Why Does SEO Take Time to Obtain Rankings?

Organic SEO takes time. This is an essential SEO truth, and one that many online marketing firms struggle to express to perspective clients. In fact, John Selby, of HRS Consulting, recently told The Organic SEO Blog that most prospective clients balk at SEO timetables.

"When can I expect results?" is a common question, and Stepman takes great pains to answer honestly: "Many websites see quick results, often in a month or less," he says, "but true organic reach takes time, often six months or more."

So why does organic SEO take time?

Why Does Organic SEO Take Time to Produce Results?

The Website Audit

The initial website audit is often the first step of any organic SEO campaign. Different audits may examine different aspects of a website, including (but not limited to): a technical audit, a performance audit, an accessibility audit, or a content audit.

Depending on the scope of the site, and the auditors know-how, an audit can take anywhere from a few hours to a few days (or more). There are SEO audit applications that can automate some of this work, but a quality SEO audit for an expansive site often requires hands-on knowledge.

Incidentally, click here if like to read a full page of SEOs battling about the question, "How long does an SEO audit take?" As you'll see, the question of "how long does an audit take?" is hotly contested among SEOs.

Optimization

The results of the website audit guide the optimization process.

Some of this work is about fixing technical mistakes like broken backlinks, page redirects, and website structure. And much of this work is simply about refining snippets of code. Of course, the work requires knowledge about development, HTML and other languages, and SEO. Depending on the scope of the mistakes, technical optimization can take days or weeks. And, of course, once optimization begins technical SEO is on-going.

Read: "4 Service-BasedBusinesses That Really Benefit From Local SEO"

Beyond technical optimization, most websites require content optimization, which may require pages (and pages) of fresh, relevant content. Recently, many firms have taken to calling content optimization "content marketing." The point is to create a batch of fresh content for the search engines to "crawl" (see below). Ideally, too, content will be produced on an ongoing basis, as often as every day or every week.

Another important form of optimization is "conversion rate optimization," which attempts to tie each page of content to an actionable goal. Without conversion rate optimization, all that fresh content may be for naught.

As we've noted before:

"A visitor to your site is simply that, a visitor. A visitor might click on your site, browse a few pages, then leave. A site with a high ranking might attract many visitors who browse a few pages, then leave.

The whole notion of ranking begs a question: What is the point of attracting visitors? The point is conversion. A conversion is a visitor who performs an action on your site, like buying your product or service, or sharing your content, or signing up for your newsletter. Different sites have different ways of defining a successful conversion, yet the essence is the same: A 'converted' visitor is a customer."

Read: "Why ReputationManagement for Doctors Is Important?"

Technical optimization. Content marketing. Conversion rate optimization. These three types of optimization require time and effort--and, of course, they do not cover all types of optimization.

To assign a general time allotment to this work is often misleading because each site requires different forms or optimization. In any case, the initial phase of this work will take months for most websites (and often more for some websites).

Google's Crawlers

When you begin to optimize your site, Google begins to crawl the new fixes and content for the purposes of indexing each page. Some SEOs believe that the creation and submission of a new "sitemap" may help expedite this process. Moz disagrees:

"Probably the most common misconception is that the XML sitemap helps get your pages indexed. The first thing we’ve got to get straight is this: Google does not index your pages just because you asked nicely. Google indexes pages because (a) they found them and crawled them, and (b) they consider them good enough quality to be worth indexing. Pointing Google at a page and asking them to index it doesn’t really factor into it."

Whatever the case, Google may take its time to "crawl" your new, shiny site: anywhere from days to weeks--a popular estimate, on online forums at least, is 4 days to 4 weeks, although this has not been verified by Google.

Online Marketing with HRSConsulting

John Selby, the founder of HRS Consulting, has often optimized websites to appear on the first page results in a month or less. However, Alex understands that each website is different, and each site requires a different path to success. To learn how you can optimize your website to perform as quickly as possible, contact HRS Consulting today or request a free quote now.