For many SEO clients the process of seeking out qualified assistance can be very frustrating. To even the brightest business owners, search engine optimization often seems to be an ethereal process without any hard and fast rules or predefined methods of generating tangible results. Making matters even more discouraging, in general, anyone who is willing to give you promises of specific results with easy to monitor benchmarks is likely to be a scammer who is simply feeding you false information in the hope of earning a fast paycheck before you notice he is a digital snake-oil salesmen.
On the other hand, people who actually know what they are doing are unlikely to ever promise a specific result with a clearly defined timeframe. Instead they reply to your questions with the most famous answer in SEO: ‘it depends.’ A prudent business owner may be left wondering, why does ‘it depend’ and what are some of the factors that will impact the success or failure of any SEO strategy which honestly can not be accounted for by even the most competent search engine optimizers?
Algorithms Change More Often Than Your Underwear
Most people in the civilized world make a habit of putting on clean underwear at least once a day, maybe twice if in the tropics. By comparison, there are several different Search Engine Algorithms (the code used by Google, Yahoo, AOL, Baidu, Bing and others to determine what sites should be included as results in each search and how high each should rank on their result pages). Each search company makes tweaks and changes to their own proprietary search code multiple times per day along with additional major changes any time the need arises from their point of view.
That means SEO requires constant vigilance, testing and tweaking to keep your sites fully optimized for an ever-changing set of requirements, preferred elements and suggested courses of action. How many changes are made, how each of those changes affects each of your sites and how flexible your targets are can greatly affect the impact of SEO work on your web properties. So, when it comes to algorithmic changes and the success of your sites… it depends.
SEO Is A Competitive Team Sport Unlike Yoga
When people challenge themselves to become physically fit and begin taking Yoga classes their success or failure is inherently up to them. Whether they go to the class each week diligently becoming a master or decide instead to get ice cream that day is a matter of personal choice. In that way the Yoga student has a huge advantage because nobody is trying to prevent their success.
Conversely, SEO is more like a game of Football where like-minded site owners, consultants and vendors try to implement a game plan to score the most points possible while opposing interests on other teams attempt to do the same for their web properties in direct competition with your own. As a result, without knowing exactly how many opponents have goals similar to yours and what their game plans are, it becomes impossible to know how hard it will be to climb over hundreds of other listings for a specific set of keywords in the pursuit of being top ranked by search engines that are trying to act as neutral referees. So, as far as your site’s ability to out-perform competitors in the same or similar markets, the answer often is… it depends.
Search Engines Crawl Like Crabs Not Like Toddlers
You have probably already noticed that search engines do not crawl every site on the internet each and every day. They patrol the entire web crawling from site to site in search of content. That process is not predictable. If you sat down with the whole IT Department at Google and asked them to give you a specific list of sites that would be crawled in the next 72 hours there is no method they could use to manually generate a list of sites that the search engine bots intend to crawl. If you know anything about crab fisherman, you are aware that most of their time and resources are spent trying to predict the seemingly random ‘crawl patterns’ of large clusters of crab along the ocean floor.
If they knew where the crabs were going they could simply drop all their traps in the perfect location and bring back a full boat of valuable seafood in an hour. Instead they have to make educated guesses using a combination of human experience and complex technology to anticipate the probability that a set of traps in a string of locations will yield the desired results. SEO strategies have many similarities because a large network of sites and carefully planned advanced hosting techniques may not be noticed by search engines in an expedient time frame. For that reason, any so-called SEO consultant who promises you organic results within a period of less than three months should smell like bad seafood in your mind. If search engines crawled toward specific items or incentives like a toddler crawling toward its mother, SEO pros could predict a more accurate time frame for you to see results. However, since it's more like crabs crawling, the only honest answer to the question of when your SEO strategies will yield results is… it depends.
Why It is OK That It Depends
With so many variables and such hard to quantify obstacles, you might start to wonder how SEO ever works for anyone. The answer is simple; SEO is never a short term strategy or a handful of magic beans. As one part of a well-reasoned marketing strategy SEO is an essential component for organic growth, branding and visibility. Coupled with traditional ad buys, PPC methods and social networking strategies it can accelerate the overall growth of your traffic network with minimal long term costs and significant long term gains.
While a competent SEO pro can not guarantee you a specific set of end results within a predefined time line, they can detail the methods they plan to use to achieve results and demonstrate incremental progress along the way. So, while the answer to “When will my site quadruple its current organic traffic?” will always be It Depends… the answer to the more specific question of “What was accomplished this past month?” should always be clearly definable with easy to track reports and transparent metrics that allow you to know what is being done, at what expense and with what intended purpose.
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