Yesterday I decided to try a new sandwich shop. This was a big step for me because I am a creature of habit. I placed my order and waited and waited and waited. I went up to ask the counter girl about my order, and she quickly replied, “great food is worth waiting for”. I am a big fan of food, so I decided that I was willing to wait. But for how long? And in this time I got to thinking.
SEO clients and prospects almost always have the same question, when will I be ranked #1. I immediately made the connection
of
that question and my current situation in the sandwich shop. My response is very similar to that same counter girl, ”
great
SEO takes time”. However, never should that explanation be used as an excuse for non-performing SEO.
Here are some factors you can use to gauge your level of patience
- Geo-Targeted keywords tend to optimize quicker
- “Restaurant” (National) vs. “New York City Restaurant” (Geographic)
- The more words in the term the quicker the optimization should take place
- “Steakhouse in downtown New York City” will optimizer faster than “Steakhouse”
- How competitive are the keywords
- There is much more competition for the keyword ‘Baseball’, approx. 216,000,000 web pages vying for #1, whereas ‘Glove’ has approx. 29,900,000.
- Are the site rankedabove youengaging in their own SEO
- You will gain much more ground against a site that is not doing any active SEO
Patience is warranted in regards to SEO. Four months is generally a good point to check to see how your SEO is progressing. At this point, don’t be afraid to ask your Internet Marketing Company questions. At this time, the answer should not be “great SEO takes time”. By this time your foundation should be set, and you should be climbing in the rankings. In addition you should also be able to track your return on investment for your SEO initiative. If you do not know how to do this, then check back later this week for my next posting on that topic.
To finish my sandwich story, it was a great sandwich. This has opened me up to try new places, if you know of any gems in downtown New York City send them my way.