Outside of the immediate industry, search engine optimization (SEO) is a murky area of knowledge. The most common question that is asked is, “how long will it take to see results?” Unfortunately, a small business investing into a search engine optimization (SEO) consultant may not fully understand the various processes involved to get ranked. Search engine optimization (SEO) results are based on a number of factors: the age of the site, the brand level, and the competitiveness for high volume keywords—if we keep this simple.
New Domains
The age of a domain is crucial.
If it’s completely new, ranking for competitive keywords can happen within three months, but to be realistic, it might take six to nine. Additionally, new domains get their brand terms ranked quickly after the first crawl and you should rank number one easily for a unique brand name. Thus the goal for a new site should be to rank for brand and potentially long tail searches.
It all depends on how relevant your content is and oftentimes how soon and how often you can get linked to from authoritative websites. This will help grow the “trust” level between you and the search engines. Keep in mind, this is based on a site with good technical infrastructure—without this, you’re a fish out of water.
Redesigns
Then there is the question of redesigns. If you’ve got a large, reputable website, major search engines will immediately begin re-indexing your site. This is because search engines will “trust” your site more if you’re only changing URLs on the same domain, versus having an altogether new site. If you rely on your home page rankings for top keywords, then a redesign probably wouldn’t hurt you for the same reasoning. Of course, you can benchmark how the crawling process is going by monitoring your top 10-50 keywords and seeing how your rankings are.
How will your traffic be affected for a redesign? Unfortunately, even if you keep up your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts by maintaining your high-volume keywords, you’ll mostly likely experience a drop in traffic, no matter how minor. But at any rate, your goal should be maintaining your high-traffic keywords. However, you can engage in analytics to try to offset this loss, as monitoring will give you the best clues on how to understand how search engines see the site. This will give you a better idea of how long it will take for you to see search engine optimization (SEO) results.
Written by: Daisy K.