How long will it take for SEO to start working for your business?
This is one of the most challenging questions that we are posed with as a digital marketing agency – is looking at a company’s SEO and figuring out how long it will take to position them.
The reason why it’s often hard to answer this question is because there are so many factors that go into your SEO ranking that it can vary drastically from business to business and location to location. It also is changed by what your competitors are doing. So if you have a competitor that has more authority than you and they are running after the keywords and you have less authority in general, it can take a much longer time for us to catch up to or surpass that competitor. If your website has tons of authority already and tons of backlinks but you’re not ranking well for keywords, it can be a really quick turn of just updating your keywords and seeing a huge impact to your SEO.
For most businesses, it will take somewhere from 90 days, which is basically three months to six months. We require our clients to run a six month campaign because those variables start to show themselves in the middle of the campaign. So as we’re moving the campaign along, we start to see what your competitors are doing and we start to see how Google is responding to the work that we’re doing and we make adjustments. It is not typical to see an immediate result.
Having said that, we have definitely seen clients have a result in 30 to 45 days and a significant one. We’ve had clients come from no ranking at all to ranking number one for 60 to 80 terms in their search area. And they were winning lots and lots and lots of searches and getting business that way. How your business stacks up, it just depends on so many different variables.
So the truth is, long term SEO is a long commitment. If you run a six month long and SEO campaign, it’s likely you will want to continue that campaign. If you pull out of an SEO campaign, your ranking typically will spike and then slowly fall off. And the reason that happens is because, like I’ve said, Google changes your competitors change your website changes.
Nothing about the digital marketing space is ever the same from Monday to Tuesday or even from 3pm on Monday to 5pm on Monday, things change in the Internet space. And if you’re not adapting to those changes, you will not get organic ranking.
So the reality is, if you need immediate leads, you’re probably going to want to look at ads. They’re usually much, much more impactful and immediate lead generation campaign to drive it with ads. But if you’re looking for the long term, you’re looking at your business two years, a year, six months from now, whatever that is.
SEO, it’s not either or right, you can use SEO and ads, but if you’re picking between them, you have to decide if you’re looking for a now thing or if you’re looking for I want free leads delivered to my doorstep in six months. What’s your situation? And maybe you need both, right? You have to decide that.
But thinking that SEO is going to turn a massive profit in your business in 30 days is probably a falsity. And we don’t ever want to give our clients false hope that’s going to save their business because it won’t. But it absolutely is the right step for most businesses. When you look at doing a long term campaign in the business, you want your organic rank to be rising, rising, rising, rising, but you don’t want to rely on it straight away for you to get leads.
I hope that is helpful. If you’re not sure if SEO is going to work for you or you’ve thought about it, but you just don’t know. Reach out to us online at muletowndigital.com we can run our SEO Track Builder, we can do a viability analysis and we can tell you what we think it will take to grow your business.
But the bottom line is you’ve got to be willing to invest in SEO. It is a long game play and if you’re looking for a short game, come to us and let’s run some ads. But you got to know that going in that it’s not going to be immediate. It could be. And it can be. And it has been for our customers. But you have to know, it could also take a long time and a lot of effort.
So whether it’s right for you or not depends on your business. Let us know if we can help you.
Thank you.
Muletown Digital is a Columbia based SEO company offering SEO services to businesses throughout Tennessee, including Nashville, Spring Hill, Brentwood, and Franklin.
