[00:01]
Darren Jamieson: On this week’s episode of the Engaging Marketeer, I want to talk about something that digital marketing and SEO people get asked a lot, and business owners ask this a lot as well, and it’s effectively, “How long does SEO take to work?” “How quickly can I see results if I start doing SEO on my website?” “When am I going to start seeing a return on investment?”
And as with everything in SEO, the real answer is, “It depends.” But let’s try and look at some realistic outcomes, shall we? Um, we were working with a client recently who wanted to see results very, very quickly and didn’t get the conversions they wanted in the first couple of months and thought that wasn’t particularly good, even though the industry that they were in was sort of consultancy and was, therefore, difficult from a standing start to build awareness, get people to the website, get people engaged in what they do, and actually get conversions.
Whereas, if you’re selling something that is a very simple purchase, um, a snap purchase—I don’t know, say selling candles or something like that—then it’s the kind of thing that you can sample, that you can make a decision on without having to think about something too much. Um, but the issue with SEO always is, and we tell everybody this, we tell everybody the same thing, that the issue with SEO is that it does take time to get results. It is not a quick fix; it is not like turning on a tap.
If you want results for your marketing that are going to happen immediately, if you want to be able to, from day one, start paying money and immediately get results, immediately get sales, immediately get conversions, then you need to be using some kind of paid advertising—something like Google Ads, for example. You’re able to put a specific advert in front of somebody at the point at which they are looking for it. So they’ve gone on to Google, and they’ve said, “Right, I’m looking for a plumber.” Your ad for a plumber pops up, they click on it—brilliant. It’s a transactional thing that will get you results very quickly.
[02:00]
Darren Jamieson: The downside with that, of course, is that it can be quite expensive because you can be paying a lot per click on Google Ads, as there are a lot of other people doing it at the same time because it gets results, it works, and it’s an auction. So the more people that are bidding on the ads, the more people that are running the ads, the more expensive it’s going to get. So that can get very costly, very quickly.
The other downside to that, of course, the second downside is that as soon as you stop paying for it, you stop getting results. You don’t get the compound interest effect that you get with, with SEO, for instance. Uh, so if you’re paying ads, paying on Google Ads one week, you pay, the next week you get the results, you pay the next week you get results. You stop paying, that’s it—you stop. You stop the leads, you stop the sales, you stop the referrals immediately. It’s like turning off a tap; that is literally what it is.
But with SEO, it is a slower process because you have to build the awareness, you have to build the engagement, you have to build the trust within Google, and that takes time. That takes time with content, that takes time with links, that takes time with Google indexing pages of the site and bringing you up against your competition because it needs to build your authority, it needs to know that you are trustworthy, you are the person you say you are, your site is good enough, and it’s going to get the results that way.
But there are some things that are important to say. Just because SEO does take time, and it does, it is a long game—just because it does take time doesn’t mean that you can’t get instant results, because you can. If you create content on a site that is very well built, very well constructed so that it has no issues with Google, it has no indexing issues, the structure of the content is well put together, all of the navigation is well structured, the internal linking on the website all works very well—once you have a site that works like that, you can put content live on that site and have it indexed in Google and bringing you traffic pretty much immediately. I mean, it can be within, certainly under an hour, possibly even less than that.
[04:42]
Darren Jamieson: Because I always remember, many years ago, when I was working as an SEO, a relatively junior SEO, uh, one of the guys in the company asked a question around—he got everybody together, and he was asking them questions about SEO, testing their knowledge, and one of the questions was, “How long does it take to get indexed in Google? How long does it take for a page to start getting indexed and gain you new traffic?” Uh, and people were saying a day, two days, three days, four days, and I said, “Pretty much instantly.” Yeah, you can have a page instantly accessed and get traffic from it, which was the correct answer.
So I’ve always remembered that because back then I was learning, now I am not learning, uh, so I’m teaching you that you can have pages instantly accessed in Google, instantly getting the traffic—it doesn’t have to take time. But, and this is the key, this is the key that you need to know, actually getting business with SEO, actually getting sales, leads, referrals, whatever it may be, is going to take time. It is a long game, and I always remember as well, a financial adviser, I’ll give him a shout-out, I’ll give him a shout-out, Richard Haddow Powell from Haddow Edwards Wealth Management. Hello, Richard. Uh, Richard mentioned to me a couple of, was it weeks, months ago? I don’t know, I don’t know what time it is anymore. He mentioned to me a while back, and I’ve repeated this because it’s so relevant to SEO. It’s so relevant to SEO.
Uh, he talked to me about a pension for a child. So when you, as a new parent, have a child, you can pay in the maximum, as it was then, I don’t know if it’s changed, £3,600 per year into a child’s pension. If you do that for the first 10 years, you have £36,000, £3,600 times 10, £36,000. So when the child is 10, you’ve paid in £36,000 into this child’s pension. If you do nothing, if you do absolutely nothing with that pension, when that child turns 65, so 65 years later, that money in that pension is worth approximately £1.3 million. Thirty-six grand turns into £1.3 million. That is the effect of compound interest, the effect of investment, and interest upon it, interest upon interest upon interest, which gets you that huge return.
[06:47]
Darren Jamieson: That is exactly the same as SEO. That is how SEO works. You have to look at it like that. You cannot say, “Right, I’m going to try SEO for three months,” or, “I’m going to try SEO for six months,” or, “I’m going to give it a go for a year, and hopefully, it’ll work.” It is a long-term investment strategy in your business. If you want instant results, do Google Ads. It’s going to cost you a packet, as soon as you stop paying, you’re going to stop getting results. But SEO will work like compound.
We’ve got clients that have been with us since we started the company, so that was 2009. So our oldest client was with us in 2009. They have, what was the number? It was something like six and a half thousand pages on their website about every aspect of what they do, every conceivable question, every conceivable problem that their customers have, their clients have—they’re there for. They are in Google because they have the content for it, they’re getting the results for it. And that is what happens when you have it over time, which means they get so much traffic, they get so much sales, so many enquiries, and they do so well out of it.
Had they done that for, let’s say, six months, and then got, “Ah, this SEO thing is not really working, it’s not really working out for me, I don’t think it’s going to last,” then they wouldn’t have got those results, and they would have been relying on the Google Ads, which they were using at the time when they came to us. So they were paying all of that budget into Google Ads to get the result. As soon as you stop paying, it stops working.
But now they’ve got the SEO compounded over 15 years that is working well for them. They still run Google Ads because Google and SEO work very well in tandem. They work very well in tandem. They also have Facebook Ads because Facebook works well in tandem, particularly when you’ve got people clicking through from a Google Ad or clicking through from SEO and not inquiring at that point. The Facebook Ad can pick it up with retargeting to track them around Facebook and send them back to the website for the conversion.
[09:11]
Darren Jamieson: So don’t look at, “Oh, should I have Facebook Ads? Should I have Google Ads? Should I have SEO? Which one’s going to get me the best return on my investment? Which one’s going to get me the quickest results?” Look at it as an overall marketing strategy. SEO is long-term. SEO is like investing in a pension. SEO is something that is going to set you up for life if you do it right, and you do it well, and you do it long enough.
If you want results right now, if you need to make sales, you need to get enquiries because you have to pay the tax man at the end of the month, SEO is not right for you. Do not look at it short term. Do not think, “I need to get two enquiries in the next month, or it’s not going to work for me.” That’s how long it takes to get SEO. So I hope that’s been helpful. I hope I’ve allayed some concerns over how long it takes to get rankings in Google and how long it takes for SEO to produce returns on investment.
If you’ve liked the podcast, then please give me a like, give me a follow, drop me a comment, however you want to do, send me a pigeon, uh, send up some smoke signals—I don’t mind. I respond to anything, but probably not the smoke signals because I don’t really know how to do them. But you can try that if you like, and I’ll catch you on the next podcast.
