There are two traps I have seen clients fall into when it comes to plans and budgets for SEO; 1) they don’t have a plan, 2) they don’t have a budget. As my father is fond of saying, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. When it comes to SEO, failure means lost time, money, and opportunity. Below, I share five steps to create a simple plan and budget to make sure this doesn’t happen to you. But before any planning begins, there are two important facts to understand about SEO.
- SEO is a long term strategy. How long does it take for SEO to work? While circumstances differ, a good rule of thumb is 4 to 6 months for minimal results, and 6 to 12 months for more complete results. Rarely do you see results within the first month or two. This is because the first month there is generally a lot of discovery, auditing, and planning taking place, and not much implementation. The second month implementation begins, but it takes time for search engines to recognize the changes, so virtually nothing happens to results until the tail end of the second month. When results start appearing in the third and fourth months, they’re going to be minimal. By the sixth month things should be starting to move along nicely, but it will likely be closer to 12 months before the real payoff starts. It’s in the second year that you will harvest your investment…
