Taking the chance and spending money on Search Engine Optimization seems to many business owners like the early days of the Gold Rush when gold-seeking “forty-niners” took a big chance and traveled to California by ship, horse, or covered wagon. Individuals had just as much chance as big companies of finding gold – and because individuals were often acting faster and traveling lighter they got there faster to stake their claims.
Search Engine Optimization is a lot like that. Smaller businesses can set up optimization for their web sites and expect to see returns quickly if they get involved early enough. Once your site ranks well, it’s difficult for a newcomer to take your spot.
Right now with 216 million Americans on the web (and that number growing to a projected 288 million by 2012) there’s “gold in them thar hills” and Google rewards well optimized web sites with rankings and visitors – but only to a point. Once page one gets filled up with older optimized sites it’s harder for new site to reach page one. Waiting to optimize, just like waiting to stake a land claim, is not a good idea.
A good SEO web designer is worth his weight in gold.
In my opinion when looking for a good SEO company always look at their previous work and never give your sites to amateur SEO companies that promise quick results.
Amateur companies are the ones that think they found out SEOs make a lot of money – they’re in it for the money. The right way to get started is to do web design and keep trying to get your customers more clients until you become obsessed with asking them how much new business you’ve brought in from the web – until finally you’re spending more than half your time optimizing and you realize you’re ranking pages with 50,000,000 and 100,000,000 competing pages – and then you’re the RIGHT kind of amateur = caring for the customer’s well being first and not lining your own pockets. A lot of what a good SEO can do relies on the size of the budget. The services and man hours need to be paid for or you may as well be asking a carpenter to build you a house using a 2×4 and a cinder block: it’s just not possible.
Depending on how tough the competition the definition of quick results varies. I usually explain to clients that there is an “expected time” of results barring some unforeseeable complication. Two months is where I expect to see results in local search but sometimes less. In on extremely rare occurrence I actually was ranking on page one the following day for what I was optimizing. Google just swooped in the day after I set up the site and really liked what it saw.
Against tough competition (nationwide, highly optimized pages, lots of back links) SEO can take six months to a year – but businesses that want to expand to doing national business against the leading firms expect that unless they have a beefy monthly budget it will take longer.
I agree with you fully. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that many businesses aren’t familiar with SEO. They would rather spend their money on PPC campaigns like Adwords rather than SEO. I also think there is a lot of bad information out there as well as Scammers in the industry, which makes it tough again for Good SEO companies to be employed. Great read.