How long before my SEO starts working?

That being said there are some items that we can be pretty certain will feature in all search engine ranking metrics:

• Content - This has always been the most important asset a website can have. By content, I mean well-structured, grammatically correct, easily understandable text that most importantly is relevant to the subject matter that the website is about and 'speaks' to the prospective client/customer that the website is targeted at. You might ask, well what about the images? Are they not important too? Well I would guess that you could probably swap one image for another one and as long as you title it the same way then you'd probably not change the ranking at all. Images are valuable visuals to most blog posts and may add context but unless they are highly relevant, (to a product perhaps) may not carry much weight in terms of improving rankings.
• Meta Data. Of the various meta data items on a site, Meta Title and Meta Description are almost certainly the most important items and are what you see in a search results page. Other factors include any structured data you have on the page. This is a standardised way of telling search engines about your business, it's location, about products that you may have etc.
• Speed. Here we start to see some differentiation between desktop and mobile devices. As most desktop devices are almost certainly going to be connected to the internet , it is less important that they are optimised for speed but when it comes to mobile devices the assumption is that they may well not be connected by wifi but are often used with 4G or even with 3G so to get a good page speed on mobile becomes more important.
• Inbound links to your site. These are valuable if they are a) relevant to the subject of your site and b) come from high value sites.
• Social signals from social media and customer reviews will also have a part to play in the rankings.

Overall there may be over 200 ranking factors and there are different ranking factors between desktop and mobile. Ranking factors are different for different search engines. It is possible to rank in the top 3 on Bing and Google desktop but be on page two for Google mobile.

Any website's SEO strategy will include elements of some or all of these ranking factors to some extent.

So when to expect results?

Google staff have stated that it may take four to twelve months to see the benefits of an SEO strategy. Of course a website appears on a search in amongst many other sites which may be competing for the same keywords and these sites are also moving up and down the rankings.

It’s complex. Your site rankings are dependant not just on what you are doing but also on what your competitors are doing and also on how the search engines are testing and rolling out new ways of determining the rankings in an increasingly complex environment.

The best way to proceed is to slowly:

1. Build up content. Use your blog to write naturally about what you do. Search engines like a site with fresh new content especially if it’s interesting, free of jargon and easy for anyone to understand. You can add content at any time that you think of it. I’m adding to this blog entry whilst lying awake in bed on my iPhone whilst most of the UK is still asleep. I could just as easily be on holiday. As long as there’s some sort of signal to save the changes you’re good. Of course you would have to test this out before you write a lot of text!
2. If you’ve written a great blog post then share it with the world.
3. Look at your old blog posts. See if they still make sense and are still relevant to what you do. Do they contain lots of rich content or are they just linking out to other sites of interest. It is probably best not to have a blog post that simply links to another site because you like the content, as you are giving away link juice to someone else’s website. It’s far better to distill what you like about the other person’s article and put it into your own words. Don’t simply copy and paste content from other sites. Duplicate content is a thing that search engines can recognise and if found they can ignore the later version.
4. If your business is making gorgeous looking pastries, painting fabulous looking nails in a nail bar or swimming in wild places then share images of those activities on social media.
5. Look for opportunities to get relevant good quality incoming links to your website.

None of this is going to happen quickly. You have to be prepared for a long haul and to put some effort into doing these sort of things at regular intervals.

If you don’t already have a blog on your website then talk to me about getting a website with content management built in plus blogging. Of course you could use blogging tools elsewhere to write a blog but what you really want is for people to visit your site. If a visitor is on your site reading your blog then they are more likely to see what else you have to offer.

Visit my page called Optimisation to find out about how I can help get your website found on the internet.