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If you're a business new to internet marketing, with a little SEO training we can help you understand all the great things that SEO could be doing for your business. Good SEO can improve the number of visitors to your website, improve your conversion rates and help raise your brand profile across a number of internet platforms, from organic search to social media to image search.
One thing that we, as SEO consultants, often struggle to convey to people who are only just embarking on their first serious internet marketing campaign, is what they can reasonably expect to achieve from their websites for the budget they have available.
The speed at which any SEO campaign achieves ROI is often out of the hands of your SEO agency for a number of reasons:
- Your budget - How much budget you have available determines how much work we can do at any one time. The longer it takes us to do the remedial work necessary to convey the subject of each page the longer it will take search engines to start showing your pages in the right search results subset.
- Your competitors - If nobody in your industry is engaged in SEO then it may be that you achieve ROI very quickly. However, in all likelihood at least one of your competitors is working hard at SEO; it could take months, or even years to see a ROI, particularly if your budget is a lot smaller than your competitors' and they have a head start. It would be reasonable to expect to appear in the top 100 for some keywords, above sites that are not actively optimising, but to get into the first page of results will take time.
- Website age - If you have a brand new domain your SEO consultant should not go crazy and acquire loads of links immediately - buying a high volume of links for a brand new domain can do more harm than good. They will have to start by generating few authoritative links at a time, slowly building your link acquisition to a decent rate. This means that it will take you longer to catch competitors who have been at it for a while. It's not impossible, it just requires patience.
- Search engines - Every search engine is a little different and every search engine is constantly working to tweak and refine the results they deliver. If Google, for example, feels that giving too much weight to links is causing searchers to see a lot of poor quality pages, then they will take some value away from links within their algorithm and rely more heavily on another factor.
Thus, even if you do absolutely everything right - build a search engine friendly site that's full of great information, which is linked to by relevant, authoritative sites - it may still take time to see a ROI because while you're working to rank better for the most relevant search terms, so are your competitors. Moreover, nobody can predict how quickly the search engines will not only understand what your pages are about, but at what point they will decide that your pages are more valuable to a searcher than somebody else's, and thus entitled to a more prominent position in search results.
