Why A Watched SEO Pot Will Never Boil

You may have just ripped up your mattress where you’ve been storing all your greens and broken every single piggy bank you had to bust out enough cash to arm your business with the power of SEO. But horror of horrors, it’s been a week and you still haven’t seen any results whatsoever. What do you do? Scream into your pillow? Nope, no need to. All isn’t lost. The truth is that the closer you watch your SEO pot, the longer it’ll take to deliver luscious, delicious results that will make your marketing mouth water. In fact every business owner and marketer needs to contend with the fact that SEO does not happen overnight. It’s not like you set out your Christmas stocking on the fireplace and the next morning, it’s filled with goodies. This isn’t an overnight thing, so be sure you can come to terms with that. Unless you're business is niche in nature, with little or no competition, your site is going to take a while to show up. 

Why Effective SEO Is Time Consuming 

Many business owners just don’t seem to understand why SEO takes so darn long to get done. The digital space requires you to have more patience that when you're waiting for your girlfriend to get ready for your date. Unfortunately, there is no switch to flick to get the job done. Sure, there will be ton of shifty-eyed SEO ‘experts’ who will assure you results in as little as 48 hours. But these experts are just as legit as those fake Gucci watches you can buy on the street corner – they may look great, but in a day or two, they fall apart. If you trust your SEO efforts into the hands of these overnighters, you can be sure that it too, will fall apart. 48 hours is a totally unrealistic time frame within which to expect results.

If you partner with someone who knows what they are doing, SEO can be a simple and effective process, but still a time-consuming one. The process entails analyzing and optimising website content. In many cases, this calls for complete restructuring, rewriting and massive editing. In order to adjust its rankings, Google takes time to re-index and recognise website changes. Effective SEO often entails acquiring links to a website from social media and through other relevant sites. Building a good reputation and forming a strong web presence through locating sustainable links is not a process that can be achieved overnight. 

It Is Important To Stay Ethical

Being ethical in your SEO efforts go a long way in determining its effectiveness. The implementation of good backlinks or inbound links as they are also called, is one of the most important ways that Google determines which site is most relevant to what a user is searching for online. To order to act as an authority in your field and to show Google that your digital property is worth its salt, you need links to your site. But this doesn’t mean that you should procure a gazillion inbound backlinks at the same time. Stay from those suspect adverts that claim to sell 10,000 links for under 30 bucks. If you try and work around the system, the system will notice and you can bid a Viking farewell to your website ranking, especially if that system is the all-knowing Google. There are tons of red flags that are thrown up on Google’s end if you website goes from a couple of unassuming links to a whopping 3000 in a short while.   

Keep It Organic 

There are a couple of things you can’t rush – romance and SEO. When you let things happen naturally (on both those fronts), the results will be more sustainable in the long run (also, on both those fronts). This is because (and only for SEO, not romance. If you want to know about romance, you should go read Cosmo) Google is in love with natural, organic links. Too many links causes Google to take notice and it will levy penalties on your site, causing it to drop in ranking. If you resort to really underhanded tactics, you could be kicked out of the search results game altogether. It is important that your links occur naturally and are from credible sources that are at least somewhat relevant to yours. This is a time-consuming process. 

Don’t Compare Yourself With Competition

If you're a newbie, you obviously can’t compare yourself to a competitor who has been doing SEO for years now. Catching up to competition can be done, but it takes time, a lot of R&D and some classic old school trial and error. 

Stress on Site Content

Everyone by now has got the memo. Site content that is original, relevant and compelling boosts the time frame within which you can see SEO results. 

SEO is an Ever-Changing Process

The digital space is constantly changing, and along with it, SEO does too. Search engine such as Yahoo!, Bing and Google are evolving their strategies all the time, and every time they evolve, it calls for some evolution on the part of SEO strategies too. This helps in providing search results that are more relevant for users. It is critical that keyword selection is in line with current trends.

Effective SEO Takes Time 

There’s no two ways about it – SEO strategies that are well-thought out, in line with current trends, are ethical in nature and are effective, take time to show results. If your website is relatively new and has never been optimized before, it could take up to 2-3 weeks to show initial results, sometimes longer. 

SEO strategies take a lot of dedication and constant research to nail. SEO companies have to stay ahead of technology, learn and adapt themselves to changes overnight, and be able to work on a trial and error manner. While SEO is simple and organic in nature, it can at times be confusing and complex. Partnering with an SEO company gives you a  substantial edge.