Sep 12 2007
How Long Does it Take to Rank Well After Your Site is Optimized
I get asked this question A LOT so I thought it would be worthwhile to do a post regarding the answer. I have been optimizing websites for about 5 years now and from my experience there is no simple answer to this question but there are a few elements to be considered when trying to answer it.
1.      How competitive are the keywords that you would like to optimize your site for? There is a big difference in trying to optimize your site for the keyword phrase “Taxes†or trying to optimize your website for “New Jersey Tax Returnsâ€. A fast way to get a rough understanding of just how competitive a keyword phrase is before planning to optimize for it is to perform a search for the selected phrase on Google and see how many results show up for that term. This does not mean that the sites that appear are necessarily your competition in a business sense but they certainly are in a search sense.
 2.      How well is your competition optimized? Most of the time it is not just about the sheer number of competitive websites but also about just how competitive they really are. There may be 100 million results but the top 10 sites that appear may be optimized very poorly and may just have their ranking due to domain age and link popularity. Once you delve into your competitions sites and discover what they are doing to optimize their sites or more importantly what they are NOT doing you can then incorporate those elements into your own strategies and tactics.Â
3.     How long have you had your existing domain and do you currently hold any weight with the search engines? It is a much easier and faster start to optimize a website that has been around and on the internet for a long time than to optimize a site that is brand new even if the older site doesn’t have to much or any link popularity. Another important factor to keep in mind is that if you previously had a domain selling jewelry that was performing well and now want to sell widgets on the site that have nothing to do with jewelry then you may very well be starting from scratch or worse. Remember that your site becomes a trusted source regarding a topic and when all of the content on the site suddenly doesn’t correspond with any of the anchor text or websites that are linking back to yours then you are very likely to vanish from the results for a time until you become a trusted and relevant source on the new topics at hand. While these are not the only elements by far they are certainly some of the more important ones to consider when you are trying to create a business plan based around how quickly your website will gain traffic through natural search. The one strong piece of advice I can give is to NEVER EVER EVER base a business plan around natural search bringing in large amounts of traffic in less than 6 months. While I don’t believe it is impossible it is a very rare occurrence and not something worth counting on.
Ultimately the best solution if possible would be to try to plan and implement SEO on a website 1 year in advance before actually counting on that site bringing in any return. For that matter if you can try to build 50 under that same model. Everything in SEO requires some serious planning in advance and if executed properly will bring some wonderful returns.
