After you’ve improved your website’s SEO, when can you expect to see a difference?

We’ve all heard the phrase made famous by the movie Field of Dreams: “If you build it, they will come.” Though this mentality may have worked for Kevin Costner, when it comes to your website and its Search Engine Optimization (SEO), the same mentality does not work.

Many of our initial conversations with new clients usually steer in the direction of “when will I show up on the first page?” What most do not realize initially is how loaded this question is. Before we answer that question we always have a conversation with our clients explaining what they should expect when it comes to developing their SEO. Here are a few of the main points that we discuss with them:

SEO Takes Time

There are over 255 million websites on the internet today. In 2010 there were 21.4 million websites added to the internet. Whenever a new website is added to the web it is sent and saved on what is called a server. The site will then wait for a search engine to find it on the server and index it. Think of the internet as a massive book that is constantly being updated with more and new information.

Whenever your site is found by a search engine it will scroll through your site searching your information and then place you, or index you on one of the pages of the internet. With over 20 million sites being added a year, it can take a while until the search engine is even able to find your site. So don’t be nervous when you type in your site in the search field and nothing comes up for a few days, weeks or even months. In the meantime it would be in your best interest to work on your SEO strategy so that when you do become indexed you start off strong.

SEO Takes Work

So your website is built and your site has been indexed so you’re done now, right? Actually, you have just begun. Building your SEO is an ongoing process that should be looked at as part of your long-term marketing strategy. Once Google sends its Google bots to search your site and indexes one of your pages, it will not come back again, unless you give it a reason to do so.

This same mentality goes with people that are searching your site. When you are reading a book, how many times are you going to go back to page one to read it over again? Yes you might go back once or twice to refresh your memory but once you get the information you need you move on. You need to have content that is not only going to cause the search engines to revisit and re-index your site but you also want the viewer to have a reason to keep coming back to your site.

SEO Takes Strategy

Once you begin your SEO you need to make sure it is working. SEO can be a huge investment of your time and if you are not tracking results and making adjustments where needed you’re losing money. Here are a few areas that you need to be looking at on your website:

Who is visiting your site?

If you are putting in the work to get people to visit your site, wouldn’t you want to know how many visits you are getting? What we do for our clients is check the number of visits that they’ve had on a weekly basis. If that number drops off we know that we need to review their site and make changes, whether it is copy changes, adding new pages, or changing the design elements of the site.

What is your bounce rate?

Your bounce rate is measured by the percentage of people that come to your landing page and then either leave instantly or click onto another page on your site. Typically a good bounce rate is below 31%. If your site has a higher bounce rate then you might want to consider either revising your copy or rewriting your Meta descriptions to provide relevant information to not only the end user but to Google as well.

Are you using relevant Keywords?

Content is king in SEO. Though the website design is very important on keeping people on your site and helps to guide the end user throughout the site, content and keywords are what Google uses to index your site. If you are a Real Estate agent in northern New Jersey you need to have your content rich with those keywords. There is a Keyword tool in Google Adwords that allows you to check the relevance and strength of certain keywords. Take time to search which phrases are most relevant for your industry and write your content based on that information.

One of the services that we offer our clients are maintenance plans in which we track these results on a monthly basis and make the necessary changes and updates to the site as needed.

There are so many facets to Search Engine Optimization and these are just a few snippets of information to help you get better results for your SEO. If you would like to discuss more strategies to build your website ranking, contact us today at 973-998-5742 or browse through our website at www.KrausMarketing.com.