Excerpts from my latest article at Practical eCommerce: “Why Does SEO Take So Long?“
Search marketing’s two halves are so similar and yet so different. A new pay-per-click advertising campaign can be set up and pushed live, and data starts to roll in that same day. Within a week there may be enough data to analyze performance, tweak and iterate the optimization of the campaign. Why does search engine optimization take so long to mature and impact performance if paid search is so quick? And what does this mean for the back to school or fall and holiday seasons that seem so far away?
In my agency life I’m asked this question frequently — followed by a query as to what to do to speed up the process. Let’s start with why search engine optimization takes longer to mature. The reasons have partly to do with education, business process, creative and development time, and the time it takes for the search engines to do their thing. All told, the process from kicking off a major SEO project with a thorough site analysis and detailed recommendations to actual implementation and SEO performance can take 6 to 12 months. If a business starts the process today, it will be lucky to see results by December.
Read the article in full at Practical eCommerce »
Originally posted on Web PieRat.