Timelines for Outcomes in SEO

Jacob: 

Welcome to another episode of the human friend digital podcast. I’m your host, Jacob Meyer. 

Jeffrey:

I’m your co-host, and producer, Jeffrey Caruso. 

Jacob:

Oh, you got two titles now.

Jeffrey:

I do. I’m giving myself the producer title. 

Jacob:

Next episode, I will come with three titles.

Jeffrey:

You deserve them.

Jacob:

So, today’s episode should be a fun one, and one that’s asked quite a lot. 

Jeffrey:

It’s timelines for SEO. So, I know that we’ve probably talked about them in previous episodes a little bit, but I don’t think we’ve ever really defined them, or delved into what SEO is and why it’s important. So, Jacob:

Jacob:

Well, yeah, SEO is kind of one of those words, it’s thrown around a little too much, because it essentially stands for “Search Engine Optimization”, which means that you’re optimizing your website for search. Timeline wise, it takes a while because it’s an organic process, meaning that you can’t just pay your way to the top of these search placements. There are ads that you can buy and pay your way to be at like, the top of these places, but the real ones, you have to earn your place. 

Jeffrey:

Are you talking about placement in terms of like, a “sponsored Google result”? The ones that I see first before anything else?

Jacob:

You can buy those: they’re expensive and they’re notoriously getting more, less than, sorry… What’s the right way to say it? You could spend more and have less value from those search results over time, I’m finding with my clients, and other clients, and what I’ve heard. However, certain types of industries are doing fine with that, like e-commerce or stuff where it’s like more transactional purchases, but I find that B2B services, especially the Google ad-words value is less than. So it makes SEO even more valuable. 

What people fail to realize is how slow it can be, and also how fast it can be at the same time: and that’s where the timeline gets difficult. So, I often compare search engine results to a horse race, because, who shows up in the organic section– so below that paid stuff– is like a horse race: If you have some really fast, powerful competition, it’s going to be very hard to win that race. If you have no competition, and everyone’s not really a great horse, you can win that race a lot easier. 

So, some sites– I like to maybe say slack in the marketplace when it comes to that… And some websites, some businesses that have a poor local competition when it comes to that stuff, or just an industry that isn’t that well optimized for search yet, you could probably have some quick results. Versus a high competition space with high competition, driven competitors, 

You’re going to have people that is going to take a long time to show up. So, the question that every SEO hates to ask is “how long will it take to get a return on your investment?” right? So, in most cases you can move the needle in about three to six months– it could be sooner if, like I said, there’s a lot of slack in the marketplace. Like we just had that one client recently…

Jeffrey:

Yeah, I was going to bring that up. 

Jacob:

All I did was optimize their website, but their competition was so poor that they immediately started showing up for…

Jeffrey:

They led the pack. 

Jacob:

Like, pretty quickly for some of their most important terms, they’re in the top five: going from 100+ to the top five for rankings, with just optimizing it. That’s a rare case, but it still can happen: it just depends on that race. 

Jeffrey:

And we’ve also had clients where our SEO efforts have been frustratingly not producing results. 

Jacob:

Yeah. And that does happen from time to time, and it sucks. But again, that definitely has to do with the competition of the marketplace to be… You know, if some of the people in that space have just been around for a long time, they’re super established, they write a lot of content, they believed in SEO 10 years ago and they’re still riding it out… They’re going to be really hard to knock off: they’re like a Goliath situation, and you know, it’s really hard to beat that. 

Jeffrey:

Yeah, as an entrant to the marketplace: the newbie. 

Jacob:

Exactly. So, in a lot of those cases, you have to do a healthier, wider mix of your marketing, as well as SEO: Basically, if you’re not doing offline marketing, or paid marketing that’s more promotional, mixed with SEO, your SEO efforts won’t go as far. 

Jeffrey:

What would be an example of offline marketing that you might suggest for an entrant to an industry-space that’s been very well established? Like, how can they buck the trend?

Jacob:

Well, it’s going to be hard because essentially, it’s community building: You have to get out there and be a member of your community. So Human Friend Digital, I am a member of the Mount Washington Community Council here in Cincinnati, Ohio, and I participate and donate my time to their needs and activities. I’m actually a member of a real community. I also participate in networking events, and I have done that before and in the past. And also sometimes you’re going to have to be a part of directories and…

Jeffrey:

What do you mean by directory? 

Jacob:

Well, you know… if you Google something– and this happens a lot in my industry: if you just Google something and then there’s a business, and then there’ll be this place that’s a website that collects a bunch of businesses and puts them into a listing, like Yelp: that’s a directory. So, if that’s showing up for your primary word… So like, one of my primary keywords would be “search engine optimization agency”: If you Google that for my area, there will be something called Clutch, which is directory. 

Jeffrey:

Do you have to pay to be in the directories? 

Jacob:

Yes, you do have to pay. 

Jeffrey:

Always or just… 

Jacob:

Most of them. Some of them have a free level, some of them have a paid level. But this is going to be the mix of things that you’ll have to do: You have to get involved in your community; You have to pay attention to what else is in the search engine result, because that is a place where you need to start showing up and make those efforts; Then you need to probably do something like press releases or work with a PR firm or other marketing agency to help you get a greater mix, because SEO used to be kind of like a magic bullet for some businesses, maybe like 10 years ago, if you dominated that space… 

Jeffrey:

But now everybody’s doing it. And so to beat the pack, it’s unusual to just do SEO by itself and expect to win. 

Jacob:

Yeah, you’re going to have to do a large mix of things today, which actually ties into our next mini episode, which you should tune into: Talking about the leak that happened with Google search engine algorithms, because if you want to dominate the space, you have to be really involved in the space. 

Jeffrey:

Right, and understand what the algorithms are picking for, because it’s not always clear. So the leak is actually really informative. And we’ll talk about that on a mini-episode coming up.

So we’ve done some stuff with a client recently vis-a-vis Google indexing. So, can you talk about that and how Google stores pages and stores information?

Jacob:

Yeah, for sure, and I’ll relate that back to the timeline issues that happened with this as well. So, Google has– I don’t know if they still call it a spider-bot, but I liked in the old days when they called it a spider-bot, because it would go around the web and crawl your website, and  that’s basically what an indexing is– so, there’s Search Console, that used to be called Google Webmaster Tools– I think Bing still calls there’s Webmaster Tools, or maybe they switched to Search Console, I get them confused until I log into them every day, because I don’t care… So Google Search Console is a place where you can go and submit your website to be indexed and crawled into the Google search engine index. 

And, this process is a little painful and it adds to timelines. So you can really optimize your website. You can add a bunch of content, you can get all these things on there. You can get all these plugins that say, “I’m going to go out there and tell Google you’ve got a new page. We’re going to get it indexed”. Google still has to put you in a queue.  And then go crawl your stuff. However, sometimes they’ll crawl like your homepage and then they won’t crawl the rest of your site pages for weeks, which can be very painful and instantly extend any return on investment timelines. Just by the sheer fact that you are waiting in line and you can keep going there and saying request indexing on specific pages 

Jeffrey:

Does that move you up in the queue? Or is it just… 

Jacob:

Theoretically. It’s supposed to. What you need to do to break this cycle of having to manually go in there and index, is have a blog, is have a content schedule that you’re posting and expanding content, because you can train the bot to keep coming back for fresh content.

Jeffrey:

Because if you keep providing fresh content, the bot is gonna want to come back to you to index it. 

Jacob:

Exactly. And if you get links to your website, because you write great content that earns links, or some content promotion that you’re doing get links: If they crawl another website and you are linked-to from that other website, the bot will then put you again in the queue to be re-crawled through the link, because it’s like a spider crawling through its web and that is the way that the web links everything. 

Jeffrey:

Every connection increases your probability of getting crawled. 

Jacob:

Essentially. Yeah. And Bing has come up with a nonprofit organization, I think it’s called “Index Now,” and they’re attached to that, which is really smart, and essentially it’s another way to make sure that you can get indexed faster in other search engines besides Google, and is a little more open source. Kind of reminds me of the days of like the let’s encrypt SSL certificate… I’m sorry. Really nerdy. 

Jeffrey:

Yeah. I don’t know what that means.  

Jacob:

We’ll do that. We’ll do, we’ll do that another day. Where it’s just a good thing to be a part of, I think it’s called “Index Now” and I’ll put a link… we can put a link to it at the end of the episode. It’s a third party nonprofit resource to get indexed, because essentially Google’s slowness to index new sites because they have, I would guess more than a billion websites… 

Jeffrey:

God, it has to be, 

Jacob:  

I don’t know how large the internet is today, but it’s probably somewhere between 1 billion and a GooglePlex of websites. And that is something that we’ll just have to learn…

Jeffrey:

As of April– cutting in real quick– as of April 2023, Google has over 25 billion web pages in its index.

Jacob:

Wow. 25 billion. So when you get indexed, you’re putting yourself in a queue with 25 billion other websites, which all have usually more than one page, so that is a lot. 

Jeffrey:

Trillions of pages easily.  

Jacob:

Very much, easily trillions of pages that it has to index. So over time, this has resulted in a slower and slower queue. It feels like for me and my clients, especially of getting sites indexed, you have to be really active in Search Console and keep submitting it. What factors into this search engine that you need to understand, that also increases your return on investment time overall, is that you have to make the content to put there, because Google is not just going to give you a ranking for a term for you just having a page saying “I sell cottage cheese”. You’re going to have to actually write content to make that possible. 

Jeffrey:

Is that why when I do, uh, like search for recipes on Google, there’s like a five paragraph blog post about how the writer of the recipe like spent six years in Southern France and also inspired by blah blah blah blah blah. That’s why I have to scroll through those blog posts?

Jacob:

So, this… we’re at an age now where the mechanics of SEO have actually had some weird side effects with the way that we are ingesting information on the internet. So food is the perfect example of an over SEO optimized sector. Essentially to compete in that space you have to write these 1500-word, 2000-word blog posts about this amazing story, and it’s written in a really roundabout way. And sometimes I’ve even noticed myself on some more generic cooking websites that aren’t like, you know, the New York Times or like All Recipes, even… 

Jeffrey:

Love New York Times Cooking. I really do.  

Jacob:

But those kind of sites have their own established brand and stuff, but a lot of other ones that show up they’ll do these really long things and they’ll be even repetitive in their own words and phrases. And they’ll sometimes say the same sentence twice. They’re just trying to beat the system. Cause that horse race is insane, it literally is insane at this point: it’s over SEO itself in some ways. That is the kind of world that we’re living in today. 

Jeffrey:

So I feel like we’re coming to time, pretty close anyway. So could you just summarize the best SEO strategy for a small business/ where they should focus their resources in the SEO space? 

Jacob:

Yeah, because focusing your resources in SEO, it can be very difficult until you understand your competition. The first thing that you need to do is go Google all the words you want to show up for and actually see basically, here’s a quick checklist: When you go to their site, did they have a clear keyword focused page title, like before you click on the site, does it have a clear page title that says the same thing of the keyword and just…

Jeffrey:

So like on the Google results. 

Jacob:

So on the Google result, the link text, that’s usually highlighted in blue, that’s the page title, and the little description below that is the meta description. Take a look and read both of those things. Are they aligning with the keywords that are there? If they are, and everyone on that page is aligning with that keyword, you’re competition, it’s like a tick in the “I have a higher competition score”. Now, people are showing up for that that don’t really make a lot of sense, that would be a slack in the marketplace. 

Jeffrey:

And you could take advantage of it really easily. 

Jacob:

That might be a keyword that you can go after. Now, once you look at your competition’s pages, do they have a lot of words on their page? Because Google, the spider-bot, doesn’t have eyeballs. I mean, it will have eyeballs with AI, but it doesn’t really have eyeballs yet. So it has to basically just reads everything, and so it’s all written content contest. That is really what it is. It’s an essay contest. So go to that page. Do they write well enough about that topic? Do they have sections with headers? Like, so there’s a big heading, usually called an H1, and there’s little headings of H2, H3. Do they have keyword related content in there? Because if a lot of your competition is writing well, and displaying a lot of content on their site, and if they have a blog as well,  you’re going to have a hard time competing in that space. 

But that’s the exact same playbook that you’re going to need to do for your website to show up. So if you have a lot of competition in your space, you’re going to need to start also putting in a mix of community minded efforts. Like, you need to put in marketing efforts that are like getting… showing up in your community either locally, or showing up in your community, like if they have competitions or if they have conferences, or they have forums, or they have giving back, or charitable things that are related to your industry. 

Jeffrey:

That’s going to boost you. 

Jacob:

So there’s ways that you can donate your time. Like, in the agency world, agencies can really help a lot of nonprofits all the time because… 

Jeffrey:

Pro bono work. 

Jacob:

Exactly. And then, and then you can get a link back to your website from the pro bono work. There used to be this old link-building adage that I thought was funny at the time. I don’t see it very much anymore. It was called FTBOM: and it was “for the betterment of mankind”.

Jeffrey:

Oh, that’s nice. 

Jacob:

So if you have really high SEO competition, what’s your “for the betterment of mankind” marketing agenda? That is what you’re going to need to focus on. Now, if you have a weak competition marketplace, and basically people barely write about what they’re actually doing there, they don’t really show up for the keywords. This happens a lot in B2B, especially like engineering, industrial…

Jeffrey:

So we’ve seen some competition for one of our clients that is literally the most atrocious website I’ve ever seen in my life. Like 1998 level website design. Terrible.

Jacob:

They’re still out there. They’re still out there. And in their case, it’s really easy for the client to just, and we’ve talked about that in earlier. Where we just did some basic on-page SEO stuff and they were already eking out ahead of them pretty quickly. Maybe they’re not number one in the pack…

Jeffrey:

But, they moved up.

Jacob:

They were moving up above those people quite quickly, and if you have that going on, you don’t have to do as much “for the betterment of mankind” kind of marketing work.

Jeffrey:

You should anyway.  

Jacob: 

Especially, because once you establish yourself as a player in the marketplace, and someone gets knocked out of that first place ranking or second place ranking, and then they’re paying attention, that’s only gonna motivate them more, to put more time and effort into it. So the more you commit to it, the better. But, more and more today, the biggest thing for small businesses to remember is that its SEO is a part of a greater marketing mix, and I’ve even seen the word “fractional marketing” showing up more and more, where your marketing efforts are pieces, I have fractions that you need to put together to create a whole effort. And so SEO can often be a fractional marketing piece. 

Like you might have an agency or an internal marketing person at your organization. But a fraction of that is you outsource that to an expert like me, or a design firm for your design work or this, and you fractionalized different things because you’re going to need to have it as a whole mix. It can’t just stand on its own two legs very much anymore because of the nature of competition. 

Jeffrey:

Yeah. It’s just too… the whole search engine space is too flooded.  

Jacob:

And with that, we kind of wrapped up the episode. In today’s episode, we were recording outside and there were some birds chirping in the background. Some planes overhead. We were experimenting with that and maybe it turned out all right. However, we did have to cut the episode short there on the edit because the plane that flew overhead was a little too loud. To finish. The most important thing you can do right now is take a look at your competition. See what SEO items they’re doing to rank well,  Are they writing good content or they’re writing a lot of content? Get in that horse race.

Again, SEO is a fraction or a piece of your greater marketing efforts. So please get with your marketing team internally or your agencies externally and come up with a great strategy that integrates SEO into what you’re doing to better mankind. Have a great day.