As with most things in SEO it depends. On what exactly? Usually how competitive your industry is and where you’re starting from. SEO requires momentum, both in terms of how much momentum you have behind you from previous efforts and how much is standing in your way with your competition. So if you’ve just launched your website in a competitive niche, it might be a long road ahead!

Anyway, back to the question. How long does SEO take? For most clients, I give the following expectations:

2-3 Months into a campaign you should see some signs of improvement, either from an increase in traffic, impressions, or keyword rankings. In many cases, we’ll see an increase in impressions in Google Search Console before we see our keyword tools, like Ahrefs, show an increase in rankings.

6 months into a campaign I expect to see significant improvements in traffic and rankings. That doesn’t always mean you’re now ranking #1 (though it might), but it should mean we’ve got some steam behind us and are getting results.

Another thing I also tell clients is that in most industries they should continue investing in SEO services even after they have gotten some results. Why? Your competition is going to be investing in SEO and you never know when a Google algorithm update is going to shake things up.

All that being said. You should be prepared to commit to a minimum of 6 to 12 months of SEO services if you’re going to invest in SEO. Otherwise, it probably isn’t worth your time or money.

Yes! We have an amazing content team in place that is ready to dive into keyword research and build out incredibly researched content briefs to help your new content rank on Google.

When it comes to search engine optimization, one little-known impact of creating new content is building topical relevance. Many websites have their service, product, and category pages in place, but lack supporting content to build topical authority and expertise.

Part of our content creation process involves asking our clients for input on the topics we write on. This allows us to translate the client’s expertise into a well-crafted SEO content piece.

While we might be biased, investing in SEO services has proven to be one of the most efficient uses of marketing dollars if implemented correctly.

That’s because the visitors that land on your website from Google or other search engines typed in a search term or keyword that exactly matched a product or service they were looking for. By using a keyword to search on Google, they are basically pre-qualifying themselves for your product or service.

Even more importantly, search engine optimization does not increase in price!

Think about it this way. If you pay for ads and want more traffic, you have to increase your ad spend and pay for more clicks. Whereas with SEO, your website traffic can exponentially grow for years, meanwhile your retainer with your SEO agency will often stay the same. We don’t charge you more because you’re getting more traffic. Sometimes it feels like we should! (kidding)

Also, each time a new content piece is published, it’s another lottery ticket entered in the Google algorithm. The truth is, you just never know when a piece of content is going to take off and earn you a bunch of attention that not only increases website traffic but also helps drive leads and sales.

Over time, investing SEO arms your website with content and backlink assets that make it harder for new competition to steal your traffic and harder for your existing competition to unseat you.

An SEO Audit can help determine the right path forward for your investment in this powerful marketing channel.

To start, let’s discuss what a backlink is. A backlink is when another website links to your website. Think of it as a vote of confidence from one website to another. If the linking website also has authority, it sends an authority boost to your website and thus gives you more power to rank for the keywords you’re targeting.

There are a million ways to build backlinks (some of them you should avoid), but we tend to rely on the following methods:

• Manual outreach to relevant blogs and websites
• Submitting responses to HARO (Help A Reporter Out)
• Guest Posts
• Creating link-worthy content
• Finding unlinked brand mentions
• Broken link building

The big difference between our outreach and some of the link-building services out there is that we’re actually doing the prospecting and outreach for YOU. This means higher quality at a level of consistency a link service often can’t provide. We aim to focus on links that are topically relevant to your niche and come from quality websites that are producing real content.

The best SEO process for a brand new website is one that starts with a proper audit or analysis of the keyword landscape the site is aiming to compete in.

Even though every SEO campaign is slightly different, at the core of any campaign there is a hierarchy. Things like site structure, technical SEO items, and on-page optimizations should be squared away before you worry about creating a ton of new content or building backlinks.

Technical and on-page SEO items could include but are not limited to:

• Site speed
• Optimized Meta Titles
• Optimized URL structures
• Internal linking
• Site Navigation

I could add more to that list, but you get the idea. A new website should have the best foundation it can have.

Once the on-page optimizations are taken care of you can begin to start creating new content and building out backlinks. In general, it’s more effective to have 10-20 pages of content on a website before you start aggressively building links. That being said, if you’re in a very competitive niche, it may be wise to start building links right away, as your backlink gap may be larger than other industries.

Long-tail keywords and high-volume keywords are often misunderstood. Volume in this case refers to how many searches a keyword gets per month. Many people assume “long-tail” means “low-volume”, hence people asking the question of long-tail vs high volume.

The truth is, long-tail keywords are keyword phrases that are longer than others and usually 3-4+ words in length. There is an assumption that they are also low-volume, as the longer the keyword phrase, the more specific the search is, and because of that most people land on the keyword having less volume. BUT, just because a keyword is long-tail, does not mean it can’t also have a lot of volume. Many long-tail keywords do.

The correct question to ask here is should you go after low-competition keywords or high-competition keywords. With enough time and money, you could rank your website for almost anything, but since most of us do not have unlimited budgets, this is a very important question.

A good rule of thumb is to use an authority metric, such as domain authority or domain rating, and the average number of backlinks needed to rank for a given keyword. While not fool-proof, if you’re website has a domain rating of 25 and all of the websites on page 1 of the keyword you’re optimizing for have a rating of 80, it’s going to be a tough hill to climb. Whereas if page 1 has a couple of websites that are in the ballpark of your website’s authority range, it’s a sign you might be able to compete.

What is SEO? This is a great question. Let’s start with the basics. First, SEO stands for search engine optimization. A search engine basically means Google or Bing or any other tool that you can search for things on. YouTube is also a search engine (YouTube SEO is a thing too.) And optimization means organizing your website in a way that suits the algorithm of the search engine you’re trying to rank on.

So, how do we organize a site properly? In an effort not to bore you, there are a few items that stand out from the pack. These include how your website is structured (navigation, URLs, internal links), how fast your website loads (think of a time when you’ve returned back to Google because of a slow website), and the quality of the content on the website.

If we’re taking a step back, we want a website that:

• is well structured
• loads fast/good user experience
• has quality content

While structure, site loading speed, and user experience are fairly straightforward to understand, quality content is a bit ambiguous. Since quality is subjective, keyword research plays a huge role in creating quality content.

When conducting keyword research, your SEO agency should account for the intent of the searcher. There are many different types of intent. Buying intent, informational, investigative, and navigational. It’s important to understand what someone really wants when they are searching a specific phrase on Google. If you ignore this concept, you’ll be certain to craft a low-quality piece of content.

Another aspect of quality are votes of confidence from other websites. These are also known as backlinks. When another website links to your website, they are more or less saying, “this is a website I value.” So if you earn a backlink from sites that are linked to often, meaning they have value, those links pointing to your website also have value and act as an indicator of quality.

All of that was a long way of saying that SEO is creating a website that is well structured, loads fast, and has quality content that others find valuable. An SEO campaign is a consistent effort at addressing these search engine optimization factors in a manner that helps a website rank for keywords that tie back to business goals.