A few months ago I was talking with a client about the long term game that is SEO. The work you do today might have an immediate influence on your social media activity, your email campaigns and your overall user experience (especially when it comes to your content creation efforts), but you might not see the real SEO benefits for several weeks or even months! Depending on how competitive your industry is and how established your business is, it could take years to really build your organic presence. That doesn’t mean SEO won’t work for your website, but that you have to remember it’s a long term and ongoing process, just like planting a garden!

1. PLANT YOUR SEO GARDEN NOW!
Written by Shawna Wright
A few months ago I was talking with a client about the long term game that is
SEO. The work you do today might have an immediate influence on your social
media activity, your email campaigns and your overall user experience
(especially when it comes to your content creation efforts), but you might not see
the real SEO benefits for several weeks or even months! Depending on how
competitive your industry is and how established your business is, it could take
years to really build your organic presence. That doesn’t mean SEO won’t work
for your website, but that you have to remember it’s a long term and ongoing
process, just like planting a garden!
Imagine each piece of content you create is like a seed you’d plant in your
garden. You can plant it in perfect soil, use the best fertilizer, water it exactly the
right amount—but no matter how long you stare at that garden the only thing that
makes it grow is time. Even with the best groundwork you need time to reap the
benefits of all your hard work. SEO works exactly the same way. Even though
when you publish a piece of content you can see it, share it, link to it (and get
other to link to it!), until Google crawls and indexes that piece of content it doesn’t
exist in the search engines. And if it doesn’t exist in the search engines than
there is no way it can drive organic traffic to your site. Depending on how
frequently Google crawls your site it could be a few days or even a few weeks
before that content appears in the SERPS. But even then, that new URL has to
earn its way up the list. Depending on how much other content there is out there
around the same idea (and how powerful those URLs are), your content might
need a lot of time and love to earn its stripes.
I know just how much internal red tape there can be whenever a company is
trying to launch their SEO program. Q1 easily turns into Q2 (and sometimes even
Q3) before you really get the ball rolling and suddenly you’re 6-9 months into the
process before you’ve ever actually done anything! The longer it takes you to get
your website optimized, your content schedule organized (and publishing!) and
your link building efforts to kick in the longer it will be before you gain any ground.
Suddenly you’re (supposedly) 7 months into your SEO campaign but you have

2. no real results to show for it! Why? Because in reality, even though you’ve been
talking about SEO for 7 months you’ve only got 2 months of work under your belt!
So now is the perfect time to start planting your SEO garden! It’s the beginning of
the year, which means that in 12 months you’ll have a lot of data to report on and
show the real effects of that SEO work. Even better, you can compare 2015 to
2014 to see exactly how much bang for your buck you’ve gotten through your
SEO work. Take a look at this e-commerce client below (December is obviously
their big month):
Year-over-year, their Google organic traffic has increased 55.64% from 2013 to
2014. For them, that’s around 200k extra organic visitors in just a year! Now your
SEO garden might not be worth 200k visitors, but even a 10% organic growth in
a year is a solid number, especially if you work in a competitive landscape. The
work you do this year helps pave the way for an even stronger 2016. Just like
how your garden gets a little fuller every year!
Read the full article here:
http://www.brickmarketing.com/blog/seo-garden