Realistic SEO Expectations
You invested in a dazzling company website that features all the interactive bells and whistles, but the only people who know about your great new site are you, your employees, and your web designer.
In searching for ways to increase online traffic, you stumble upon this thing called search engine optimization, also known as SEO, but cannot determine whether it’s a silver bullet or an online hoax. After conducting diligent research, you conclude that SEO is, in fact, a genuine marketing strategy that can offer tremendous return on your investment, so you begin searching for the right company to hire. You understand what SEO is and how it will benefit your company, but you are still uncertain of what your realistic expectations should be.
Can I rank on the first page of search results in one week, one month, one year? Am I confident that our website will rank number one for some of our top key phrases, or are top five and top ten rankings more realistic? How do I know if my website can even rank well enough to attract new visitors?
If this predicament sounds familiar, then you came to the right place.
Expectations
Before signing on the dotted line with an SEO firm, it’s important that you are in agreement about what will be accomplished, how it will be accomplished, how these accomplishments will be measured and reported, and how long it could take to accomplish specific goals.
First, realize that instant results are not a plausible expectation. If an SEO firm promises top organic rankings and tons of new traffic in little or no time, it likely isn’t a reputable outfit. Search engine optimization is a gradual and ongoing process. Depending on the size of your website, the number of man hours allotted to your project, and the competitiveness of your targeted words and phrases, the process can take several months or more than a year in order to complete, and even then, improved rankings for your phrases is never guaranteed.
This isn’t to say some improvements can’t be seen right away. Within the first few weeks you might enjoy a modest increase in traffic, as well as improved rankings for longer-tail and less competitive phrases. You could even garner a few number one and top five rankings for some of your target keywords and phrases.
Highly competitive phrases, however, more often take several weeks or months to really improve, and even then, ranking number one for all of them isn’t going to happen. There are two reasons for this. First, your competitors are likely pursuing SEO professionals as well, meaning the competition for the most profitable phrases is high. Secondly, rankings constantly fluctuate, so maintaining high rankings (Top 5 or 10) might be a more realistic goal. Compare it to a college football poll. No team is permanently ranked number one, but the best programs always seem to be in the top five year after year.
To better ensure your site eventually ranks in the top five and top ten for your desired keywords and phrases, you should divulge as much information as possible to your chosen SEO firm, making it abundantly clear what phrases mean most to your company’s success. This enables the firm to target those phrases from the outset of the project, adjusting various elements as is necessary.
More importantly, this insight will allow them to conduct keyword analysis so you rank well for the phrases that will drive targeted traffic to your website. To increase your ROI, it is imperative that the right traffic is coming to your website, which is why proper keyword analysis is of the utmost importance. Getting another 10,000 monthly visitors might add nothing to your bottom line if most of those people are landing on a website that means nothing to them. Similarly, being ranked number one for phrases that no one is searching means nothing. If you can instead rank top five or ten for competitive phrases that your customers are searching for, the right traffic will follow. When the right people find you, your conversion rates will find the ceiling.
Measuring and Reporting Results
There are multiple ways to measure progress, and the data you receive should reflect the expected results you agreed to in the SEO agreement. In terms of pure search engine rankings, there are reporting systems that track how each keyword and phrase is currently performing in the major search engines. These reports are relatively easy to interpret and provide both detailed and general statistics.
Ranking reports should depict where each individual keyword and phrase is currently ranking, and whether it improved or fell from the previous reporting period. These reports will also give comprehensive statistics that provide a broad overview of the successes and shortcomings of your entire SEO campaign. This includes such statistics as:
Total Number One Rankings
Total Top 5 Rankings
Total Top 10 Rankings
Total Top 20 Rankings
Rankings that Improved or Fell
Total Positions Gained (Net difference between previous two)
Some clients are more interested in overall traffic numbers, leads and conversion rates. For this, many SEO firms use tracking programs like Google Analytics, which provides detailed reports that illustrate most everything you need to know about your traffic. This includes:
Total number of visitors
Total page views
Total unique visitors
Average time spent on site
Referring Sites/Traffic Sources - How visitors found your site
Bounce Rate – Number of visitors who left immediately
Understanding Your Website
Numerous factors contribute to search engine rankings, and evaluating your website before signing with an SEO firm enables you to temper or heighten your expectations. Search engine optimization is not an exact science, so understanding your website will provide insight into the challenges your SEO firm will be up against, and give you an idea of how quickly your SEO campaign can yield the desired results.
- Age of URL/Website – Search engines tend to trust older websites more than newer ones, and thus regularly award the former with better rankings. Imagine you are walking down the street in an unfamiliar town and need directions, and there is an elderly gentleman and a young child standing on the corner – who do you trust will give better directions? That’s how search engines look at most websites.
- Internal structure – Search engine web crawlers are not without faults, so they need directions, too, in order to effectively navigate your website. The more simplistic and organized your website is, the easier it will be for search engines to explore your site and index information. Imagine standing in the center of a circle. Walk in any straight line and it is an equal distance to the perimeter. If your website is designed as such, where you can reach any page from any page, search engines can navigate your site with ease. Conversely, imagine a straight line that goes from point A to point Z. If the only way to get from A to Z is going through points B through Y, then it will take greater time and effort.
- Content – Search engines value nothing more than quality original content. Thus, if your website predominately features pictures and images with no text, then search engines will have a difficult time determining what your site is about. It’s similar to going to an art museum and seeing a beautiful, albeit ambiguous, painting. Even the most sophisticated art critic will read the adjoining description to gain further insight into the idea behind the painting. Thus, if your website is a masterpiece with no description, the search engines won’t know what it really means.
- Size – In general, the bigger your website, the more phrases it can rank for. This is a good and a bad thing. It’s good since you have more content opportunities and phrases with which to lure visitors, but bad since it requires more work to improve individual rankings for every word and phrase. If yours is a bigger website, you should consider what phrases are most valuable to your company when forming your expectations. This is similar to running a fine steakhouse or a buffet. If you know your specialty is steak, then you can invest most of your culinary efforts in making it the best steak possible. But if you’re running a buffet, it becomes more laborious to perfect 50 individual items.
- Nature of your business – Some phrases are simply easier to rank for since there is less competition. If your company sells sea shells with pictures of past presidents painted on them, then it won’t be difficult to get your site ranked for related phrases. But if you have a small sports blog and hope to rank ahead of ESPN.com for the word “Sports,” you might want to temper your expectations.
