How long will it be until my SEO investment starts to pay off?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a key player in the success of your website. Lots of people spend lots of time and effort (and often money) on trying to enhance the SEO in their website, so how long will it be before these investments pay off? Well, as is the answer to a lot of questions, how long is a piece of string? However, the one thing you can’t get with SEO is quick results, so don’t expect anything overnight.

The general rule as reported by 123-reg is that after you put in the initial work the following happens:

• Three months for initial SEO results
• Six months for noticeable SEO results
• One year for impactful SEO results

As you can see, SEO is long-term game so you need to make your efforts meaningful rather than hoping for, and expecting, cheap and quick results. The current SEO game is a long term one, designed to make websites provide meaningful content to consumers, so you’ve got to play the game. There are a number of ways to benefit your SEO without heavy investment:

• Start a blog; not a pointless blog, but one filled with interesting facts and news related to your industry and your business. Google is a demon for relevant terms and will be scouring your website for content to boost your rankings in searches, a blog is a great way to do this.
• Use social media; Google+ feeds into Google rankings (funny that!), the way you label your images for upload on social media can impact Google rankings, having your contact details visible on social media can help geographic searches and create unique “about us” content for each channel. All of these will help to boost your ranking.
• Audit your site; check your website for broken links, duplicate content and anchor words (the words that you tie your URL hyperlinks to). These can all affect your SEO, and need to be checked regularly.

And while all of the above will ‘help to boost your ranking’ (as previously stated), bear in mind the timescales above, they still apply, and you’ll need to keep working at it, a one-hit wonder won’t help you to reach the magical Page 1 of Google.

If you need a hand getting started with your SEO drop us a message and see how we can help: hello@webfwd.co.uk