What Activities Happen Each Month?
To understand the time involved with building an SEO strategy, it helps to look at the timeline month by month. Let’s break down months 1-6 and what your plan might look like during that time.
First 30 Days
Let’s assume that you have hired a consultant or agency or have high competency within your company already and that that activity doesn’t consume the first two weeks of this process. Below, you will find elements a solid SEO plan will target in the first month.
Your Digital Footprint Research
SEO specialists will start by researching your digital footprint, including your website, social media, and brand. This process is essential, as every company is unique.
Your SEO Team will research your industry, its competitiveness, niche, competitors, and how they rank, as well as more company-specific topics like keywords that drive positive marketing and sales outcomes.
If you build and prosecute your SEO plan in-house, your research process might be shorter as you know your company well.
Your Company Website Audit
When it takes you on as a client, your SEO company will examine your website’s structure, content, and overall user experience.
The best SEO consultants also conduct thorough SEO audits. This process helps them assess your content and areas of opportunity and create a game plan and strategy.
Keyword planning
Content on your website allows you to rank in search engines. To achieve this, you must create pages targeting keywords your audience searches for online. For that reason, keyword research and planning are essential parts of the SEO process.
It helps SEO experts determine the number and type of keywords you need to target.
Days 30-60
Remember that the items above sometimes adhere to a specific schedule. Depending on your website’s current quality and standing with the search engines, your SEO consultants can immediately start on items that usually occur within the second month.
Below are a few steps within the second month of your SEO campaign.
Your Website modifications
More technical SEO work typically begins in the second month. Your SEO team will access your site’s back end and make the necessary changes to ensure you start to rank higher in Google search results.
The changes should correspond with your SEO audit. For example, if you already have solid alt tags for your website images, there is no need to pull an alt-tag report. However, if the site’s meta descriptions need to be added, update them.
If your corporate website is old, it may need a total SEO overhaul. This process could take months alone. Your SEO agency will typically tell you if your site needs a spring cleaning within the first month.
Ensure Design and Coding Best Practices
Responsive design means that users have a great experience no matter what device they view your website. Suppose you have a website that needs to be more responsive or struggles to render well when visitors view it on a smartphone or tablet. In that case, it will look different than on a desktop.
Buttons might get cut off, images might shift off the screen, and the site will be more challenging to navigate. At this stage, your in-house marketing efforts will ensure that your website is responsive since that affects your site rankings, too.
Days 60-90
You will see visible results in the third month. This is when new website content plays a role in your organic traffic.
Keyword selection
Before your SEO technicians can create and implement a content strategy, they’ll have to make a long list of keywords they developed initially and winnow it down to the keywords that will drive high-intention traffic.
Different keywords lend themselves well to specific types of content. For example, there are long-tail keywords (long phrases used by searchers in their queries) and more generic keywords.
Generic keywords include one or two words and describe a broad topic. Examples include “ice cream,” “pants,” and “pets.” While generic keywords undoubtedly have high search volumes, many other companies in and outside your industry target them, making it difficult to rank them organically.
Long-tail keywords are more targeted and contain three or more words. They are specific to your industry and target particular needs.
They include phrases like “red shoes made of leather with gold sparkles” or “Goldendoodle puppies in Arizona.” Each of these keywords caters to a particular need.
Long-tail keywords have a lower search volume, but they attract higher-quality leads to your site. When choosing keywords, a winning combination is high search volume and low competition.
As you can see, a lot goes into selecting keywords before writing content. Content creation takes a month or more, depending on your website needs.
New Content Strategy and Creation
One of the most critical efforts in an SEO campaign is creating content. As we’ve discussed, determining precisely what keywords drive high-intention traffic to your site is a labor-intensive process.
Like keywords, there are many different kinds of content, too. During the third month, your SEO consultants will pair each keyword with content that works best with each topic.
For example, there is long-form content, landing page content, website page content, product and service content, and blog content. By this stage in your SEO campaigns, your consultants will determine what content your website will use and create the right plan for creating it.
Long-form content typically contains over 1800 words, which is essential for SEO. Long-form content earns higher organic traffic, more shares on social networks, and more backlinks.
In earlier years, before SEO became sophisticated, businesses could produce content “stuffed” with keywords, winning cheap but effective rankings. But search engines have gotten smarter and penalized such activities. For your website content to rank, your website must have content that addresses exactly what the searcher is looking for, not just content that has added a keyword or two.
Blogs are highly beneficial to SEO. Most SEO consultants recommend that your company have a blog that regularly adds new content.
It is appropriate and produces good results to include in your blog product and service content that discusses your business, brand, and elements of your products and services. This content is essential if you want your specific product offerings to rank and show in search engines.
As soon as your content goes live on your website, Google can index and rank it in search engines. Don’t expect to see your newly posted content in search results within the first week. Still, after a month or two, you will likely see well-written content rank, at least somewhere in search results.
Month 4
Month four is likely when you will see tangible results from your SEO campaign. By month four, you should experience increased website traffic and improved site rankings.
However, an SEO team’s job is still ongoing. They’ll continue implementing content on your website, fixing technical issues, and making your site function 100 percent across the board.
This month, continuous content addition and technical SEO aspects like link building are necessary to keep the SEO momentum moving. Building authoritative links is essential to your ranking because it shows search engines, like Google, that other websites trust your information enough to link to it.
To increase backlinks, your marketing manager may contact other companies in your industry and ask them to link to your content.
Month 5
By month five, you should start seeing positive results from your SEO efforts. You should see increased site traffic and likely new business opportunities flowing through the door. This means that your campaign is working and can give you a good indication of whether it is effective.
Analyzing Results
An essential part of an SEO company’s job is reporting its findings to you and the client, and some of the most critical findings are analytics regarding your campaign.
Your SEO should monitor your campaign throughout the process. Still, around month five, you may see a jump in traffic or conversions. SEO consultants will use tools like Google Analytics to demonstrate performance and improvements.
Month 6
Be encouraged if you have yet to see the results you were hoping for by this point. The above elements determine how long you can acquire traffic through your SEO efforts.
However, if you had a typical case, your SEO campaign should produce accurate results by month 6. If your corporate website is producing increased traffic, congratulations are in order But, it’s important to remember than SEO isn’t something you achieve. Upkeep will be needed to ensure you don’t lose ground to your competitors.
Testing of All Customer-Facing Assets
A/B testing is a tactic marketers use to test elements in your digital footprint, like your website. For example, suppose your SEO consultant implemented a call-to-action (CTA) button but wants to test its efficacy in a different color against the original to determine which performs better. In that case, they might employ an A/B testing protocol.
This testing methodology allows them to see which variation of an element performs better and implement the better-performing version on your corporate website.
Heat map testing
Another method to improve SEO performance is heatmap testing. This tool shows how much content a site visitor consumes on a page before leaving your website. It also shows where users click and what elements they use to hover over, which can indicate whether you need more interactive elements on your site.
Ready to jumpstart your SEO campaign?
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