Search Engine Optimisation FAQs
How quickly will one see results from a search engine optimisation
campaign?
Search engine optimisation does not produce instantaneous results, which
is why Optillion recommends that clients who need to generate website traffic
immediately initiate a pay-per-click advertising campaign to run concurrently
with the initial stages of website optimisation. The pay-per-click campaign
can then be scaled back or stopped when the search engine optimisation campaign
starts to produce significant levels of search engine referrals.
The length of time that it takes for a SEO campaign
to produce results depends principally on the competitiveness of the key
phrases for which the site is being optimised. A search engine optimisation
campaign targeting uncompetitive key phrases may produce significant ranking
improvements in less than a month. However, one would expect it to take
between 3 and 6 months for the site to enter the target zone of a top 30
ranking in Yahoo and MSN, and up to a year for the site to achieve stable
first page rankings in the same search engines.
Achieving results in Google is significantly slower and one would expect it to take up to three months longer to reach the equivalent ranking targets in Google than in either Yahoo or MSN. It should be noted that when a website is first indexed by Google it receives a significant ranking boost which may last for up to four weeks, after which it will fall to its natural position in the search engine results. This drop in rankings is a recognised Google behaviour and does not indicate a failure of the search engine optimisation process.
The timescale is rather longer and much less predictable when optimising websites for competitive key phrases. In part this is due simply to the inherent competitiveness of the target key phrases, which means that more comprehensive on page optimisation and significantly larger numbers of inbound links are required to achieve high search engine rankings. The matter is further complicated by the Google ‘sandbox’, a filtering mechanism which appears to be triggered by sites which are targeting competitive key phrases acquiring large numbers of links either in a short space of time or with little anchor text variation. Sites which are ‘sandboxed’ remain in the Google index, but are omitted from Google’s results, even for uncompetitive search terms, for a period of between three and twelve months. Adding links over a prolonged period and using greater anchor text variation may prevent the Google sandbox filter from being invoked, but will also lengthen the time it takes to achieve results in all three of the target search engines.
Optillion’s search engine optimisation campaigns have a minimum contract length of twelve months. One would expect a SEO campaign targeting uncompetitive key phrases to have fulfilled its objectives within the contract period. Search engine optimisation campaigns targeting highly competitive key phrases should have achieved significant improvements in both search engine rankings and referrals by the end of the first year, although it generally take a somewhat longer period of optimisation to achieve optimal search engine rankings. An Optillion search engine optimisation proposal will provide a more precise estimate of the timescale required to achieve ranking results for an individual website and its set of target key phrases.
