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.
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.
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: