If you’re looking to get your business consistently found on the web these days, you’re going to need an SEO strategy. It’s rather exciting to think of having thousands of visitors to your site every month, but you cannot allow your expectations to get away from you. Many pursue SEO like something akin to a get rich quick scheme and that, simply, is not how SEO works. In order to see results, you must be patient and you must understand that there are several tactics and best practices that need to be applied and amended along the way. If you approach it as something that is going to give you results in a week, you’re going to be disappointed. But, if you stick with it over the course of 3 to 4 months, you’ll see measurable results on the web. To keep you on the path, let’s go over some pointers on how you can set realistic SEO goals for you and your business.
Use Long Time Periods and Relative Measurements
As mentioned above, don’t look for drastic results within the first few days and weeks. To keep your expectations in check, use long periods of time to measure progress. It’s better to compare longer time periods against each other anyway. For example, track progress from January to March and then from April to June, and compare them. If everything is going well, you should be solid increases across the board from April to June. Traffic and rankings can fluctuate, so it’s best to not analyze week by week.
Be Realistic About Your Resources
If you’re going about implementing your SEO strategy all on your own, congratulations. However, you have to think about the time you’re putting into your efforts. If you’re going about it in short bursts, it’ll likely take a bit longer to get where you want to be compared to if you had one or five dedicated people working on your SEO strategy. You must also consider the amount of content you would like to produce, your offsite content, backlinks, and your social media channels. All of these things are important when trying to rise in search rankings. If this is your first time launching an SEO campaign, be conservative with the goals you would like to achieve. There are so many ways to go about SEO that the best advice would be to get real with both your expectations and the amount of effort you want to put into it.
Adjust
When you set out with specific SEO goals, you really shouldn’t change them. However, SEO allows for a lot of adjustments to be made. After all, you could temper your expectations and realize your site is getting a lot more traffic than you expected. If that’s the case, it’s more than reasonable to increase the expectations of your set goal. The latter can also be applied if you bring on one or two people to produce content and manage your social media channels. However, algorithm changes and other shifts can take you back a few steps too. In instances like this, it’s okay to scale back some of your goals and adjust them again in a few months time.
SEO is something that requires consistent work and an ongoing strategy. You cannot simply get on page 1 of search results and expect to stay there. Once you’re there, you must continue to work on SEO to remain consistently relevant for your major keywords. Think about the long-term goals you hope to get out of your SEO strategy and then go about them, slowly. Good luck!