Why You Should Invest in SEO Long Term
If you are looking to do search engine optimization (SEO), it’s important to understand that this is not a pushbutton advertising technique. You shouldn’t expect to turn SEO on and expect to get huge amounts of traffic right away. Instead, it’s a great way to build results over time, and it comes with enough benefits that it’s worth the wait.
Rising Slowly Positions You to Stay on Top
The strategy for slow-building your SEO involves building a website that earns its spot on the top with great design, tremendous user experience, and solid content. When the search engines send a visitor to your site, that visitor is satisfied, so the search engines start sending more and more people there.
When you rise to the top this way, you can stay there as long as you continue to satisfy your visitors, according to the website behavior metrics that matter. This means that although you might have to wait weeks or months to get there, you can stay at the top of the rankings for years. This is where the real benefits roll in. You get huge amounts of traffic and business with very little ongoing effort and expense. There’s the potential for tremendous passive income that helps your business thrive.
While it is sometimes possible to use SEO to jump to the top of the rankings immediately, it’s either a fluke or your SEO is doing things that can get your site flagged and banned, which can make it hard or even impossible to make it back to the top of the SERPs (search engine result pages).
You might hear people warn you about search engine algorithm changes that can bump your site from the top. This does happen–there’s a fair amount of churn among search results. However, if you have a quality site, you’ll find that you can weather these changes, often with only a short demotion if you experience any at all.
Building a Quality Site Lets You Exploit New SERP Features
It seems like Google is introducing a new feature to the SERPS every day. Maps, info boxes, side bars, Q&A tabs, and more features keep appearing. While these features are new, the sites that benefit from them rarely are. Instead, these sites have quality information and content that
Google is finding new ways to deliver to searchers, i.e. possible customers for your business. These sites included that information without any idea that it would show up in the new features.
If you build a quality site for long-term results, you will often be surprised at how your site will show up in the future.
Building a Quality Site Helps You Build Your Brand Reputation
Although SEO has a few tricks it uses to appeal to the search engines, the engines themselves make it clear that the best way to rank high is to provide good service to visitors. As you’re building a quality site for the search engines, the current and potential customers coming to your site will enjoy the experience they get there. This will help them build a positive association with your brand. You’ll get more branded searches as people return to your site, and people will start recommending your site to others, either in person or by sharing on social media. Good word-of-mouth is hard to build, but it’s often a side benefit of long-term SEO.
For example, one of the ways that you build ranking is by looking at common questions people ask in your industry that aren’t being answered anywhere else. Answering these questions will help you climb the search rankings, but it will also make your site the go-to place for anyone who has that question. This means your current customers won’t have to go anywhere else to get that question answered and new potential customers will be coming to your site and not a competitor’s. You get known as an expert in your field, which helps even more when it comes time to turn site visitors into new or returning customers.
A Long-Term SEO Strategy Evolves
While there are many core aspects of SEO that remain constant, some of them do change. However, this is never a case of tearing down what you’ve done: all the things that got you to the top of the SERPs can position you to take advantage of new search trends.
For example, the winners of the “near me” search revolution where those who had already done the work of strongly identifying their location in many ways. Maps, addresses, and accurate location references were all good practice before people were asking their phones for businesses near them. Now those same practices help them to appear in “near me” searches, sometimes with only minor tweaks. However, no one now will design a site without specifically trying to appear in “near me” searches.
Are You Looking for a Long-Term SEO Partner?
If you are looking to succeed at SEO, it’s best to think in the long-term and find a partner who can work with you through the entire process. At VEA Technologies, we have helped many customers build their way to the top of the SERPs and stay there. We also understand that your business can’t be put on hold while you wait to climb the rankings, and offerPPC advertising, which can be turned on for almost immediate results.
To learn more about how to successfully build a long-term SEO strategy, pleasecontact VEA Technologies today.