- When I came into the office this morning,
I enjoyed this colour scheme.
So apparently this is called spring blossom
so I had a bit of a look
and it turns out we've got some other options as well.
We have Savannah sunset, Tropical Twilight
what about fancy bit of Arctic Aurora,
all great, but in my opinion,
you can't beat a good bit of office default.
Welcome to Exposure Ninja, how long does SEO take?
Maybe as long as this, this (mumbling), this
no that's not an announcement,
well in this video, I'm gonna be sharing some stats
that we've pulled from our client SEO campaigns,
to give you a bit more of a detailed answer,
because how long does SEO take is a very common question.
We all want to rank quickly
and it's scary investing time and money into something
where you don't see an immediate return.
If we contrast it to something like
Pay-per-click advertising, for example,
which still isn't immediate,
but you can immediately get some ads showing up
SEO is a much longer timescale thing to do.
So how do you know if you're smashing your head
against the wall for six months, about to break through
or you're just smashing your head against the wall.
Well, the general consensus answer within SEO
is that you need to allow between six to 12 months
to see ranking improvement.
In fact, Google's own recommendations from Miley oh yeah
say that you need to allow between four and 12 months
to see a significant improvement.
Hold on four to 12 months,
well, that's a really big difference, four months is great,
12 months is like three times as long though
so what's the real answer?
Well, we want it to dig into the data
to see not only how long SEO took,
but what were the commonalities
between the fastest moving campaigns
so that's exactly what we're gonna share in this video.
How long does SEO take?
What are the factors that impact, how long SEO takes?
And how can you speed it up?
Okay, so here's the short answer to the question,
how long the SEO takes.
If you're being aggressive
and you're starting from a very low base
then usually you're able to see ranking improvement
within a very short period of time i.e. three months
or less, if however,
you're in a much more competitive market
and you already have the basics covered,
then it'll take much longer to see gains
typically eight months plus.
If you want some data
than the average Exposure Ninja SEO client
that does SEO for more than six months
sees a 30% increase in their organic traffic.
Now, of course you expected caveats in a video like this,
and here are they, we actually found
that there's no such thing as typical SEO results
with our clients
actually people's experience was dramatically different
and there are lots of different variables.
Now it can be frustrating when you ask an SEO company,
how long does SEO take?
And they say, I don't know why is the thing.
There are so many dependencies, even giving averages feels
to be honest, a little bit misleading
because across the client data we reviewed
actually very few campaigns looked like the average
of all of the data.
Instead, we found that campaigns tended
to broadly follow one of two paths,
which I'll show you in a couple of minutes.
Now, if you're watching these caveats thinking,
hold on, Tim, you've just pretty much
written off the usefulness of this video.
Hold up, I actually don't think it matters
how long SEO takes on average,
because you're probably watching this
because you just wanna speed up your SEO, right?
Well, I'm gonna share with you the commonalities
amongst the campaigns that sought
the fastest improvements later on
and finally at the end, I'm gonna give you tips
on how to get this stuff moving as quick as possible
so stay tuned.
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Okay, so first things first,
what impacts how long SEO takes?
What is the difference
between the slowest SEO results and the fastest ones?
And how can you move yourself into the fastest ones?
Well, we noticed a few different variables
which had extreme impact on the speed of SEO results
and our variable number one is gonna seem ridiculous
because it's so obvious (mumbling)
how quickly you're able to make changes to your website
because here's the thing focusing on onsite SEO,
which is usually where you can see
the fastest initial improvement
requires changes to be made to the website.
Now we've got clients that are like one man bands
and we've got clients
that are huge multibillion dollar companies
and guess who's able to make the changes
to their website quickest
yes, it's usually the small businesses
because they're just like, okay, well I can just do that
or you can just do that.
Whereas as soon as you get to large enterprise clients
changes to the website require a whole process
going through legal and all this and all this
and as we know, as soon as anything has to go through legal,
all bets are off.
So the faster you are able to make changes to your website,
the faster you're able to enjoy
the benefits of those changes.
The second variable, again, might seem quite obvious,
but it's worth saying, is how much time or energy or money
you're able to invest in your SEO.
In one breakdown of the stats we noticed
there are very smallest SEO campaigns
by the end of the first year, they'd seen a 75% increase
in monthly organic traffic,
contrast this with the largest SEO campaigns,
which actually saw an 864% increase in monthly traffic.
You can see that going at this thing with more firepower
inevitably gets you bigger results.
This is fairly obvious if you need to have more content
to your website, you can add a little bit more content
or you can add a whole fricking load more content.
If you need more links to your site,
you can either get a few links
or you can get loads of links.
So obviously the more fire power you're bringing
to the party, the more you are likely to win
if you're the sort of person
that brings fire power to a party, an SEO party,
that's my kind of party,
actually an SEO party sounds really boring.
Variable number next is how competitive your market is,
now people tend to think of SEO as in,
you're trying to increase your website ranking
against the whole bunch of static results in Google search
all right, it's a bit like a ladder
and you just climb up it.
The thing is, it's not really like a ladder
it's more like a race and the all the other competitors
are moving as well.
If everybody is pushing forward with their SEO,
if everyone's investing in stuff,
then it's much more like a race
and the all the other competitors are moving.
Whereas on a ladder,
all the other rungs are just stationary
so you just climb up them.
Now, the next thing that defines how quick SEO is,
is actually a little bit counterintuitive.
If you're working from a very low base,
you actually tend to see faster results
than someone who is working from a much larger base.
So why is this so
well, usually the fastest way
to increase any website's ranking
is to pick the low hanging fruit
things like amount of content on pages, page titles,
meta descriptions, headings, that type of thing
very quick to generate improvements
from those sorts of optimizations.
Whereas once you get to a site that's maybe
had all of those basics taken care of,
and now they're relying
on a massive content marketing strategy
those are the sorts of things which take much longer time
to have an impact.
So this is why we tend to see our clients falling
into these two different categories,
rather than all following the average curve.
We get the sites that have a lot of low hanging fruit
so we're able to generate some nice, quick improvement
and then we get the sites
where they've got the low hanging fruit,
they've got the basics covered, their well-established
and therefore they're relying
on the more advanced strategies,
which tends to take time for the effects to accumulate
and the final variable is how well SEO'd
your competitors are.
Obviously, if your competitors have loads of links
and loads of content,
then it's gonna take much longer to improve against them
than if they have absolutely nothing in place
so for those of you in the IT support industry, high five.
So before talking through how long a SEO takes
for these two different types of sites,
I just wanted to talk about some of the different ways
that you can track the progress of your SEO.
Now, the first is using something called organic visibility,
which is a metric used by SEMrush
and you can get a trial of SEMrush
if you go to thankyouninjas.com.
Now SEMrush is a tool that we use at Exposure Ninja
to attract organic visibility for our clients
and it's basically a percentage number,
which is a bit of an indication
about how visible you are for the keywords
that you're tracking against.
So for example, a keyword visibility of 100%
means that you're ranking at the top of Google
for every single keyword that you're targeting.
Whereas the visibility of 0%
means that you're ranking outside the top 100 positions
for every keyword that you're tracking.
So this kind of percentage visibility
can be quite useful read for how your site is doing
and how quick your SEO is progressing.
Because what it does is show you movement
before you might notice a traffic increase.
So if for example, you move a ranking page
from position 100,
so that's on bottom of page 10 to position 65,
which would be fifth on page seven.
You might not notice a ranking improvement
because you're still on page seven,
but actually you've done a lot of work to get there.
So you'll see that in your organic visibility,
before you notice an increase in traffic or conversions,
having said that tracking organic traffic
through search console
to see exactly how many clicks each of your pages is getting
and where they're ranking is a great thing to do as well
and this is another one of the metrics
that we try to for our clients here at Exposure Ninja.
Another great way of tracking organic ranking improvement
is through organic conversions, i.e. leads and sales
that have come through your organic traffic
at the end of the day, conversions i.e. leads or sales
is all you really care about.
So we do like to track this
and this is our kind of primary metric
that we measure and celebrate inside Exposure Ninja.
Having said that, of course,
conversions can also be influenced
by changes to conversion rate
made by conversion rate optimization.
So there are other variables
that play with organic conversions,
which is why we tend to use this mixture
of different organic traffic metrics
to measure how long SEO is taking.
So, you can track your SEO in Google analytics,
search console and SEMrush.
So, what I wanted to do is show you some different graphs
from different clients of ours,
which represent the different kind of situations
that we see websites in.
In this first example,
you can see a brand new website for a business
well, the website had been around for a little while,
but it never really been fully promoted.
Now as you can see, this site saw fairly significant
and consistent improvement throughout the year
in fact, month view organic traffic
went from about 600 visits per month
to over 16,000 visits per month
during the course of the first year.
Now, even though it's saw pretty steady improvement,
it's still had months of drops.
In fact, in the first month of SEO,
actually traffic dropped a little bit
and then it also dropped
between months five and six as well.
So it's important to note that
even if your SEO campaign is going really well,
there are gonna be times when your traffic drops
this could be due to ranking fluctuations,
this could be due to seasonal variations
in the amount of people searching
for what it is that you sell
particularly if that drop coincides
with a holiday like Christmas or something like that.
So don't worry too much if you do see some drops,
these are completely normal
and consistent across all of the campaigns
that we've ever run.
Now, the reason that results improve so quickly
for a brand new site without any marketing
is that they're starting from such a low base.
So in percentage terms an increased from 600 visits a month
to 900 visits per month, there's a 50% increase
yes, but actually in real terms,
it's a very small increase.
Well, exactly the same with an established website,
you might increase in established websites visitors
from a 100,000 to 101,000 a month
well, that's only a 1% increase
so you might be thinking, huh, but actually in real terms,
that increase is bigger than the first example
for the brand new website.
So it's much easier to show a large percentage increase
for a brand new website
than it is a more established website
and because the new website
has loads of low hanging fruit available,
it's also much quicker to generate big changes in ranking.
Now in this graph for an established website,
you'll notice that actually
the increase was much much more gradual.
They saw a reasonable increase over the first few months,
but then things plateaued for quite a long time
then in month seven, they actually saw a fetty chunky drop
at which point, you know, total panic,
Explosion Ninja are quirks, this isn't working anymore
help help help my hairs in on fire type thing,
but fear not
because then the site saw a really healthy increase
as a result of all the content
that we've been putting onto the site
and the knowledge base that we launched.
So with an established website,
it does really depend on how much SEO has been done before,
how much of that low hanging fruit has already been picked
and how much content there is as well.
So the big question obviously is why does SEO take so long
and how can we speed it up?
So why does SEO take so long?
Well, if we think about what goes into SEO,
we see that there are really two reasons
that SEO takes so long.
So let's just imagine
that we're working on a typical website,
then we want to improve its ranking.
The first thing that we might do is do some analysis
to see where it's currently ranking
or where the opportunities are based on competitors.
We might do some keyword research,
we then might do a content audit of the site,
as well as a UX audit, we'll then do some content planning,
we'll then write the content, get it approved,
edit it, publish onto the site.
Once it's been published onto the site,
it then needs to be crawled and indexed,
which then takes time before that shows up in the ranking,
we might then need to build links to that content
to improve its ranking on Google.
So we've got two types of reasons that SEO takes so long
the first is that a lot of stuff is involved, right?
It's a lot of work to do that, it's not just like,
oh, just click the SEO button and ping
the site is optimised.
But then even once that work has happened,
it takes Google search results time
to reflect that work in the rankings.
So after all of this, what is my advice to you?
My advice to you is go hard and don't wait,
we know that there is a delay between putting the work in
and getting the results
so with that in mind, you wanna get started on this stuff
as soon as you're able to do it
and then of course stick at it
even if things don't seem to be moving
or even if (mumbling) you notice a drop in organic traffic,
this is actually fairly typical
amongst the sites that we've analysed for this study
so don't be alarmed at all by that, keep going
and as long as you're confident that you're doing good work,
you should see things come back stronger.
You're only ever a few really good posts away
from blowing up your traffic
or finding that content angle that really turbo charges you
and helps your ranking.
We've seen this time and time again with our clients,
there'll be an 80 20 kind of rule going on
with particularly blog content
where 20% of their posts will be driving 80%
of their traffic and their conversion
so it's just a case of keep on trying to work out
what sorts of content is gonna help you rank?
What sort of stuff
is gonna get the best quality visitors onto your site,
which you can then convert with a commercial call to action.
We've got tonnes of videos and information
about how to do this, so I'd encourage checking those out.
Above all, don't be disheartened, SEO is still in my mind
one of the most important digital marketing channels
for any business,
'cause the quality of the traffic is just so good.
So don't be disheartened that it takes time
luckily, you are more patient than your lazy competitors
I can just see it, so you're gonna do absolutely fine
and by the way, if you're watching this thinking
oh, this looks a bit much, can you just do it for me?
Absolutely, we can give you some free advice
and get you on your way.
The first thing that you want to do right now
is go to exposureninja.com/review
there'll be a link in the description,
that's exposureninja.com/review,
tell us a bit of information about your business
and your goals and we will go and identify
your top low hanging fruit
for SEO conversion rate optimization, pay-per-click
and we'll also have a look at your competitors.
This service is totally free of charge, there's no catch,
there's no sneaky naughtiness or anything like that.
Go to exposureninja.com/review
tell us a bit about your business and your goals
and one of our team will record you a 15 minute video
showing you where you should be focusing
your digital marketing on right now
to get the sorts of results that we're looking at.
By the way, if you enjoyed this video,
don't forget to like and subscribe.
We post regularly to this channel
we also host live workshops on YouTube,
where we give feedback on people's websites.
So subscribe to the channel,
click the little notification icon
and you will get notified
when we are running those in the future.
If you like filling your ears, as well as your eyes
with digital marketing information,
then you can check out the Exposure Ninja podcats
just search Exposure Ninja podcasts
I don't need to tell you it's hard to find a podcast anymore
in 2020, go like it and subscribe it
leave a rating if you enjoy it
and see you soon.
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