Many in the SEO industry will have faced the dreaded question from clients at some point: your pitch is completed, things have gone well, you talk about your strategy and then talk about how much money it will cost, but the client has a question: how long will this take?
One of the first things you must make the client understand is that the value generation of SEO is a long-term payoff. If the client needs results within a few months, then they simply don’t yet understand the value you are bringing to the table. You should attempt to show your expertise by showing some previous case studies of businesses that you have helped and show the client how, over the long term, SEO is a great investment.
Investment should be a keyword that you hammer home time and time again; you should make them remember that SEO, when done right and in the long term, can provide a positive ROI which can grow a business. On average, you can see positive results from SEO within the first 3–6 months, so if the client needs something quickly, then they should try the PPC channel instead, as this can bring clicks and potential sales on the same day.
SEO is a long-term strategy that helps to boost your brand and also your direct sales by increasing your search engine visibility by getting you listed higher on Google and other search engines. Understanding that SEO takes a long time to bear fruit should be an essential part of your sales pitch. It’s vital that clients are on board with sticking around for as long as possible so they get to see the true ROI that only a great SEO process can provide.
SEO is now one of the oldest digital marketing channels, which makes it very trusted and established with big brand names and in the advertising industry in general. Business owners may have a rough idea of what SEO is but not how to do it or how long it takes to research, study and analyse the competition. Clients may even try to do SEO themselves before they give up after researching how complex it is.
Our job is to ensure the client understands that this is a full-time job and a long-term process that evolves over time; there is no such thing as an SEO model that lasts forever. Google updates ensure that their search algorithm is forever updating as more data is uncovered and they put more priority on certain metrics over others. One of the biggest things that clients need to realise is just how many years you have invested to become great at SEO.
While SEO may take a long time, you can boost the trust the client has in you by delivering something quickly. Building trust during your sales pitch is critical and is required. Normally the first 3 months are when buyer’s remorse will be felt the strongest, so being in touch with the client during this window is critical. You must show them you are active and working on solving the problem. Send them a spreadsheet with all the edits you have made on page and any progress you have made in regard to getting links from outreach or press releases.
There are many factors that influence how quickly the SEO process will yield some results. The way that the Google algorithm works is by taking a look at an estimated 200 ranking factors; some of these factors can be manipulated to give you a faster ranking boost.
One of the biggest factors for how fast a site will rank is the age of the website; new websites will often take the full 6 months to really start gaining any trust with Google. This is a normal part of the process which helps Google to take enough time to ensure you are a legitimate business with a plan for the future and not a fly-by-night operation that can rank quickly, take orders and money and then close down. Google knows that this is terrible for their brand name because consumers end up getting ripped off and it reflects badly on their recommendations from organic search results.
Another thing that needs to be taken into consideration is the size of the website; if the client has a few hundred pages, then it won’t take long to make the changes that will boost rankings, but if we talk about hundreds of thousands of product pages, then obviously this will be a very slow turnaround. While it may take 6 months to see the full results of SEO, I have seen many ranking improvements from editing on-page metrics; sometimes even manually submitting non-indexed URLs can cause a huge surge in both rankings and traffic.
Perhaps the biggest factor in the length of time taken to rank a website with Google is the backlink profile. If a site is brand new, then you usually see a few backlinks from the likes of the web design company that built the site, local press releases and maybe a few citations, but normally you tend to find under 50 backlinks for a fresh website.
Backlinks are one of the biggest factors to gaining both trust and ranking with Google, so you really need to work on increasing this metric, but not just any backlink will do; some of them are best avoided, and as discussed, certain links may take months to acquire, as you want to do quality outreach, which takes a lot of site analysis and then producing good content for that website and contacting the website owners to find out what kind of content they allow. This is a time-intensive process.
The last thing to discuss is the website’s history. A site with spammy backlinks or a previous history of blackhat content tactics or even being hit with a major update can yield a large-scale issue because it means you have to undo all the previous loss of trust. You may need to go back and manually remove toxic backlinks or try to remove old content that has caused a decline in rankings. Taking on these clients is a difficult task and may take even longer to correct, as Google will apply certain filters to your website until it is certain that you are no longer breaking the rules.
One of the fastest ways to boost rankings and sales is to consider focusing your SEO strategy on Bing. So many clients neglect Bing because it doesn’t get the traffic that Google does, but from testing, many in the SEO industry have found that Bing can yield really good results, and you can often rank rather quickly.
Bing requires a completely different strategy than Google does. We can see that Bing is very slow to pick up new pages, so one big tip for Bing is to install the Bing webmaster verification tag on your website and then use the manual submit tool. You can also submit a sitemap, but again, with Bing, it doesn’t index pages as quickly as Google and will often be very poor at picking up deep internal pages such as product pages on an e-commerce site.
With Bing you will also notice that long-tail searches simply don’t get the same amount of searches, as the users of Bing tend to be people who have it installed as the default search engine, so they are not as tech savvy as Google users. The best way to combat this is to aim for generic, broad keywords, but if you decide to go for long-tail keywords, then you should aim to do them in bulk.
If you target Bing, then you will notice much faster ranking results than with Google even if your website is new, but you should consider building out a large-scale website for Bing because you will simply require a larger volume of pages in order to win as each search term gets much less traffic.
In terms of speeding up the ranking results for Google, you could try boosting up your brand name searches. If you take a look at the analytics for your website, you will find many different variations of your business or brand name; these can all be optimised by getting in some backlinks with these alternative spellings or names. Since these have no competition, you can rank quickly, and it’s a very easy and fast method to boost business.
You should also look at implementing rich snippets and editing existing meta descriptions as a way to get a boost from pages that already get traffic from existing high rankings; these are very quick wins and can help build a site’s traffic levels, which are thought to be one of the factors that Google looks at.
Answering a client with “it depends” when they ask you about timescale is not the most professional answer, but as seen in this article, it is an honest answer. There are simply too many factors to consider, but one thing is clear, which is that you should always educate and explain to the client that SEO is a long-term process and really try to convince them that the right frame of mind is to invest in the long term to see the best benefits from SEO.
You should also explain that the SEO process is ever-evolving because of so many Google updates; this will allow you to reframe the client’s mindset and get them to understand that to stay on top of the game, they need to understand that they can’t just do SEO one time and forget about it. Like all processes in both business and advertising, it needs to evolve over time as new rules come to the forefront and change the rules of how the game is played.