How long before SEO starts working?
As many things to do with SEO the answer here would be - it depends. Vague, and not what anyone wants to hear. There are so many different factors at play - if we didn't address those first, any estimate would be a number pulled from thin air.
These factors can include your current brand awareness strength, your marketing/PR efforts (past and current), ongoing resources for things like content, staff and time, and how quickly you can implement changes or content that is recommended to you.
You play SEO for the long game, so there’s definitely an investment phase. It won’t happen overnight, but it needs to be constantly reviewed and improved to maintain a healthy status. Patience is key and be diligent, keep an eye on things on a regular basis, this allows for any necessary tweaking along the way, to grant you the best results to come.
Brand awareness - are you a new brand with a new domain?
If you are starting to build a brand, this will often mean for SEO that you will have a limited number of brand searches, no online reputation with search engines, and/or no significant mentions online. Mentions online refers to links to your website from other websites (ideally within a similar industry) or social media.
It would take you longer to get noticeable visibility from Google and you should be investing time and effort building your brand using a multichannel marketing approach (on/offline), so depending on these multichannel marketing efforts and putting in place a SEO strategy we would be looking to see long term results from SEO (approx. 10-12 months). We could obviously speed things up with an important investment in brand and other marketing channels.
On average, we are starting to deliver noticeable SEO results for medium size e-commerce brands (approx 5-year-old brands) within 3 months. In some instances, even less. Depending on the SEO opportunity we focus more on one SEO pillar or other. There are 3 SEO pillars: Content, Technical, and Link Earning. We do also consider UX, especially after Google announced this year that they include page experience as one of their ranking factors.
Why is SEO important for e-commerce clients?
For most of our clients, SEO is the channel driving more traffic to the website and represents around 40% of the total traffic (including brand and non-brand traffic). The main and obvious benefit here would be that you are not paying directly for relevant traffic to your website (transactional or informational) but SEO shouldn't be used in isolation as a marketing strategy.
At 30acres we have an integrated marketing approach for e-commerce clients, where all the channels are working together in tandem to provide better results than when working separately. In fact, when you access any of our clients Google Analytics profiles and look at their multi-channel reports, it is clear to see how much the different marketing channels are assisting/interacting with each other before the final conversion is made, so it is really hard to attribute the success in conversions to one channel exclusively.
Examples of this integrated approach:
- SEO and marketing campaigns. Marketing campaigns are made considering product/category seasonality using past results from Google search demand. These campaigns are covered using the different channels: email, PPC, SEO/content, social media, website assets, and the same message is sent across these channels.
- Content. SEO informs about the content opportunity and format to follow and it is amplified via Social Media, PPC, email, etc.
- PPC helps SEO to find converting keywords to improve existing pages or create new ones also a PPC / SEO integrated approach would improve efficiencies saving money for our clients.
- Paid social. Facebook prospecting helps to raise product and brand awareness and then in many scenarios the users return and convert through brand searches (via SEO or Paid).
- Social Media and SEO. At 30acres we have access to tools that can give us information in terms of third party content that have had success in terms of social engagement and link earning that can be replicated and amplify via social and paid social.
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