying for. Seo Well because once we start taking over rankings, people are gonna respond to that. So we might get really good results. And let’s say month three to six or month 6 to 12 or whatever the case may be and then it could be month 14 where somebody really fights back.
They’ve really upped their game, they’ve upped their content marketing, they’ve hired an agency or really got on their agencies back to say hey these guys are taking over my positions and that’s something that you have to keep in mind anytime that you take away money out of another company’s pockets, you’re not going to make any friends from that and they’re going to respond to it. What we wanted to cover today is understanding that mindset of why you have to be involved for SEO for the long term. This isn’t a shout out to get clients on board for any period of time, but they need to understand what goes into it and how long it can take and what to expect in terms of once they get months in that.
That’s not always going to be the end point. You know we can’t do something for three to six months. We can’t do something for six to 12 months. It’s an ongoing process that has to be constantly worked on constantly reported on constantly researched to keep. Our clients at the top of search results once we obtain them,
We hope you found this useful. If you did, please like and subscribe to this video and we’ll see you again next time.
