If 2019 was the year of clients asking ‘Why should I pay for SEO?‘, 2020 is the year of asking ‘ How long does SEO take?‘.
SEO is not a one time thing, or necessarily a short term, quick fix to increasing brand visibility. When considering adopting an SEO strategy, your expectations need to be aligned with the realities of the process.
How Long Does My Firm Need to Wait to See Results?
There is a reason we work in quarterly service cycles – a good M&A strategy can take a minimum of 90 days to beginning showing a positive impact. The timeliness of SEO improvement depends largely on the following:
Site Functionality
Functional sites that are mobile friendly, well designed and error free are given preference by search engines. In really basic terms the search engines want to drive user traffic to sites that they will have a positive experience viewing, this bolsters user trust in the search engines and gives preference to publishers that invest in their website. If your site has a low site score or is functionally deficient all of your SEO efforts will be significantly diluted.
Content Relevance
Ranking for specific keywords involves creating content that is relevant and original. If your site is sparse on content or simply does not incorporate terms from your keyword strategy you will have challenges improving your SEO results. While we often focus on developing search friend blog content, there is often an argument to update your firm’s overall site content to specifically support your SEO strategy.
Relative Change
Google likes change and likes to check in on your site frequently. Every time Google indexes your site, it should appear different than the last time the site was indexed. This can be accomplished by adding new content monthly, consistently changing back end SEO-centric settings and solving technical issues diligently over time rather than in one pass.
State of the Market
The M&A search market is small (compared to say the number of people searching for a new CPA online). Because of this, the actions of your competitors can directly influence your rank results. Consider focusing your SEO efforts on under served or less competitive markets, and dominating your branded term search before chasing broad terms like ‘sell my business’ which huge M&A houses throw money at daily.
Think of SEO as marketing maintenance. You change your oil even though your car still runs right? Similarly you should have an SEO strategy even if your firm is performing well today. In the long run, you will get much more milage out of your well maintained marketing machine than it will cost you.
Interested in learning more about SEO for M&A? Need help developing your firm’s next marketing plan? Contact us to connect.
