What Should be the Realistic Expectations From An SEO Campaign ?

SEO Is A Long Term Plan

No SEO campaign can guarantee quick success and results are not going to appear overnight. SEO is a gradual process that takes time to develop. Nothing wrong in expecting outcomes out of your investment. But, that shouldn't be unrealistic. Nothing happens overnight in SEO.

You can achieve the expected results only if your SEO plan includes:

• Achievable Goals
• A timeline
• A budget
• Patience

Actual results ( in the form of improved ranking ) could take several weeks, months, and occasionally years to appear.

Results of an SEO campaign could be delayed for many reasons:

Website Age:

Though debatable, it's believed across SEO communities that an older domain gets a ranking boost. If your domain is not that old, you need to work harder.

Location:

Location of your website sometimes payoff benefits in terms of SEO. If your target audience and your domain are from the same geo-location, your website gains additional traction and visibility.

Unoptimized Website Elements:

There may be the chances that your website elements (Content, links, Navigation, Images, Multimedia objects, UX, Accesibility etc.) are not optimized. They directly impact your website's performance and delay the results.

Changing Trends And Circumstances:

You never know when an ongoing SEO trend gets obsolete. To recall, once mass link building was the biggest ranking factor, but now it invites penalties. A sudden fluctuation in trends may hit your campaign expectation, hence, may delay results.

Ongoing Algorithm Updates:

Again, your SEO results may get delayed if a fresh set of Google algorithm put a break midway on activities being performed.

Growing Competition:

On each day, thousands of new websites are added to the google. That simply means, If they offer what you do, you're eventually exposed to more fierce competition.

SEOmoz, the top most resource on search engine optimization over the internet, has its own say. The company says –

Forget the results at first, it can take anywhere between 20 - 40 days before Google add brand new websites to their search results. That means, when Google takes almost a month or so to include new websites in their database, how could you expect results within a fortnight.

More The Efforts You Put, More The Results You get

SEO results are very much dependent upon the efforts you make.SEO results are very much dependent upon the efforts you put into. If you truly devote time on it, you can get better results. Again, here as well, you should have reasonable expectations from the campaign. For example: if you're a small business running a SEO campaign with a single marketing manager and a few teammates, the results would be entirely different from a large firm employing a full-time team of search engine optimizers. If this is the case with, you’ll have to prioritize your key channels for optimization for getting better results.

Don't Trust Unrealistic SEO Claims

There are agencies who take advantage of your expectations from your SEO campaign. They offer instant results and guaranteed number-one rankings for your chosen keywords. As we already have said SEO is a long-term process, better avoid such fake claims. SEO is changed now. Accepting the terms of bogus and fake SEO companies can have long-term negative repercussions for your site.