How Long Does SEO Take (For Newbies)

[Steve Brownlie]

I've seen hundreds of these graphs over the years and they're all similar but I think it highlights a few important points for all people who are new to SEO:

• It will take a while, even if you're doing a good job,
• You can't do something like 'buy 5 links and see what happens', it's all part of a big ever moving picture that is 'your overall site's long term performance',
• You can beat the numbers in this graph with one traffic leak in a day so don't rely on SEO 100% from day 1, do lots of stuff - make it that nice extra 40% of dependable traffic that gets you a nice sale not 100% of your business

Now, don't get me wrong, some clients have managed to get big boosts for their sites (mostly in local niches tbh) from annoyingly (for me lol, I want to sell more, of course) small orders of links. But many of you are trying to compete in big national niches and grow something authoritative. Doing some outreach for a week and getting yourself 5 links isn't going to make you rich, sadly. And building 5 'to see what happens' probably won't give you much information to work with (except maybe that you're good at building links...).

When your competitors have solid sites, and hundreds of links, you just won't get an impact from a few months of work all the time in the SEO world. And if you give up you miss out on that eventual hockeystick. So if you are going to include SEO in your mix, you have to be prepared to keep on grinding for a long time, and I'd really recommend, as do many here, that you keep a sensible mix of strategies on the table so you get some motivational hits during those early months when Google isn't your friend!

http://www.johnfdoherty.com/how-long-does-seo-take-to-work/

 

[Ryuzaki]

One of the biggest enemies to newbies is nobody setting proper expectations for them.

The people not making money tend to not mention it. Some people flat out lie or take credit for client sites. Some making cash choose not to reveal the amount, which leads to mental exaggeration by readers. It feels like everyone is making money and making it fast.

What few really see is the journey. And it's not a short one with SEO. If you want quick money then you need to be thinking about PPC and hands-on marketing non-stop. SEO is the easiest thing in the world, but it's protected by the hardest thing in the world for most people: Patience & Greed.

• This is taking too long, I give up.
• This took forever, I'm finally earning. I'll sell the site before the hockey stick curve.
• This is taking too long, I'll spam or buy PBN links.
• But writing content is boring.
• I didn't get into this to be a marketer.

It's the same reason 99.9% of artists are starving. They don't want to run a business or be a marketer.

The reality is, and this is what we've been preaching on BuSo since the early days:

If you do SEO and plan on waiting for Google to bless you with traffic, you're going to be waiting a long time.
​

"Why won't Google send me traffic? I'll write some more content. I'll quit. I'll buy links that never send any traffic."

Google collectively is smarter than you. Their algorithm can't rank the best content in a vacuum because robots don't understand all that. So they depend on people to tell them which is the best, and that's largely based on social engagement and editorial links from other validated sites.

The humor in the whole thing is, if you do what you should be doing anyways, which is being an actual marketer, that is when Google is happy to send you boatloads of free traffic, and more and more for as long as you exist without compromising their trust.

I talked about this a while back:

Spammers messed up the game for everyone so bad that Google won't even consider you for valuable, decent-volume traffic for at least a year. Links will help, social signals will help, but they don't un-throttle you for at least 12 months. And I'm sure there are other fractional multipliers that hold you back till year 2 and maybe even till year 5.

How will you eat for those first 12 months? You can have a day job. Or you can do like @Nat has been doing and be an actual marketer and start ripping down $100-$500 a day from proactively going where the people are and letting them know he exists.

Sure, you don't hit a home run every time, but you get links, branding, and social engagement. And when Google says "Okay, boys, this one is okay, release the kraken" you can look like my curve above, or you can get no boost at all because you did nothing and earned nothing.

The game has changed. The easy days are long gone. SEO has finally matured into a grown-up industry, and it's laughable that the barriers to entry that worked ended up being the ones that would block out any child: delayed gratification.

You know how they say you should expect to work for 3-5 years in a brick-and-mortar business before it really pops off or turns a relatively respectable profit? Guess what the online world is going to start looking like from a search engine perspective?

Start now and expect to work with no reward from Google for a long time.

We have a killer marketer here. He's a natural. He's gifted. He keeps selling his sites around the one-year mark instead of holding. Now he has a day job.

Guess where he'd be if he never sold the first one, let alone the second and third? We bust his balls all the time only because he's the man. Whenever he wants to win in SEO, he will.

If he can harness patience. The same goes for anyone. It's still the ripest opportunity in the universe. It's the easiest "job" in the world. You are your worst enemy. Learn more in day one of....

This Message Was Payed For By
The Digital Strategy Crash Course Committee

.​

 

[algospider]

This post is GOLD.

Can we please make a treasure section.

 

[contract]

This post is GOLD.

Can we please make a treasure section.

The Treasure Chest. (Requires 200 likes for entry)

 

[paulcarl]

​

I'm a noob to this forum and this post grew way longer than I expected when I decided to write it. I'm not putting a tl;dr, you can skim the italics/bolds or have some patience and just read it ffs. Or don't.​

Decent Work + Patience = Compound Interest
​

When I transformed my domain name from a resume site and personal blog into my marketing company's website, I got rid of all of the unrelated posts except for one that had a comment. It was the only comment on my blog at the time and it was what I considered to be the best thing I've ever written. I couldn't bring myself to delete it.

Fast forward a few years and I notice that one blog post (on a lesson plan for high school teachers) is driving 30% of the organic traffic to my marketing agency website. Weird. I drop an affiliate link in it and forget about it again. Fast forward a few more years and that obscure post is now generating over 2,000 unique visitors per month, has gone viral a few times, and it generates about $30/month in Amazon affiliate sales of a fucking $15 book.
​

The lesson I took away from that is that my most popular and successful content was created because I actually cared about the topic and I wrote to express myself with no regard for any target keywords or other SEO concepts. This didn't do anything in the short term but stroke my ego, but as the years passed the search traffic for that topic started growing and growing and the few hours I spent writing that 6-7 year old post has made me over four figures to date. It still sits at #1 above a couple of Mega Brands.

Here's another personal story.

I followed the Blue Hat SEO ideology of keeping domains so long as they paid for their costs each year. My last remaining MFA wasn't really worth it because it only earned $100/year. I let the others go but I decided to keep this one anyways and continued to "waste" my time updating it's plugins and WordPress, I even dumped a full day into switching it over to a responsive theme. A couple years after this I came across CCarter's traffic leaks post on some other forum and I spent a few days half-assing some traffic leaks while writing another fresh piece of pillar content and tacking on a digital download product that I repurposed from my first "real" offline business venture almost 10 years ago. Then I ignored the MFA site again.

That site is now doing about $20/month. Nothing special, far from it. When I first made the site 6 years ago it was making about $50/month before it fell off of Google. Still baby numbers, but the site isn't even on the first page for anything in Google. It turns out that those traffic leaks are generating the majority of my traffic now because those small random forums grew in users and the pillar content I repurposed from my site onto their forums is now the primary source of traffic to this site.

The lesson here is that as you spread your eggs out into different traffic baskets, your web traffic will likely grow proportionately with the web traffic of the sites you've used for traffic leaking.

I've been a small player in this game for nearing 10 years now. I got my start in affiliate marketing and MFA sites until I learned the ropes, then I've been busying myself building websites and generating leads with AdWords for other people. Realizing these lessons is what has led me to stop focusing on building other peoples' empires so that I can focus on rebuilding my empire and catching up on the time I lost.​

Here's the ultimate lesson.​

Your digital empire is a long-term investment and it should be treated as such. You don't empty out your 401k over a bad year so don't do that to your websites. Creating special evergreen content that will remain true for decades will continue to grow in value (and revenue) for decades just like a special company will. Your digital creations benefit from time just like an investment with compound interest. The tiny dividends that you reap today will be huge tomorrow if you continue to hustle, create good shit, and be patient. The bar is set so low that a blog post I wrote as an 20 year old idiot is outranking several competing mega brands. Even if your empire isn't perfect, a good investment still beats a shitty investment or no investment - just be patient while the compound interest kicks in.

It's depressing to think about how many millions I've left on the table while churning out hundreds of websites for other people's businesses instead of for my own. None of that matters now though. I have become the jack-of-all-trades digital marketer and now I have had the epiphany I needed to change the course of my career and, more importantly, my life.

That gif's for you, CCarter, now give me my 3rd like pl0x​

 

[MalinC]

If places like fiverr or seoclerks wouldn't be full of shady gigs promising to put sites on 1st. page through actual spam then folks wouldn't be tricked into believing that getting results is as easy as making links, no matter what.

 

[chanilla]

setting proper expectations

I dunno man, I got caught in this same trap last year, and I'm far from a newb. (or so I thought!!! albeit was entering a new vertical) Your post is so real to me, you have no idea how hard it hits home/I relate, even though slightly off context.

I COMPLETELY underestimated the time it would take to succeed, and was banking on my years of experience, since I thought that gave me an edge over what I currently saw in the market. I was wrong... dead wrong.

I thought I could duplicate (and excel above and beyond) where others set the bar in a matter of months, when in reality they have been working at it for... multiple years. Somehow I had the audacity to think I could replicate that in 1/4th of the timeframe, but I think now that was just my gut knowing I could do it better... but I still got caught in the underestimating trap!

But you know what? It's one of the best things that ever happened to me. I went from being comfortable for a few years, to oh shit I either have to go all in on this, burn the boats, and shit is going to get hella uncomfortable for a while, or I probably won't make it because I'm not 100% committed. (the reality: the game was tougher than I imagined it was going to be, and even when that realization hit, I struggled to make those decisions. To say I was stressed would be the understatement of the century!)

A lot of successful people talk about being in dire straits and creating your best work because you have to. I think that's part of it, but I also think that sometimes overestimations, even if they're mistakes, might be a blessing because they make you take the leap you're hesitating on... I don't really know, just reflecting aloud.

But it's tough to feel like you're going backwards in life for a while, and dealing with stressful situations you're no longer accustomed to...

Seriously, things like:

• Cutting revenue streams simply because of the focus/time commitments/distraction (even though I needed that money! I knew I couldn't succeed unless I dropped them)
• Started living off savings
• Floating balances on credit cards (something I hadn't done in a loooooong time, fucked with me mentally)
• Realizing I was going to make less money in the short term, but ultimately be happier in the long term
• Flat out not knowing 100% if I could do it or not (confronting fear based mentality and limiting beliefs that I hadn't had to in quite some time)

When you come out the other side though, there's this weird new 30k foot view... You're either fucking nuts, or there's this new rough water in your wake called... barrier to entry.

If people stare at barrier to entry like the great wall of China, no one would ever try anything. On one hand, realistic expectations help maintain the slow and steady persistence needed to achieve, but on the other hand, it might be a detriment to many people starting. I don't know what's right and wrong, I just know my own experiences.

I think it's the GAP in the middle that really matters... you have to decide to be determined to figure it out, no matter what. However long it takes, whatever it takes, and being willing to adjust, because most likely your initial vision will not match up to your final form.

 

[joek07]

Wow - I've only been on here like 2 minutes and what an inspiring thread. Thanks for this - it puts it all in perspective.