Follow these steps and make sure that you can reap all the benefits that SEO can provide you with simply by being prepared.
Plan for the long-term
We’d all like our SEO to be instantaneous, but many of us don’t even realize that this isn’t really a possibility. The most fundamental thing you need to know about SEO is that you won’t see results right away. In fact, you should be suspicious of any SEO-related operations that claim to work immediately, as SEO, by its very nature, is simply a long-term process.
So how much do you have to wait? On average, it takes 3 to 6 months to see the first results, and even then, they’re usually pretty minimal. 6 to 12 months is the period where you may actually start seeing more substantial results that make an actual, meaningful difference in your website’s ranking. The reason why you won’t see any results within the first two months is quite simple:
- the first month is spent on research, auditing, and planning – these are the early concept stages, so no meaningful work can be done as there is still no established plan of action,
- the second month is when the established strategies start to get implemented, but it takes a while for the search engines to register the changes happening.
So, in the end, it’s a process that takes time and patience. And, as we all know, time is money, which leads us to our next point.
Be prepared to spend money
Work won’t pay for itself, and SEO is a lot of work. While it might seem like a small thing, SEO actually involves a string of complex processes and intense micro-managing, so you can be sure that any company that promises to help you out for peanuts is most likely worth exactly the amount they charge. If you want to invest in really valuable SEO, you should be prepared to pay between £1500 and £3000 per month if you want to have an broad range, though it depends on your field. And that is just the bare minimum required, as larger companies that need the SEO proportional to their size spend money in the tens of thousands per month in order to maintain their position. However, it’s not completely outside the realm of possibility to receive a good SEO service for as low as £500 per month. It all depends on the expectations and goals that you set for your campaign, as well as the time needed to reach them.
Now that you have a plan and are committed to spending the necessary funds in order to start and maintain your SEO campaign, it’s time for the next step.
Decide on a metric
Budgeting SEO means you also have expectations regarding your performance. It is hard to gauge performance without a proper measuring criterion, however – that’s where metrics come in. Though you might be tempted to use rankings as your metric, that’s actually one of the worst factors you can choose to accurately gauge the performance of your SEO. Instead, consider looking at traffic, as focusing on leads and other types of conversions in this type of metric can give you a much better idea of what’s going on.
Set your goals
There’s no point of a strategy if there is no goal behind it. You need to know exactly where you want to be by the end of the process if you want that process to yield any sort of measurable results. Think carefully about what you want to change about your company through an SEO campaign and try to set a reasonable goal for yourself. Whether it’s an increase in sales, subscriptions, or anything else, how you measure your success is up to you – and it’s up to you to decide what your ultimate goal will look like.
As with most things that matter, you need to know how much you are willing to give in return for your success. If you want to achieve that increase in sales that you’re counting on, you have to know how much you’re ready to pay for that.
Give your SEO company enough space
Once you’ve handled those issues, you’re pretty much set to hire an SEO firm to take matters into their own hands. Pick the company that best understands your needs and expectations and offers the most reasonable offer. The important thing you have to make sure of right now is that the company must perform its role in the best way possible.
You need to be ready to let your SEO firm handle all of the issues of your company’s website. They will need to receive full access to your website’s structure. This is very important, as, without this level of trust, your efforts may be all for nothing, as you’ll get results at a much slower rate than expected. Alternatively, your IT team can be tasked with implementing the changes the SEO team proposes, but the thing is that you can never be sure if they’ll be able to coordinate as effectively as the SEO firm could with proper access.
While this is your own, personal plan and strategy from start to finish, and your SEO firm is just someone you hire to perform a task, so to speak, you need to give them the freedom to operate on their own terms. Remember – they are the specialists here and you hired them because you want to benefit from their expertise. By micromanaging your SEO firm, you may end up inhibiting their work, causing not just delays in their work, but actual losses for you. Communication is the key to understanding one another – and in this case, it can have important financial benefits. Because of this, keep in mind that you are still the biggest expert when it comes to your company’s field, so make sure that your SEO firm receives the input it needs from you, in order to effectively do their job.
The bottom line here is that you need to take the time to carefully plan your SEO strategy. We all want quick results, but SEO is meant to give you ongoing benefits over time, with incredibly satisfying results in the long run. In the end, just the fact that you understand the process better and realize how much time has to pass for the results that matter will give you a leg up compared to most of your competitors. A little bit of patience can come a long way in getting you where you really want to be.
