How Long Does It Take To See Results? – Some results can be gained within weeks and you need to expect some strategies to take months to see the benefit. Google WANTS these efforts to take time.

Critics of the search engine giant would point to Google wanting fast effective rankings to be a feature of Googles own Adwords sponsored listings.

Optimisation is not a quick process, and a successful campaign can be judged on months if not years. Most successful, fast ranking website optimisation techniques end up finding their way into Google Webmaster Guidelines – so be wary.

It takes time to build quality, and it’s this quality that Google aims to reward in 2016.

It takes time to generate the data needed to begin to formulate a campaign, and time to deploy that campaign. Progress also depends on many factors

• How old is your site compared to the top 10 sites?
• How many back-links do you have compared to them?
• How is their quality of back-links compared to yours?
• What the history of people linking to you (what words have people been using to link to your site?)
• How good of a resource is your site?
• Can your site attract natural back-links (e.g. you have good content or a great service) or are you 100% relying on your agency for back-links (which is very risky in 2016)?
• How much unique content do you have?
• Do you have to pay everyone to link to you (which is risky), or do you have a “natural” reason people might link to you?

Google wants to return quality pages in its organic listings, and it takes time to build this quality and for that quality to be recognised.

It takes time too to balance your content, generate quality backlinks and manage your disavowed links.

Google knows how valuable organic traffic is – and they want webmasters investing a LOT of effort in ranking pages.

Critics will point out the higher the cost of expert SEO, the better-looking Adwords becomes, but Adwords will only get more expensive, too. At some point, if you want to compete online, your going to HAVE to build a quality website, with a unique offering to satisfy returning visitors – the sooner you start, the sooner you’ll start to see results.

If you start NOW and are determined to build an online brand, a website rich in content with a satisfying user experience  – Google will reward you in organic listings.

ROI

Web optimisation is a marketing channel just like any other and there are no guarantees of success in any, for what should be obvious reasons. There are no guarantees in Google Adwords either, except that costs to compete will go up, of course.

That’s why it is so attractive – but like all marketing – it is still a gamble.

At the moment, I don’t know you, your business, your website, your resources, your competition or your product. Even with all that knowledge, calculating ROI is extremely difficult because ultimately Google decides on who ranks where in its results – sometimes that’s ranking better sites, and sometimes (often) it is ranking sites breaking the rules above yours.

Nothing is absolute in search marketing.

There are no guarantees – despite claims from some companies. What you make from this investment is dependent on many things, not least, how suited your website is to convert visitors to sales.

Every site is different.

Big Brand campaigns are far, far different from small business SEO campaigns that don’t have any links to begin with, to give you but one example.

It’s certainly easier if the brand in question has a lot of domain authority just waiting to unlocked – but of course, that’s a generalisation as big brands have big brand competition too.

It depends entirely on the quality of the site in question and the level and quality of the competition, but smaller businesses should probably look to own their niche, even if limited to their location, at first.

Local SEO is always a good place to start for small businesses.