I wrote this sentence in my last blog post and thought I would expand on it a little bit. This is often a term I used to put SEO in perspective for most new clients that I work with. Some people have been misinformed or lied to when it comes to SEO.
4 Misonceptions about SEO:
-#1 organic or natural search engine rankings can’t be obtained over night.
-You can’t buy your way to the top of natural/ogranic search. This is free reign and has been dominated by the SEO wizards for years.
-Immediate results. You won’t see results generally for 2-6 months unless you are in an industry that is very niche and has little competition both on and off the search engines.
-The keywords meta tag isn’t really important, so if you are a business owner doing SEO yourself, don’t waste to much time on it. Here is a link showing Matt Cutts, in charge web spam for Google saying that google doesn’t use the meta keywords tag at all for ranking purposes.
For a domain that is brand new, you shouldn’t expect any real significant results to determine ROI or other reports until 4-6 months. Domains that are brand new often get put in a sandbox that google uses in order to put spammy site in their search engine. After this waiting period, Google then gives them a shot.
For older domains, 1 year or older without a history of penalties or being blacklisted you should expect to see changes in your traffic within a few months. Generally the older a website is, the more trust Google will have.
When setting up a budget for SEO, you and your company should think about your industry and how competitive it is. In an industry such as mortgages or foreclosures, you will need to be very patient as there are a lot of websites vying for a piece of the search engines right now and you can expect to pay more due to the amount of work needed to be done by your SEO company in order to get you to the top. If you are in the business selling a new product or service that doesnt exist than your search engine wait time will probably be much less and the amount of work your SEO company needs to do in order to get you there will also be less.