Sometimes it’s hard to explain SEO to a person (shoutout to all my SEO mentors for being patient with me, too!), which is why I often get the question, “why aren’t I ranking first when I search for ‘real estate agency in Burlington’?” or “how come I’ve paid you for a month and I’m not #1 over my competitor?” Well, the answer is simple, but hard to understand for folks outside of the industry.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the art of getting a business to appear in search results, organically. This doesn’t mean you can spend $1,500 in one go to appear first for a certain search query (check out SEM if that’s what you want), but rather you spend increments of money over time to help your business obtain long-term search results. SEO is best when you are trying to gain visibility for your business/brand OR you are in a highly competitive market and want to “out rank” your competitors (or both). By investing in SEO, you are quite LITERALLY investing in long-term visibility for your business to appear on Google SERPs (search engine results pages) rather than a “one and done” paid advertising effort.
Good SEO can come from a combination of ranking factors, but the three that help the most (in my eyes) are internal linking, great metadata and relevant industry content. Producing content, updating metadata and internally linking those pages together takes time for both an SEO Analyst to do and for Google to read. If you aren’t seeing organic results for search queries within 5-6 months of establishing a good SEO routine, then maybe it’s time to talk, but you won’t see results in a week. If you think your business needs some help gaining ground in the search world, please reach out to us today.