SEO | Cât timp îi ia

Search engine optimization is a process to improve website visibility and ranking in search engines. Every website owner tries to do its best to rank higher and be ahead of competition. It takes a lot of work and time to do and the results do not show right away.

Many of you may have asked yourselves the question: "How long does it take to see any results?". 

A lot of SEO firms will explain you that it takes 4 to 6 months to start seeing results. That’s generally accurate, but bear in mind this is when you start seeing results, and SEO results grow over time.

It takes so long mainly because there are a lot of factors to be considered when ranking a website. Before your website can appear on the Google search engine, it has to be indexed first. While this doesn’t really mean you should have so many pages ranked on Google, It means having quality pages indexed. There are studies that point to a relationship between indexed pages and rankings. The more quality pages rank, the better but don’t fall into the trap of creating pages for the purpose of ranking.

Contents are the major key to ranking on Google. In short, it is the only factor that we SEO experts can vouch for when it comes to ranking factors. But then not any type of content gets you to rank. Your content has to do/give something extraordinary to the person reading it. Your content can make or destroy all your SEO efforts. Hence your content needs to be original, and unique, have at least 1000 words and well presented for readability.

A factor you need to keep an eye out for is the competition level in your niche. It could be extremely hard to rank when thousands or more websites already exist and rank well in the same niche. The only possibility is to have something amazing in terms of content so people would prefer your website. Hard to achieve, but doable.

The age of the domain also plays an important role in SERPs (search engine result page rankings). Search engines tend to trust more an old domain, without penalties, than a newly created one. It would take a new domain +6months to achieve what an old one could have in the first weeks. This practice is encouraged by black-hat SEO doers, so it is not actually on the list of best-practices.

Target audience. It does matter wether you target a specific audience like a geographical region, or a more larger audience. Targeting a small region may actually help you rank faster for a simple reason: searching for "Pizza in New York" might actually put you restaurant in the top results, but searching for "Pizza" at a global scale, will most certainly not list your website. But this metric is relevant for local businesses only. If you are a blogger, you write content for everyone, not only for your friends in New York.

Handling SEO for your website can be split up in 3 steps:

• Do an audit, make a list of every aspect you have to deal with ( a few days, up to a week of work )
• Do the actual work ( never stop doing SEO )
• Allow time for search engines to index your website

SEO is not an easy task, and not everyone knows how do deal with it. Even if you use a CMS site builder like Wordpress or Shopify, you still have to take on SEO by hand. 

There are though, a lot of apps and tools that help by automating some tasks for you, such as optimizing images, adding schema markup, beautifying urls and so on. 

Or you can always contact a SEO expert or a company that deals with SEO to help you out, but this solution is quite expensive because, as you already know, SEO does not provide immediate results and it needs constant work.

A common mistake is to abandon SEO work after a couple of weeks or sooner after seeing little to no results. If you do have faith in your content and feel it has to be in the top, then never abandon SEO work. If your website were to be a plant, SEO would be the water and care you offer it. It takes a lot of time, but after you plant the seed, it grows until everyone sees it.