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.
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.
- You could create unique, relevant and useful content for your target audience
- You can get new links to your services or topical articles from high traffic, authorative sites
- You could fix major technical SEO issues on your site that were preventing Google from properly crawling and indexing your site
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.
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.
Jeremy’s 2026 Refresh: Compounding Beats AI Search Hype
Reading this back three years later, I’d only sharpen one thing: the rise of AI Overviews and chat-based search hasn’t broken the long-term thesis, it has proven it. When I recorded my conversation with Drew Dorenfest on the Unscripted SEO podcast, he framed organic growth as a brick-by-brick flywheel rather than a slot machine, and that’s exactly what’s surviving in 2026. The brands getting cited inside AI answers are not the ones who chased a quick algorithm hack last quarter; they’re the ones who spent two or three years building the content depth, the technical foundation, and the authoritative links that an LLM can actually trust and quote. The surface of search changed. The thing that earns the citation did not.
So the 2026 version of “treat SEO like a long-term investment” is even more literal: every genuinely helpful page you publish is now an asset that can rank a blue link, feed an AI Overview, and get name-dropped in ChatGPT or Gemini all at once, and those returns compound on each other. Google’s own guidance on creating helpful, reliable, people-first content hasn’t softened on this; if anything, experience and trust matter more now that machines are deciding who is worth quoting. The cold-callers still promise instant wins. Ignore them, keep stacking bricks, and let the compounding do the heavy lifting.
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!