This is the big question any SEO professional is going to be asked right off the bat. It’s because clients want to know when to see results and they don’t realize the process can take some time.
Not only can the process take some time, but the client has to be made aware that the process calls for their willingness to constantly monitor, update, tweak, and maintenance their websites and blogs. There’s no magic bullet like in the old days when people would just slap up any old keywords or keyphrases and use all sorts of wild tactics to get traffic. Today’s search engines are far more wiser and are implementing technologies to assure the surfers get the best results they can get instead of useless data.
The reasons the search engines are pouring on the high tech wizardry is because they lose out when scrupulous webmasters and SEO scammers manipulate things to get the top rankings. If people can’t get what they’re searching for, they’ll move on to another search engine and even Google couldn’t survive a wave of a mass exodus away from their site. That being said, the new ways of doing SEO call for ethical and methodical techniques that provide better results for all around.
Mind you, it’s not how many hits your website gets, it’s what those hits do. If they don’t convert to sales or some form of equitable exchange, then the efforts are for naught. You can have a site that has 100,000 hits a month but only four sales, whereas a competitor could be getting 4,000 hits a month and 500 sales. It’s all about the right way to go about it, your salesmanship along with your site’s design. Two companies selling apples with one outselling the other means that one knows what they’re doing.
In all fairness, it’s a good bet to say that from the ground floor up, it should take about 5 months before you see solid and reliable results. The trick to achieving this isn’t magic, it’s just following the methodical and right way of creating your site, writing the copy, and more. Keywords are important as well as keyphrases, however, it’s how you place them and nowadays just tossing a word or phrase isn’t enough, the queries are more natural, based on natural speaking patterns as surfers are now using things like Siri and other audio based tools. The search engines want the people who input real search queries to find what they’re looking for so they develop software to take advantage of this in order to provide more valuable results.
This is why it takes about 5 months now to see results. Your site and its content has to provide pertinent data, that useful data that helps the surfers along. Links are important but nowadays only real, pertinent links, not just some list of inbound links from spam farms. Optimizing photos, tags, are all important here to capture that organic traffic that is more likely to convert.
Following the smart and ethical path is going to get you the results you want so keep your eye on the prize and practice patience, it will work out in the short and long term.