Developing a Realistic Timeline for your SEO results

If no matter how much you try, you seem to struggle to get your site out of the deep-end when it comes to search engine rankings, you might find yourself wondering how anyone masters SEO. For site managers or marketing professionals, it can be difficult to ascertain why conversion rates or rankings refuse to improve – especially after implementing huge (apparently positive) changes within your site. It could be that your current strategy just isn’t working in the way that you had hoped, but it’s far more likely that you are struggling from a disconnect regarding a realistic SEO timeline. Here are some things to consider when you#8217; re planning the future of your SEO results.

SEO is Long-Term and Complicated

A lot of what makes up the technical side of your SEO strategy will be troubleshooting the things that go wrong. It’s not always obvious why your rankings have started to fluctuate. For example, you might find that the tactic you used in the past is now recognized as spam, leading to your website value being discounted by Google. Such an occurrence could result in a huge drop in your rankings. This is why it is important to stay on top of your SEO as often as possible. Optimizing your website is not something that can simply be done once and then forgotten about – you need to learn how to adapt as new changes come into play and learn so that you can constantly stay ahead of the curve.

SEO is a Team Game

There are various important factors that can have an impact on the success of an SEO program, and many of them rely heavily upon co-operation from other departments within a business. When you want to make sure that your SEO scheme is working correctly, you need to be able to cooperate with other teams, especially the social media team, customer support team, and IT department.

 Timing is Important

Once upon a time, it used to be effective to simply place fifty new posts on your website and promote the hell out of them in the hope that a small number would be appreciated by a really large number of people, earning link authority and social shares for the site. Unfortunately, “going viral” is something that is incredibly difficult to predict – even for the experts. Often, you need to know how to place the right content in the right place at the right time. You can make some effort to predict which content your audience will want at certain times by thinking about seasonality, current events or trends. But most of the time this is going to be a game of luck, as the right time can happen at just about any time.

ROI can be Complicated

The Hummingbird algorithm that Google has introduced has made things incredibly difficult when it comes to measuring the precise ROI for all of your SEO actions. You can no longer measure the specific amount of traffic that you are gaining from a certain keyword. What’s more, Hummingbird means that you cannot always control directly which variations of a phrase or word your site is capable of ranking for. Instead of focusing on ROI too heavily, look for KPIs that offer more value to your goals overall. For example, do you want to receive more positive press online, or increase brand loyalty? The metrics with the most important value will be determined by the specific goals of your business.