Unfortunately, you may have received a cold-call, got a cold-call email, got a form submission or a Linked-in message purporting that you can get fantastic, instant marketing results from X Y or Z service “doing SEO” for your business.

Craig Campbell SEO Speaker, Trainer & Speaker

Why Should You Beware of Promises of “Instant Success” in SEO?

There are three fundamental levers that can “move the needle” when it comes to your ranking in Google that you can directly control.

However, each of those tasks is variable in terms of how long it can take to implement, as well as how much value each of those tasks brings to your particular site. Perhaps you already are an established brand, and had made a horrible, technical mistake of adding a “no-index” to much of your marketing content and fixing that could unlock a flood of indexation, ranking and traffic for new search terms.

Ranking Changes Are Intentionally Obscured By Google

It can often be challenging to figure out specifically what change, addition or effort lead to your organic success. This is intentional on Google’s part, as part of their ranking process, there will generally be a “dance” of increased and decreased rankings for a page for a term or set of terms.

Remember that there are groups of individuals constantly attempting to exploit Google

As a response to the absolutely constant effort of less scrupulous individuals and groups to find cheap or easy to scale efforts. Perhaps they might try the lazy SEO chatGPT path to harvest organic traffic through spam, low quality content or low quality link building on a massive level, Google is cautious about overtly signalling what specifically “moved the needle”.

Treat Your SEO Like Contributing To A Long-Term Investment

Instead of seeking instant wins, like stock brokers playing the “short game”, take your three fundamentals of content, technical SEO and building authority as a long-term play. Consistently publish as much great content as you can afford. Fix those SEO issues keeping your site from being indexed and crawled properly. Find partners, allies and other marketing teams looking to reach your audience and collaborate to get quality links from other authorative sites.

Categories: SEOSEObits

Jeremy Rivera

Jeremy Rivera started in SEO in 2007, working at Advanced Access a hosting company for Realtors. He came up from the support department, where people kept asking "How do I rank in Google" and found in the process of answering that question an entire career. He became SEO product manager of Homes.com, went "in-house" at Raven Tools in Nashville in 2013. He then worked at several agencies like Caddis, 2 The Top Design as an SEO manager and then launched a 5 year freelance SEO career. During that time he consulted for large enterprise sites like Smile Direct Club, Dr. Axe, HCA, Logan's Roadhouse and Captain D's while also helping literally hundreds of small business owners get found in search results. He has authored blog posts at Authority Labs, Raven Tools, Wix, Search Engine Land. He has been a speaker at many SEO conferences like Craft Content and been interviewed in numerous SEO focused podcasts.

1 Comment

Jeremy Rivera · March 7, 2023 at 12:47 am

Don’t approach SEO as a flash-in-the-pan solution. It’s a process, and it can yield great results for your business, not just by bringing you new potential customers, but reducing churn by addressing common support requests. That has an added benefit of reducing the number/quantity of your support tickets, which means less man-hour cost per paying customer/client!

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