So lange dauert SEO wirklich!
You will learn how to
at least roughly estimate the duration and which factors
you have to take into account. At the end we look at
practical examples together. Have fun! My name is Alexander Rus
and SEO is my bread and butter. On this channel we chat
about SEO and content marketing. If you want to learn how you
can sustainably acquire customers through your website, then subscribe to this channel right now. How long does SEO take? That is of course a perfectly valid question. As entrepreneurs, we want to generate a return on investment with our marketing activities as quickly as possible
. But what is important to understand when it comes to
search engine optimization and what it is all about: It is important to overtake the competition
and to objectively do a better job.
This means that these are not magical
optimization measures that bring my [ __ ] forward, but I have to deliver something that
is the best possible result for a keyword. And what the best possible
result is has many factors. That means:
I have to overtake the others. Very, very important to understand. It's not like that:
a few adjustment screws, but much, much more.
And the question comes from my personal
point of view from a wrong mindset. How I see the world and how
Evergreen Media works is: It's about: Lots of small changes + time + consistency
+ experiments = significant result/growth I think about how to establish processes
that will sooner or later lead to extreme wins. What you can already see here: I'm not results-oriented,
I'm process-oriented. And to explain that briefly with an example: Let's say I'm in the
process of learning golf. Most of them are like this:
If I don't become a golf pro within 10 weeks, I'll stop
because obviously it doesn't work.
And the successful people think like this: What habits will allow me to continuously
and endlessly improve and achieve my goals? It's process oriented. What I always think about,
always with everything I do, is: compound effect. As an example of a compound effect: I started the YouTube channel
in 2016 and if I had evaluated the results after a year (i.e. 12 months)
I would have had to say: This is a complete waste of time. Versus: Now YouTube generates
millions in leads per year. That is, process-oriented and
results-oriented – what would have worked here versus what
would not have worked here.
And just to briefly show this compound effect
using an example, let's jump in here: There is a case study for this,
where I go through exactly what we did at Elbemetall. But the process is always the same.
We always have this compound effect in SEO. That means we started here with the customer.
Not that much happened in the first year and if the customer had given notice here,
he would have missed out on a lot. And that's that effect again that you
always have with SEO – namely this movement. Of course, there are always limits, at some point
the potential is exhausted, but it is very important to keep that in mind when you ask yourself how long
SEO takes. And don't forget: Even if
results have been achieved, then you have to keep going forever. It is, after all, an endless competition
and the competition never sleeps.
Why is it now so difficult to give an exact answer
to the question "How long does SEO take?"? The problem is, on the one hand,
we have a dynamic environment. That means we don't have: We are now optimizing this one page and it
's like in the laboratory and everything is controlled, but we have all these competitors who are
all playing for the same keywords and who of course also take measures
to gain more visibility to get. That means you always have to consider
what the competition is doing in the same period of time.
That means I can have a million SEO budget
a year – that's a lot of SEO budget, I'd say.
But when the competition has 10 million SEO budgets a year,
then I don't have much in comparison. Very important. Then, black box Google. We know what
ranking factors actually are, but we do n't know how the algorithm
actually sees a website at a certain point in time and what
little things are going on in the background. Then:
implementation speed. The big question is always, if we really isolate what
we can control: how fast things actually go online. If I do SEO for myself, then
I can control all that, but if you work with an agency now, for example,
then the agency cannot control, for example, how
quickly I make things go online. Then:
generalist or specialist. For each keyword, Google prefers something different. For some keywords, Google says: "Cool, Amazon is the best solution here because
users tend to be the happiest there." In other words, a keyword where
generalists can perform very well.
In some niches, however, you have
these super strong generalists and these small niche players and Google prefers
the small niche players to the keywords. Then:
penalties. Have you broken the rules in the past
and gotten caught by Google? This again has consequences for how
long SEO takes when you take new, hopefully clean measures. And finally, a very important factor: non-SEO factors that influence the
duration of SEO, such as your brand strength. This is easy to measure
using trademark searches. Then, perceived user and customer experience
– that is, how satisfied are people really with you, because that again has
effects on your user signals, which your website then sends to Google. There is a dedicated video where I
explain all of these non-SEO factors in detail. Let's dig a little deeper. What Factors Affect
How Long SEO Takes? And from my point of view there are
four central points and one, let's say secondary point,
which unfortunately very few people understand.
So.
First of all, your goals. After all, your goals influence what it
even means, how long SEO takes. It's actually about: How long does it take us to do SEO
until we meet your expectations? That means these can
be goals with sales and leads. These can
be traffic goals, and so on. And as a general rule, if you start SEO now
, your estimates will be total [ __ ], because at the beginning,
if you've never done SEO before, you have no idea what's even possible
and what's realistic and blah blah blah . And even for a professional, this is
incredibly difficult to assess, based on the points discussed previously. What is practical and
definitely worth looking at is: You do keyword research, the most important
document there is. And what you look at there, what is
the keyword search volume potential anyway. That means, what if I ranked number 1 everywhere
and you can take that as potential , even if nobody in this
world can tell you what it actually is then.
That means, if you
look at us, for example, in this dummy keyword research – that's what it
looks like when we do this for a client – then you would see here
what the potential search volume is for your business-relevant keywords
and what percentage of it is commercial. Important for making good decisions. What's very important to me to say is that it
's mean now, but I'll say it anyway: If I want to have a good laugh,
I look at the ROI forecasts from agencies. So unrealistic… It's a sales tool and
a [ __ ] tool, but it certainly doesn't represent reality.
Then:
Your initial situation. That means how long SEO takes depends of course
on what your starting point is. Let 's say we have a 100
meter sprint and you start at -1000, then SEO will take a relatively long
time to get to 100. Now if you start at 0,
it's still better than -1000. That means you look at each other: How good is your technical foundation? Do
you already have relevant pages for your business-relevant keywords
and do you have a link profile that is comparable to the top competition? So we call that a
competitive link profile. Fits. Number 3: Your resources or
your commitment to SEO. What do I mean? How much are you willing to invest
in terms of time and money to overtake your competition, and how does that
compare to the competition? It's always so funny, customers
always rate their budgets like this without context. That is, they say, for example:
A five-figure budget is a lot for SEO. But if your competitors
have budgets in the millions, then you have a tiny budget in comparison.
And in some niches even
€500 can be a huge budget. Very, very important. Then: Do
you have an agency partner who has the necessary know-how
, or do you have the necessary know-how internally? Do you have the right strategy? How effectively can you
implement measures and content? That said, it's cool to think things through
and do SEO audits, but then how long does it actually take you
to implement and whatnot. And that's why it's so important
to understand when you're working with an external partner now:
SEO and content marketing are never services, they're
always a collaboration. Because the service provider can
provide the best service, if you don't implement the service
– namely, let's say, make sure that pages go online
– then it becomes insanely difficult.
Fits. Then, your competitors. The number 3… I hope now that I'm
counting correctly – no, number 4: Your competitors. How strong is the competition in terms of technology, content and links and how many, let's say,
good links does the competition get per month? This means that when we do a competitor analysis,
which is a package we offer, for a customer, one of the
metrics that is incredibly important to us is: We look at the speed with which
the competition is now building links that really count. So links that
are not just any scraper links, but really good links
and these comparative values. This means that even if you have a five-digit
budget or let's say you invest a lot and
you build 20 links a month and the competition builds 100 links a month, then
your budget is obviously too small.
Next point, and this is actually
a marginal point, which I still want to mention because it is so rarely understood: the demand. Always distinguish between rankings and clicks when evaluating SEO efforts or SEO results
. That is, in the Google Search Console you see the actual impressions
and the actual clicks. For example, in a tool like semrush, ahrefs, sistrix,
whatever, you now see a traffic index, which means there
you see, based on your rankings and the historical search volume data collected,
you have such and such visibility. And here it is very important to understand
that the following can happen: In ahrefs your visibility, your
traffic index goes up, but in reality, in Google Search Console
you get fewer impressions and clicks. What happened then? Did your internal SEO department
or SEO agency then fail? No, because what happened is: Demand went down.
This means that if you are a B2B customer and you complain that demand goes down
in summer, then you have to think about why, after years in the B2B business, you still don't
know that demand goes down in summer.
Very, very important that you can distinguish between demand and visibility
– most people can't do that. Very essential. That means you can
do a lot right in terms of SEO, but let's say Corona happens
– then the demand goes down. Is SEO bad then? No, the SEO when the traffic index goes up
is good, but the demand has dropped. And SEO can never
generate demand, only pick up demand. game changer So now let's dive into the empirical values and
actual examples. From experience, how long does it take
for SEO to produce visible results? Most importantly,
something that is inferior to the competition will never deliver top results over a long period of time
– SEO is a competition of who best answers a search query
, not charity. That said, if you're thinking SEO is welfare –
"Oh, I've been trying so hard and I should be getting results" – you haven't got it.
It's a tough competition.
Another thing that is important: Those who stop will
lose visibility again. After all, it's an endless competition. Now how long does SEO take for a new website? So we ask ourselves the question again: Do you have a clean, technical foundation? Do you have pages related to your keywords
that match search intent? Do you already have a few backlinks that
signal Google that you are a rising star? And so forth. And you have to calculate how long it will take you to
answer yes to these questions.
And because of that, you should only tend to
expect top rankings for simple keywords in the first year. You can look up what simple keywords are
relatively easily in the keyword finder. There 's always keyword difficulty and
you always get a good feel for it. And we already briefly showed an example of this
before, that's this customer. So the shop was
online a few months earlier, but in terms of SEO it started from scratch. That means that in the first year
not much has happened mind-blow. We just conquered the simpler
keywords and then, after a certain compound effect
appeared, it really took off.
Incidentally, our website explains exactly
what we did with this customer. So.
How long does SEO take for an established website? By established I mean you have a strong
brand, a good website, a competitive link profile, and relevant pages for
your business-relevant keywords. And of course that's a cool situation,
because every page that goes online will
deliver rankings and thus traffic within one to six months, depending on the keyword difficulty. An example of this, let's jump in
there, is this customer of ours. This is a travel provider and
we started with this customer in July 2021. Let's take a quick look at where July is…here. And of course you need the period of time alone
so that you can specifically agree on coordination, strategy and so on and then
you can see that things can happen relatively quickly. And what is also very important to me here with this graphic
is an ongoing customer of ours: If so…
This customer has so much to do that nothing is going online at the moment, then
you can also see what is happening when nothing goes online.
That means we're doing our work, but nothing's going online at the moment
, so it's going to go down from time to time. And that's always the case with SEO.
Even when things go online, there are times when things go down as well.
This is not endless growth, but: growth, slight downturn,
plateau, growth and so on.
If you even have the right strategy. So. Then, one last example,
just to show an in-between world, between a new site and an established
site – how long does it take there? This is a customer from the B2B software sector
and started in January 2021. That's a very funny example.
The customer was just in between, but he just worked extremely hard – that means,
this is a super positive example that, if you work really hard, you
can still have a nice, quick development, even if you don't have one yet established player
, but let's say a rising star. And that's how it developed. Well, if you look at it honestly
, these are all positive examples. Of course, if you now have a customer,
or you do it internally and things don't go online, then
nothing happens or it even goes negatively. Quite logical, I think. These are the facts of life. So when can there really
be extremely fast results? That's the question probably everyone has.
From my point of view there are four main cases: On the one hand, you have some
undiscovered, very simple keywords – super rare – or not very lucrative keywords,
then it can happen very quickly. By keywords that are not very lucrative,
I mean something like high-volume keywords such as "birthday sayings" –
it's relatively easy to rank there, but of course the traffic does
n't bring anything either, that means whatever… Then, case number 2: You have a competitive link profile or
competitive authority, an established brand and all you really need is
the right content for your keywords. Case 3: Actually exactly the same situation again,
but you just have a few technical and on-page errors, do an SEO audit, fix
them and then it will really go off. We have a lot of customers
who are then totally impressed that you only do a few technical tweeks. But that's only with really established players.
Case 4: It's just cool and that's why
Local SEO is a cool thing too: If you have a small local market,
dunno, you're a notary, a lawyer, whatever, here it is (unless you're
in one now big city and everyone does SEO – but this is usually only common in special
industries such as real estate agents etc.) it is also possible that you
can get extremely fast results. And that's the end of it. I know, a lot of relatively hard real talk. I hope you still enjoyed the video. Thank you so much for watching
and see you next time. Bye!.
