Do you really have to wait a long time to see SEO results?

SEO agencies regularly highlight the fact that it is necessary to be patient to obtain significant results when a company embarks on the implementation of an SEO strategy.

This is particularly the argument that is often raised when the discussion with the SEO agency's sales representative comes to the subject of the duration and cost of the service. 

Support contracts with SEO service providers are generally for 12 months and this is justified by the fact that it is necessary to wait between 6 months and 1 year to significantly improve the visibility of a site. 

This explanation is a generality that may turn out to be false or true depending on the initial situation of the service.

What do SEO results mean? 

To consider that an SEO strategy is generating results, two indicators must evolve upward together: 

• The positions. Achieving the targeted positions, generally the Top 5 or 3, on several keywords defined before the service.
• Traffic. A significant improvement in organic traffic over a defined period, in proportions that may have been defined by objectives.

The increase in turnover for an e-commerce site, or the increase in the number of leads for a showcase site, is a consequence of the increase in organic traffic. 

Indeed, a good SEO strategy will directly influence the conversion rate of a site since visitors will be better qualified (and more numerous). 

If not, it means the SEO strategy is targeting the wrong keywords, or the site has significant UX design flaws that are blocking conversion. 

Bounce off the Ball

Results in a few weeks? Yes, it's possible!

If the objective is to become number 1 on an expert subject, in a low-competition environment, with a site that already has decent popularity in its theme, it is entirely possible to reach the first page of Google and even be first on a keyword in a few weeks.

Once the target keyword or target expression has been chosen, writing text optimized for SEO and then creating a new page on the site can be done in less than a week.

This new page must then be indexed to have the first verdict on its positioning. In terms of indexing, we have the choice of letting Google robots come and explore the site and discover the new page at their own pace or the possibility of requesting rapid indexing by entering the URL of the new page in the Search Console. In the 1st possibility, indexing can take one to two weeks, in the 2nd, you generally have to wait 24 hours. We will use the second option to save time if the page has difficulty indexing.

Depending on the indexing result, it will still be possible to improve the positioning of the targeted keyword by creating quality backlinks towards it. 

Be careful of SEO agencies with promises of achieving results quickly or guaranteed results, which may involve the use of unethical SEO tactics (also known as black hat SEO). This can temporarily boost the visibility of your site, but above all, there is a strong risk of degrading the overall positioning of your site in the long term if these techniques are detected by Google.

And remember that SEO is not an exact science. Google remains the only master on board the boat, whose operating rules are not all known, and which change over time. 

 

Why do you generally have to wait several months before obtaining significant results in SEO?

Obtaining results in SEO is long-term work because even if an SEO agency has excellent theoretical knowledge of SEO best practices, implementation is an empirical process in which it is not possible to skip steps. 

Hundreds of criteria strongly influence the visibility of a site in Google SERPs. It is first necessary to optimize the SEO criteria which are the most important to see the progress that this produces on the targeted positions, and then adjust the action plan on the other points which contribute to the improvement of the quality and the popularity of a page or site. At OMT SEO Agency Lahore, we define priorities in our SEO audits for each action to be implemented so that our clients obtain a rapid return on investment.

Doing netlinking to increase the popularity of your site is work that must appear natural in the eyes of Google. There is no point in making a lot of backlinks at once and then stopping. The number of links must increase regularly over time. 

An SEO strategy is therefore systematically considered over the long term to allow the right action plan to be deployed.  The first 6 months are generally devoted to implementing the fundamentals to strengthen the SEO quality of the site. Then an assessment of the results obtained makes it possible to adapt the action plan and the means to implement it to seek the best positions over the following 6 months.

    

What elements influence the horizon for achieving SEO results?

The competitive context

The time required to achieve results will depend above all on the competitive intensity in the company's sector of activity. 

The more competitive a sector is in terms of natural referencing, the more the players there have a strong SEO maturity. This maturity generally implies these sites:

• a long history of SEO optimization via their seniority,
• lots of content that demonstrates real expertise in their field,
• extreme popularity, driven by powerful netlinking worked for years.

To get past this typology of sites, you will therefore have to rise to their level. If your site is itself a historic player in its theme, this can be done in 1 year, but if your site is a new entrant on the market, it will take years, with massive investments to hope to enter the game.

 

The starting point of your site

An SEO service always begins with an audit of the site and its competitive environment, to identify the problems to be resolved and determine the actions to take to move the site forward in the SERPs.

With an equivalent SEO objective, a site that has been poorly designed for SEO, poor in content, and with low popularity will require much more work than a site that already has good SEO fundamentals on the 3 pillars of natural referencing (technical, semantics, popularity). In this case, the horizon for achieving the objectives will surely take more time with the 1st example than with the 2nd.

 

The financial means

If your company does not have the skills or internal resources to do quality SEO, you will have to outsource this work and therefore commit more or less significant financial resources depending on your objectives (and competitors, as explained in the paragraph previous) to do the technical optimization of the site, create content, and obtain backlinks.

With few resources, it is possible to advance the positions of a site on a few moderately competitive keywords, but certainly not to take it to the top of Google on all its keywords, because the budget will not be able to finance all the actions necessary to achieve this objective.

With a lot of resources, the SEO agency can work on a wider scope of keywords, it can produce more content, and more backlinks, and aim for ambitious objectives over a year of collaboration.