One of the most common complaints about SEO is the lack of instant gratification. In an age where a transaction can be completed with the click of a button, of the swipe on a smartphone, B2B marketers are aching to show positive ROI for their investments. For some reason, SEO is the one place that elicits the most pain in terms of this instant gratification.
SEO is not a marketing promotion: it is a long-term way of thinking about how your site is perceived by the search engines, and when it comes to the search engines, patience is key. Firstly, consider how many other sites are creating content at the same time you are. With the creation and evolutions of content management systems, and the volume of content coming from social media, you begin to understand just how much content is being created every day, and therefore how much competition you have to just be seen.
Once we consider just how much new content is constantly being pumped into the Internet, think about the time it will take for the Search Engines to not only find your new content, but crawl and index that content, and understand its relevance and authority when compared to the rest of the content out there. It may only take seconds to upload your content, but can take days, even weeks, for the search engines to find it.
There is a school of thought that says that content shared with Google+ may get indexed more quickly, but it may not speed things up that much. Also, if your site has ever incurred any penalties for Google “unfriendliness” you may be hard-pressed to gain visibility with any speed. Google doesn’t forget past misgivings so easily, so any underhanded practices that may have happened in the past will also slow down your SEO visibility.
Consider also that other sites may have been publishing content for longer than you, and therefore have established a certain trust and visibility that your site may not have yet achieved. Additionally, the age of your domain, while not a huge factor, may also come into play. This is particularly key if your company has decided to change your domain to something completely new, especially as part of a branding revamp or merger. So while you may have had great visibility with your old site(s), that simply domain change may have slowed down the working of SEO (and caused a plethora of other issues along the way).
If you have just created a brand new site, where none existed before, it may also take some time for your SEO efforts to bear fruit. Search engines are by nature skeptical of brand new sites, which is why content is favored that is published on a website that has aged as oopses to content that is published on a relatively new site.
The best solution to the conundrum of waiting for SEO to take hold it to leverage the power of other online marketing content (social media, ad campaigns, back links) that can provide boosts to the site traffic, as well as aid the search engines in showing signal of relevant, authoritative content to crawl. It is a gift worth waiting for, and a benefit worth savoring when you efforts result in ROI for you SEO in the long run.
