Sounds counter-intuitive I know but I find that so many folks don’t get this that I need to explain why what you think is a “long time” is not what Google thinks is a “long time.” Ultimately, a day or week to Google is just a blink of an eye.
Building a website, launching it, and then promoting it online is not analogous to putting up a billboard or putting an ad in the yellow pages. A much more accurate analogy would be the following three examples:
- Building, launching and promoting a website.
- Starting a new yellow page directory, printing it, and then getting people to switch to it from their current YP provider.
- Buying a plot of land, erecting a tower for your billboard, then plastering your message onto it.
You see the difference? What most people forget is that the DISTRIBUTION is not already setup when you advertise online. Sure the vehicle is there, but there’s no set distribution channel. If you call the billboard company, then just slap your ad onto their existing structure. If you call the YP company, they will just print your ad on one of the pages and send it out along with the rest of the books that they were already going to send out.
When you sign up with an SEO, that person/company has to start from scratch. S/He has to build (or rebuild) the site, then push it out to as many places online as he/she can to get eyeballs in front of it.
I find that many business owners think that since they can put an ad in the newspaper and have it into circulation within the next week that the online space works the same way. Even though electrons move much faster than paper, the online space can require a much longer time horizon to measure success. Unlike a newspaper or similar medium, what matters most online is the trending. Are you moving in the right direction or not? If not, make a change, wait, and then ask the question again. If you are, great, but then don’t give up before you allow enough time to let the trend take you where you want to go.
When you have to measure movement in the rankings the most common time frame I use is a month. That means a minimum of three months to IDENTIFY a trend. Then you need another 2-3 months to make the changes and begin tracking the new trend if needed. That puts you at 6 months and you may or may not have solved the original issue.