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Being on the first page of search results is crucial. 75% of searchers never make it past the results they see on page one. However, it can feel like it takes a long time to get there—longer than you would think. There’s a reason SEO is referred to as a “long game:” according to a survey conducted by MorningScore, 82% of experts surveyed
said that SEO takes an average of six months to show an increase in traffic, with the full results taking around 12-24 months.
Why does it take so long to see success with SEO? And what makes it worth all of the work in the long run?
3 Common Obstacles to Success with SEO
There are a few reasons it takes so long to see results from SEO. Here are a few of the most common challenges.
1. Domain Age
If you’re working with a brand new domain (AKA the name of your website, e.g. southvalleypediatrics.com), it takes longer to build up your credibility and your backlinks. Older domains may see SEO results faster because they already have some credibility compared to brand new domains. However, just because a site has some history, it doesn’t guarantee that you will see results faster. If you have seen a decrease in site traffic or been affected by a penalty or core algorithm update, you will also have a steep hill to climb. If you have to spend time fixing major impacts on your traffic, expect to spend time getting your baseline traffic back up before you start to see any major SEO strategy wins.
2. Competition
As with most things related to business, more competition means a greater need to find a niche. This need extends to SEO, where overly general keywords (known as short-tail keywords) like “personal injury attorney,” mean you’re competing with the entire nation. However, if you focus your content on highly specific (aka long-tail) geographically targeted keywords like “vehicular accident attorney near San Jose, CA” you will see your conversion rates improve.
3. Expertise
Your website might be brand new, and you might have a million competitors—neither of those things is within your control. What you can control is how you approach your SEO. First off, ensure you have someone on your team that knows what they are doing. SEO is a craft, and people are trained to write and optimize specifically for this channel. The more time your SEO team can dedicate to optimizing your site for a specific keyword, the faster you will get the results you’re looking for.
What happens when you hire someone to manage an SEO campaign?
Everyone has their own specific process, but you can expect to see many of these tactics:
- Goal Alignment - Before they can analyze, they need to know what they are looking for. Take time to review your goals with your SEO team. Explain to them what you want to be ranking for and why. This will help them know if your content is doing what it should.
- Site Analysis - Your SEO specialist will review the health of your site and create a plan of everything that needs to be improved. This will include all of the technical aspects and user experience and other things that go into SEO, like how many reviews you have and your competitors’ performance.
- Content Analysis - An SEO analyst will look at your page titles, meta descriptions, heading structure, and image descriptions to ensure everything is formatted correctly, there are no duplicates, and that they make sense for what is displayed on the page.
Executing an SEO Strategy
After the analysis, your SEO specialist will put together a prioritized plan of action based on what will make the most impact on your search engine rankings. This will include on-page SEO adjustments, technical adjustments, and content recommendations. Here are some of the things you will see in your optimization strategy.
On-Page Adjustments
Optimize keyword density - Align pages with best practices for how many times a keyword should appear on that page.
Optimize heading structure - Headers (H1, H2, H3) help structure a page and help the Search Engines(SERPs) read and understand your content.
Internal linking - Internal links take users from one part of your website to another. This can boost engagement on your site and help users learn more about your business. They will review all internal links and add additional links where needed.
Text and paragraph formatting - Breaking up blocks of text with lists, photos, gallery cases, testimonials, reviews, videos, etc., helps grab and keep a reader’s attention as they scan through a page.
Calls-to-action (CTAs) - Every page on your website should have a CTA. They will add them where needed and optimize if they are not performing well (based on provided conversion data).
Titles and meta descriptions - If your pages are underperforming, they will rework your title tags and meta descriptions. A well-written meta description and title tag may both raise your position on search engines and entice readers to click through to your site instead of competitors in the SERP.
Technical Site Audits
Internal and external link maintenance - If internal or external links are not working, they will fix these. They can manually fix internal links and reach out to the site with the broken external link to coordinate the repair.
404 and 500 errors - Fixing these errors improves a user’s experience with your site. These errors increase your bounce rate and discourage people from coming back.
- A 404 error: When this error appears, a page on your site couldn’t be found. They will redirect the page and/or correct the link to improve the user experience.
- A 500 error: The 500 Internal Server Error is a "server-side" error, meaning the problem is not with your PC or Internet connection but is a problem with the website’s server. They will look at your website’s permissions and pinpoint anything not talking to the server correctly. They will then fix these errors or redirect the page.
Javascript and CSS file maintenance - Browsers won’t load broken Javascript files, negatively affecting your website’s user experience since content could be missing. When these issues occur, MyAdvice will minify your website to improve load times.
Page speed - Page load times are a factor in your organic rankings. A slow-to-load page can also decrease the user’s experience and cause them to bounce. Some actions they can take include:
- Compressing images
- Implementing browser caching (making it so that all of your data - like headers and footers - doesn’t have to reload every time someone clicks on a new page on your site)
- Minifying your HTML - process of removing or fixing unnecessary or duplicated data without impacting how a browser will process the HTML
Canonical URLs - Issues occur when a website has more than one URL that displays similar or identical content. This is an issue because Google doesn’t want to index duplicate content in its SERP. Some actions they can take include:
- Redirecting duplicate pages
- Adding canonical tags to your site’s pages tells Google which pages you want to be displayed.
Redirect loops and chains - This issue arises when multiple URLs are set up to redirect to a different page. These additional redirects can make it hard for crawlers to index the pages. To fix this, they will evaluate and re-write the redirects accordingly.
Duplicate title/meta content - As with duplicate page content, Google doesn’t like duplicate titles and metas—it gets confused. The search engine can't understand why you would have two pages about the same thing on your website. While there is no duplicate content penalty, it can have a negative impact on how your content appears in search results. To fix it, they will rewrite the title/meta to fit the content on the page.
Robots.txt and Sitemap.xml files - A Sitemap can be thought of as a roadmap of your website design to help search engines better understand the structure and important content of your website. The Robots.txt can be viewed as a directive that indicates how spiders (search engines/crawlers) should handle the content. The team will review both of these files and make sure Google only sees what they want it to.
Content Optimization
Keyword research and prioritization - Keywords are the foundation of SEO. They will research how people are searching for your services and content. They will then prioritize this list to determine what keywords they want to use on which page.
Unique content creation - Your SEO team should include a copywriter. They will review the prioritized list and feature those keywords and phrases in new, unique content for the website (FAQ pages, etc.). All content should be highly researched, and your copywriter should be fully knowledgeable about all services and procedures before they start creating content.
Measuring Your Results
- Growth in Organic Traffic - Organic traffic is some of the highest quality inbound traffic you can receive. Growth of organic traffic means that your website's visibility has gone up. To measure, plot your traffic from a few months before you started the campaign to now.
- Keyword Ranking - One of the simplest ways to track your keyword ranking is to do a Google search for the word you want to rank for. Simply count the number of results before your website appears. There are also several tools that can track this for you, but if your budget is small, the counting method works. Still losing count because you have to scroll so far? Keep working on your content for this keyword!
- Click Thru Rate - This measures the percentage of users who clicked on your organic results from a SERP. This is a great measurement of how effective your title tags and meta descriptions are. The more clicks mean the more they are doing their job in attracting attention.
- Bounce Rate - This is the percentage of people who visit one page on your site but do not click through to any additional pages. The more clicks through your site, then the higher the quality of the visitor. To measure, plot your bounce rate from a few months before you started the campaign to now.
- Backlinks - Measure your volume of backlinks with a third-party tool. SEMRush found that 2.2 times more backlinks lead to URLs in the first position in a SERP than the second. As you see your number of backlinks grow from new site links to your content, it means your content strategy is working.
- Conversion Rate - It is great to grow the number of visitors to your site and increase your clicks. But the most important metric is your conversion rate. If you are seeing similar website traffic but a larger conversion rate, this is a win! Conversions mean more opportunities for future appointments for your business and should be the ultimate measurement of the success of your campaign.
SEO takes time and there are a lot of moving parts. Even with someone dedicated to your SEO campaign full-time, it takes Google’s algorithms time to catch on to what you are doing and start to see the impact. SEO is an investment in your long-term goals. You can get some quick wins in other channels but an SEO campaign will ensure your website brings in top-quality leads for years to come.
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