Every business owner wants their official website to rank on the top of the Google search result page in terms of the related keywords. They try to hire SEO experts or outsource the SEO package to a digital company. However, the business owners will find it hard to reach the goal in a short period even though spending lots of investment. Why SEO takes time? Truth to be told, even the experienced website optimization specialists admit there is no shortcut to google ranking.

Before answering the question of why the search engine optimization process takes so much time, let’s explore the following problems firstly: What is SEO, and how it works.

What is SEO

SEO is short for “Search Engine Optimization.” It is the process of getting traffic from the “free,” “organic,” “editorial” or “natural” search results on search engines.

The traffic from SEO means quality. Providing suitable content for users’ inquiries is the core service of the search engines. They spend lots of resources to develop their algorithms to understand the website’s content and rank their positions according to the relevant keywords. While the search engines receive the users’ inquiries, they not only use the complicated algorithm to return the results but also provide the page title and description in the browser. Once users click the link within search results, that means the content of the page can match their inquiries. Visitors from the Google search ranking are the quality traffic who are genuinely interested in products or services that you offer.

The organic traffic from SEO doesn’t need to pay. Unlike paid advertisements, business owners don’t need to pay for each click. Search engines rank the website on the top of the result page because they consider the page content has high relevance to the users’ inquiries. In another word, these organic traffics can be regarded as a reward for the informative content from the search engines.

SEO also can be understood as getting your website to the top of Google search results.

How do search engines work

Search engines have two major functions: crawling the websites’ page and building different indexes base on keywords, and providing search users with a ranked list of the websites they’ve determined are the most relevant.

Search engine companies send a program called a “web crawler” or “robot” that goes out and gathers information about all the content it can find on the Internet. The crawler will visit the different websites through links. It brings all the content within the page back to the search engine to build an index. As a result,  each search engine company has a huge index database for different web pages according to keywords.

These indexes are then fed through a complicated algorithm that tries to match all that data with users’ queries.

When the user performs an online search, the search engine scours its corpus of billions of documents. Then it returns those results that are relevant or useful to the searcher’s query base on its algorithm. Normally, These algorithms often comprise hundreds of variables. In the search marketing field, we call them “ranking factors.”.

How SEO Works

Although the Search Engines are continuously updating the algorithms to improve the accuracy of search results, there remain two key elements that are the successful foundation.

On-site SEO: content and website infrastructure

• Target Keywords and competitors Analysis
• Content Create
• Code optimize

Off-site SEO: reference by other online sources

• high-quality incoming links building
• relevant and active social media presence
• creating local citations

Within a detailed SEO plan, the keyword of the niche market and competitors’ analysis is the foundation. Only after analyzing the current market circumstance can we define which topic is suitable for the company’s website, such as the online customer volume and competitors’ current SEO condition. For most small-sized businesses, generic keywords are not the best choice even they looks have high search volume because these types of keywords are often in fierce competition.

Once the major keywords have been decided, the broad match keywords and longtail keywords should be selected for content writing. In the SEO industry, content is king. Focus on the targeted customers’ demand and writing relevant articles is the best way to obtain search engines’ favor.

Meanwhile, link building should be started. The outer links can help search engines to discover new web pages and help determine how well a page should rank in its results.

When the search engines find your web page is referred by the high trusted domains and visitors likes staying on your website, the website/pages will be placed in a higher position.

Try to provide useful content for the niche market of the company, then let more people know about it. This is what SEO does.

Why does SEO take time?

After explaining the SEO basic process and searching ranking logic, let’s find out why SEO takes time.

SEO takes time on keywords and competition analysis

As we have pointed out above, keywords analysis is the foundation of the SEO plan. At this stage, even experienced SEO experts will need time to find out the suitable keywords group for the certain company.

For example, the customer is a sole trader who provides landscape services in Brisbane Northside. According to his service range, he can choose the following keywords as the website topic:

Keyword Volume Search results
-landscaping Brisbane 2,400 33,300,000
-landscaping north Brisbane 480 1,400,000
-affordable landscaping Brisbane 50 651,000

Which one is the best suitable option?

Obviously, the first one “landscaping Brisbane” has the largest search volume (2400/month). But it also has the largest search results (33,300,000 pages). If you want to be on the top page, that means 33,300,000 should be bested by you.

The second one seems more suitable for this landscaper, with less search volume (480/ month) and less competitive pages(1,400,000 pages). The term includes the keyword ” north” to refine the people who don’t live in this business area. The visitors will be more accurate. Now, the business owner doesn’t need to refuse the customer from the south suburbs.

The third keyword has the least search volume ( 50/month) and few competitive pages (651,000). It will be the easiest goal to be reached.

Which one is the best suitable option for this landscaper?

The choice depends on his current circumstance and ambition. SEO is always not a technical process, it needs exceptional IT skills and rich business experience. Even in the earliest stage, a professional SEO expert needs to have many discussions with the customer as knowing more about the customer’s business can help SEO strategy be more accurate.

Also, the existed competitors’ websites also need to be analyzed in detail. In most markets, your competitors have spent a decade or more to build both their websites and links to obtain the current ranking position. Before making the final decision to fight with them directly, we need to know more about them carefully.

Spending more time to survey and analyze, the foundation of SEO strategy will be more solid, the chance to win the online market will be higher.

SEO takes time on building backlinks

Search engines need complicated parameters to calculate the website rank and the backlinks are one of the most important factors. If you want to obtain Google’s trust, lots of recommendations (known as backlinks) from high-authority domains are needed. Like the real world, the recommendation from a celebrity always has more trust than the ordinary people.

For example, the backlink from 7NEWS Brisbane has more authority than most of the personal blogs. However, such high-quality backlinks are not easy to obtain. You need to pay for, traded, or otherwise acquired. Dealing with link owners can take lots of time and resources.

Also, search engines don’t like the website’s excessive optimization, especially the human manipulation (known as blackhat SEO skill) to try to cheat their algorithm. Many years ago, SEO agencies liked to build tons of low-quality backlinks for customers, no matter their topic and source. It worked at that time. Now Google updated the algorithm to a new version called “panda” to against such huge and meaningless backlinks. More seriously, these black hat SEO skills will cause the website to be banned by search engines. So nowadays the SEO companies need to build the backlinks for customer day by day and make it looks like naturally.

As you can see, finding and building high authority backlinks for the niche market consume lots of time. But it is definitely worth the wait.

SEO takes time on search engines to identify the website

Do you know how many websites in the world? Account to the Web Server Survey, there are 1 billion websites that were first reached in September of 2014. Nowadays, the website amount is estimated at 1.5 billion. Not all of them are active, only less than 200 million still have updates and maintenance.

Base on the numerous website amount above, the spiders sent by search engines need time to crawl the content and send back the result to the data center. Even the search engines normally have thousands and thousands of powerful servers to handle such collect-index-rank processes, as they still need time to finish the jobs.

So your website will not have any ranking before being crawled by the robots. When will the robots arrive at your website? Even experienced SEO experts have the advanced skills to attract crawlers for the sake of accelerating the process, but the schedule still depends on the workload of the robot.

After getting the website content, the search engine still needs time to calculate and test your ranking position. It’s a complicated process. For example, there are two different optimized articles about “SEO can improve small-sized business” released on two websites at the same time. Which one should be ranked higher? The search engine needs to calculate all the affected factors, from content to backlinks, and compare which one has the better score, then give them the initial rank position. This is just the ranking beginning. In the following days, the search engine will add more visitors’ reactions to decide the further rank position. During the whole process, a long wait is needed for the search engine to make the right judgment.

From the commercial aspect, SEO and PPC are the different online marketing strategies. SEO is for long-term running and PPC is a kind of business that belongs to Search engines. Search engines will not allow SEO affect faster than PPC. Otherwise, who will pay the money to the search engine for PPC campaigns? After all, PPC is the major income for search engines. Search engine optimization must need time to take effect.

How much time SEO takes

If the keyword list is on low competition, the ideal time span would be 4-12 months. Google also offers a timeline for the SEO campaign that 4-12 would be acceptable. When the SEO campaign is in a high-competition area, the timeline will be extended to 2-3 years.
However, all the time span is estimated and based on the proper SEO deployment. If the digital marketing specialist doesn’t carry out the correct operation, the result may be not satisfy.

Summary

SEO is a long-term project. Because it needs time to plan and carry out, but also depends on the search engines process procedure. Finding a seasoned SEO expert will save you three-quarters of your time and protect your investment.