This is one of the questions that my clients invariably ask me. Since the financial aspect underlies most decisions, the client thinks about how to reduce expenses and wants to make their plan from the start: I will spend amount X for Y months, after which I just have to wait for orders, sales, and profit to come. Unfortunately, things are not that simple.
Search engine optimization must be a permanent component of the marketing strategy for the site that aims to reach or maintain a good position in Google's search results.
What SEO is, I believe, does not need to be mentioned here. The purpose of site optimization is to "bring it forward" in front of search engines, to appear as high as possible in the organic (or unpaid) results.
When starting an SEO campaign from scratch, no one can say how long it will take to reach the desired position. It could be 6 months, 3 months, or even over a year… and sometimes never! Why? It depends on many factors, starting from the quality of the content, the SEO history of the site, some technical aspects (such as loading speed), and external links.
What do we do after we have reached where we wanted? Do we stop?
The answer is as simple as it gets: NO! And, to better understand what can influence our presence and the position gained, I have selected below some of the most important aspects to consider.
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1. Google search algorithms change often. Search engines upgrade and modify quite frequently the algorithms on which ranking is based in order to offer users the best and most relevant results. That is why in the SEO strategy you must always take into account these algorithms and the changes they undergo over time.
2. Penalties. Any site can be penalized by Google if it does not comply with its criteria. Thus, even if at one point the site was fine, a new rule may appear at any time, which is more restrictive, and thus the site or application may suffer penalties. Therefore, changes must be monitored and acted upon proactively. If problems do arise, they can and should be corrected – if they are not severe. However, sometimes penalties can only be lifted with great difficulty.
3. Competition. Yes, just as you have decided and opened an online store or a site about crocheting, many others have done the same. And they will do so tomorrow and next week. The virtual world is open to everyone and, unfortunately (or fortunately – it depends on how you look at it), anyone can enter with the same idea as ours but with greater resources. That is why our goal is to stay above them and make people click on our link. How do we do that? With a good title and an equally good meta description. I have written about titles and descriptions before and will do so again soon, but I must mention here that the way of choosing them has changed over time.
4. The audience. Like everything else, the audience changes, and so do their interests. If until recently they searched using simple keywords, now they have started to understand the diversity of sites that can appear as results, and they look for much more specific things, based on increasingly complex words and especially phrases. Both sides adapt to the new conditions.
Beyond these few basic elements, there are other reasons why we should never give up on search engine optimization. Consider SEO as a marketing component and learn to allocate all the necessary resources and interest to it.
