Some marketing techniques are quick. For example, if you’ve got a postcard design, you can have them in mailboxes next week. If you want to show up in the advertising section of Google, your site can be there in a matter of hours.
Unfortunately, SEO isn’t one of them. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, determines where your site ranks in Google. And while it’s the goal of every business to show up in the first page of results in Google for their preferred search terms, it takes time to get there. In fact, if someone promises they can have you in the first page of Google in a couple of weeks’ time, and they aren’t talking about paying hundreds of dollars a week for advertisements, you should hang up the phone because you’re being swindled. Here are a few reasons that it takes two to three months to climb the ranks of Google:
#1: Indexing – One of the ways that Google determines how to rank your site is to look at your connections – that is, links coming to or from your site from other sites. And while Google has a tremendous amount of computing power, it still takes Google over a month to crawl every page on the internet. That means it could be up to a month before Google understands how ‘connected’ your site is. As an aside, this is why it’s valuable to list all of your associations, such as banner programs, associations, and parts carried on your websites. Each of these links helps your SEO.
#2: Visits: – One sign a restaurant is probably a good one is if the parking lot is full around mealtime. Google feels the same way about websites – the more people that visit a website, the more valuable Google thinks that site is. And if people visit multiple times and spend time on multiple pages, it makes your site look even more valuable. But it can take time before enough people stop by your site to convince Google to push it up the rankings.
While it certainly helps to use social media, business cards, invoices, or even verbal requests to encourage people to visit your site (which they’re happy to do if coupons are available on the site), it takes time to build up the reputation as a valuable source of information that Google is hoping to see.
#3: Time: – Things can happen quickly on the internet – but they rarely happen quickly on Google. This is intentional – if Google’s results varied wildly from day to day, people would trust Google less.
Sites that climb the rankings very quickly raise a red flag, because Google has intentionally designed their ranking system to move sites slowly over time. If a site manages to get ranked very highly almost immediately after launching, it’s probably because they’re using tricks to manipulate their search results. For instance, a site owner might have paid thousands of other sites to link to theirs, to trick Google into thinking their site is very valuable. If Google determines that a site has used these tricks, they will manually drop that site many pages down the search results – or remove it from the index entirely. If Google does this to your site, it can be very difficult to get it reversed.
So, while it might be frustrating to wait for your site to climb the rankings, be patient – this process is the most cost-effective marketing you’ll ever perform. And there’s a bright side to this process as well: once your site is ranked highly, it is very unlikely that it will drop any more rapidly than it rose. That’s why you’ll be getting results from your website years after those quick marketing tactics – the expensive postcards and Google advertising – have stopped delivering results.