As the old saying goes, Rome wasn’t built in a day—and the most popular websites didn’t achieve their status overnight. If you’re trying to improve your online presence, it’s not enough to just update your keywords. Building a steady flow of website traffic and forging a genuine connection with your followers is a process, and it needs to be nurtured and helped along. If you want to develop a strategy that works for your online marketing campaign, you need to be ready to dedicate your time and energy to carrying it out.
Why Does SEO Take Time to Start Working?
The promise of SEO is that it will make your website more visible, help you reach out to new customers, and make it easier for you to promote your products and services in an effective way. The results aren’t always noticeable right away. These are some of the reasons why SEO takes some time to start changing your web results:
- If you’re like most companies, you have competitors who are selling similar products and services—and a lot of them already have a strong web presence. They’re already getting great results from their SEO and are ranking highly on search results pages. It’s going to take some time for you to catch up.
- It isn’t always easy to develop the right SEO strategy for your business. In some cases, you’ll find that your initial set of keywords will not end up earning you the results you want. It takes trial and error—and careful analytical research—to discover an approach that works. Effective keyword research takes time, so the sooner you get started, the better.
- It also takes time to optimize all your web content. You may have published a lot of content across your various online platforms—your website, your blog, your social media accounts—before settling on a viable SEO strategy. This means that you may not see the results you want immediately.
When Should You Change Your SEO Strategy?
What if you’ve given your SEO strategy a chance and it still isn’t resulting in any boost in traffic for your site? It’s not enough to develop and carry out an approach to SEO—you also need to be able to tell when it’s time to change it. That means learning to pay attention to the areas that matter most. Here are some tips to keep in mind:
Consider page views, not just traffic.
Traffic doesn’t matter if it isn’t translating into sales for your company. If your site’s bounce rate is high, it means that you’re not getting the right kind of traffic—in other words, you’re not getting visitors who are likely to become your consumers. It’s time to take a second look at your strategy and rethink your keywords.
Look at leads, not just rankings.
Search engine rankings are important, of course—but they don’t tell the whole story. Ultimately, the point of SEO is to draw in visitors who will end up buying your products or services. It’s great if your website gets a boost in its rankings, but you need to be able to draw a clear line from that boost to an increase in your leads. When that starts to happen on a regular basis, you’ll know that your SEO strategy is working.
Focus on the process, not just goals.
As with so many other aspects of online marketing, SEO is all about the process. You may have the smartest and most achievable goals in the world, but on a week-to-week basis, you need to be focused on how you’re getting there. That means knowing when it’s time to refine your current strategy and change up your keywords.
How Can You Tell if Your SEO Approach Is Working?
Here’s the question everybody wants to know the answer to—but there really isn’t a single, universal answer. Every company has different needs, and the measure of online success for one company may not be the same for another. That’s why it’s so important to develop a unique, customized SEO strategy for your company.
There’s no “eureka” moment when your SEO strategy will suddenly start “working” and begin bringing waves of traffic to your site. It’s much more likely that the various components of your online campaign—your content, the keywords you’re using, and your website—will each click into place and begin working in unison. When your traffic begins to steadily rise, you’ll know that you’ve hit on a formula that works.
If you want to craft an online strategy that gets results, talk to Pennington Creative. Our Tucson-based content experts can put together a customized bundle of services, from onsite content to shareable graphics, that will be tailored to your specific needs. We’ve got the experience and expertise to be your guide through the often-confusing world of SEO. For optimized content that gets the results you’re looking for, contact our team today via our website.
