Good things come to those who wait

Patience is a virtue in search engine optimization. Placing paid sponsored ads in the Pay per Click (PPC) area via Google AdWords can achieve almost immediate results but SEO does not produce immediate results. You won’t get your return on investment a week after SEO starts. However the long term benefits of SEO often out weight the almost instantaneous results of PPC. This is one reason that the two often work well together in a campaign.

Optimizing your site for your targeted key phrases won’t get you to Page 1 overnight. You won’t find all your keywords rankings in the top 10 on Google in 19 days (despite some claims you read), nor will you get significant traffic improvement after an hour of SEO consultations. SEO is like boiling water: you don’t get a hard boil the moment you turn on the burner… you have to wait for it.

The process of optimizing a site can take months or even over a year, depending on how competitive your area of practice and your geographic target. SEO is an ongoing process with growing measures of return. The return in SEO is good, but you’ve got to be willing to invest the time to let it happen.

Developing a Proper Base Takes Time

Hours of research, developing the proper site architecture, and making the site user friendly must all be completed prior to the actual optimization of specific pages. Keyword research, research on your specific product or service and your specific targeted geography, competition research, and more, must be completed before any optimization can begin.

Every website has different construction, design, layout, history, and speaks differently. No two sites are the same; therefore no research is the same. Some elements of the research can be applied, but you can’t just take what works for someone else and apply it to your site. You don’t get ahead by cloning a competitor; you get ahead by outsmarting a competitor.

There Are No Magic Bullets in SEO

Many businesses have quality websites. To get the search engines to rank you higher than other businesses competing in your same product or services, it is important to do all the little things right. There is no one thing you can do that will send you to the top of the rankings. You must do a series of small things right over time. Overall website construction including “Site maps”, help both search engines and visitors quickly and easily get to the information that is important on your site.

Up against a similar site, these things can help you keep visitors engaged with your content and prevent them from jumping off to a competitor. It’s often the small things that can make the biggest difference. Providing unique content offers value to visitors, videos give people an understanding of you, your personality and FAQ that address real issues are some of the examples that separate you from the rest.

Even the design and navigation of the site play a major role. The easier it is for visitors to find their way around your site the easier it is for the search engines to crawl and index all your web pages.