The SEO Marathon: Embracing the Long Haul
When planning a journey, you usually consider the length of the trip and its cost. Similarly, if you’re starting a new SEO project, you want to know how long it takes for SEO to start working and how much you have to invest to achieve the desired results. The answer? It’s a marathon, not a sprint.
Most experts agree that a website should start seeing its first results in about four to six months. But the truth is, the timeline can vary tremendously. Google is constantly updating its algorithms, and the game rules are constantly evolving. If you want to uncover your website’s full potential and succeed in today’s digital landscape, you must stay agile and adapt to the changes.
Navigating the Competitive Landscape
The level of competition in your business niche is one of the most crucial factors impacting the speed of your SEO growth. The first thing that matters is how saturated the market is. Playing against dozens of competitors is one thing, but trying to outrank hundreds of websites is a whole other story.
Why is it essential to get your website to rank on the first page of search results? Because the top one result gets 27.6% of all clicks, and only 0.63% of users clicked on something on the second page. These figures may vary depending on your industry, but the message is clear: you must focus your SEO strategy on getting your page to the top of the SERP.
If the niche is dominated by established websites that have been holding on to the top 3 positions for years, then it will be much harder to oust them. Both old and relatively new players in your niche may or may not be doing SEO. If the websites you’re competing with happen to be not SEO-friendly and lacking backlinks – thus ranking high simply because Google had no better alternatives – you should be able to take over their rankings relatively quickly. However, you’ll face hard times in oversaturated markets with experienced SEO players.
Targeting the Right Audience
Whether you’re targeting a local, nationwide, or worldwide market, you’ll have to be ready to fight with a different number of rivals. Traditionally, markets like the US, Canada, or the UK have had the most competition with numerous top-ranking sites. Get ready for fierce competition if you’re planning on targeting these markets.
The level of competition will also vary depending on the language that your target market speaks. Because English is the most common language on the web, used by 25.9% of all web users, competing with your rivals for an English-speaking audience will be challenging. SERP competition in languages other than English is usually less tough.
Finally, be aware that competition for local users differs from that for global users. Businesses targeting the worldwide market, like software companies, will see the highest level of competition as they’ll have thousands of websites from around the globe as their rivals, including international businesses with substantial marketing budgets. Dentistry targeting a particular neighborhood will have fewer competitors operating in the same area, with even fewer having a website. Therefore, it can succeed much faster than an e-commerce website offering delivery across the whole country with plenty of rivaling sites selling the same goods and trying to rank for the exact keywords. Focus, then, on local SEO practices to rank higher and reach a local audience.
Keyword Strategies: Going Long-Tail
Not all keywords are created equal. Some are more generic and get thousands and even hundreds of thousands of monthly searches. Others are more specific and are searched for approximately forty times per month. Keyword popularity search will help you distinguish between different categories of keywords.
A short-tail keyword with commercial intent will have a much higher difficulty score than a long-tail keyword with informational intent. Because the level of competition for high conversion or brand keywords is usually much higher, it will take more time to get your site to the first SERP.
For quick results, go for low-competition keywords like “gym workouts for beginners to lose weight” or “luxury lodges with hot tubs scotland.” There’s an abundance of such queries to choose from in any business niche. Long-tail keywords are highly specific – it’s clear what people expect to find when Googling the query. The drawback of this approach is that being low-volume, long-tail keywords won’t bring you much traffic.
More generic keywords, on the other hand, usually boast higher search volumes. For example, people look for “mountain lodge” 2.4K times per month. At the same time, head terms are highly competitive, so while they can bring you tons of traffic, don’t expect it to happen fast. Another drawback of head terms is that they are too broad, and it’s sometimes unclear what user intent stands behind them.
Depending on your niche and target conversion action, long-tail keywords with a specific search intent tend to convert better. Either of the two strategies may work for you – you have to realize that hunting for big fish will take much more time, especially if you are in a competitive niche and market.
Prioritizing Your SEO Approach
Analyzing the market and choosing the right keywords to target is just one part of your overall SEO strategy. You’ll also have to decide on how to build backlinks to your websites, come up with the best possible website structure, and generally decide on the things that should be done first to achieve your goals faster.
Different approaches result in different outcomes and timelines. For example, you can prioritize your content and backlink portfolio over technical SEO or user experience.
Prioritizing content marketing is the most obvious way to improve your site’s quality and SEO. You can use more valuable keywords by creating new pages with unique and helpful content. Instead of optimizing existing content, new content allows you to provide more value to users, which improves the quality of your website and allows it to rank higher.
Backlinks signal to Google that the content on your website is valuable, up to date, and can provide real value to users. This is especially true if a backlink comes from another authoritative website, one that is trusted by both search bots and searchers. The more high-quality backlinks your site gets, the more trustworthy it will appear to search engines, eventually resulting in higher rankings on the SERPs.
Solving or improving tech issues on your website is vital for SEO. It allows search bots to quickly access, crawl, and index your website, ensuring that your other SEO endeavors run more smoothly. Tech SEO allows your website to run smoothly, allowing you to focus on implementing other SEO techniques and attracting new organic traffic.
Any search engine’s ultimate goal is to provide users with a great experience by suggesting search results that are useful and convenient. To that end, search engines assess user interaction with the page and evaluate signals like click-through rate, bounce rate, time on the page, and more. A well-optimized page has a better chance of ranking higher and doing so faster.
Balancing Your SEO Strategy
In reality, all these SEO strategies are equally important, so combining them is the best option. But make sure to do it gradually, shifting from one to another. We suggest the following 6-month plan for steady SEO progress:
- Month 1-2: Focus on content creation and optimization
- Month 3-4: Prioritize building high-quality backlinks
- Month 5-6: Address any technical SEO issues and improve user experience
The earlier you start, the sooner you’ll achieve your goals. However, the success of your SEO strategy depends on each step. For example, you’ll reach your goal sooner with a thorough competitor or keyword research, top-notch quality backlinks, or an intent-focused UX design.
The Role of Resources
Regardless of the scenario you find yourself in and the strategy you choose, driving your website to the top will take a lot of hard work. And it’s more than just the work of the SEO specialist I’m referring to. You’ll need to have all the technical errors fixed, which means you can’t do without a website developer. And while some issues can be corrected relatively fast, other errors are rather complicated and resource-demanding.
Having more resources allows you to get SEO results much faster. If you can invest enough money into creating content, buying backlinks, and hiring professional developers, your SEO project will most likely yield excellent results. It would be nearly impossible, on the other hand, to achieve your desired SEO results in a highly competitive niche without enough resources.
Choosing the Right SEO Expert
To make your SEO strategy work, you’ll have to create a lot of quality content, which again takes time, as all good things do. If you don’t have any in-house copywriters to do the job, you’ll once again have to find a skillful freelance specialist. Again, this takes time and will also cost you a pretty penny.
Your SEO specialist will be the one deciding which strategies to rely on and which changes to implement on your website to make it more rankable. And the faster your SEO specialist makes all the crucial changes, the sooner you’ll see some tangible results. So choose someone who can set priorities straight and offer you an actionable SEO plan.
Getting things right will take time, and even more time will pass before search engines notice that some corrections have been made. Besides, some mistakes cannot be corrected – once the page is deleted, there is no way of getting it back. Also, beware of SEO specialists who use outdated tactics. SEO is not like math or physics – the algorithms that define the rules of the game change all the time.
Embracing the Marathon Mindset
The bottom line is: Make sure to hire someone knowledgeable who stays on top of every SEO trend. Then, whichever market you are in, the SEO expert will be able to analyze the competition and build a viable SEO strategy for your business.
Be patient! If you don’t see any results after three to six months, then keep waiting. If nothing happens after six to 12 months, it may be time to reconsider your SEO strategy and try something new. If there are no significant changes after a year, you may want to reconsider.
SEO takes a while to start working, so you’ll have to spend a lot of funds, time, and effort before you get any return on your investment. But the benefits you’ll eventually gain are well worth all the hard work it takes to make your website visible in search.