Now that you know the way to rank highly on Google organically is to be doing your SEO properly, you’ve gone ahead and found an SEO specialist to work with and you’re doing all your monthly SEO blog posts and FAQs…so when will you see results?
The question every business owner doing SEO for a small business wants the answer to…you’ve invested time and money into the process and want to know when you’ll reap the reward. You’re probably wanting to know, how long does it take to rank on google? The good news is that your efforts will be rewarded, the bad news is that there’s no way of saying exactly when.
What does organic growth mean?
Organic growth is essentially another way of saying “growth online without Ads”. You’ve probably heard the term “organic growth” thrown around, it’s essentially what SEO naturally creates that Ads do not. We can think of SEO’s organic growth for your website in the same way you would the organic growth of your garden that you regularly tend to. If you invest time into your garden, gradually your garden will grow and over time it will flourish.
However, if you stop tending to your garden and forget to water it, your plants will wither and dry up in the sun. The same goes for your website’s ranking; the seeds you have sown are a good basis, but if you stop putting the work into your SEO completely, your website will slowly wither and die in the eyes of Google, causing it to drop further and further down the rankings. To properly tend to your garden make sure you’re posting regular, quality content in the form of blog posts & FAQs on your website.
Take a look at how, through our tried-and-tested SEO strategies, we expanded the online reach of one of our clients, Conway Construction. They soared up the Google rankings from below 20th for all their target keywords to second for ‘Renovations contractor Wicklow’ & first for ‘Renovations builder Wicklow’ amongst many others, gaining many more visitors per month to their website, leading to more enquiries and sales.
Okay, but how long does it take to rank on google more or less? I hear you say. We advise waiting 4-6 months before you’ll see the full effects of SEO for small businesses. If you quit before then your garden won’t have enough time to fully flourish, and you’ll lose all the time, effort and money you’ve invested before it’s really got off the ground. Patience is key here.
In the same way the growth of your garden depends on how much sun and water it gets, the growth of your SEO efforts also depend on two main factors:
- Your domain authority (the strength of your website)
- What your competitors are doing for their SEO
So, what do these two things mean exactly?
1. Your Domain Authority
Strength of a website (aka domain authority):
We’ll try and keep this part very simple. Your website’s domain authority depends on how old it is and how much it has done for SEO. Authority rankings go from 1 (weak) to 11-18 (great for a small business) all the way up to 19-27 which is about as good as it gets.
Every brand new website has a domain authority of 1 which should go up to a ranking of around 4 or 5 within 6 months if your website has been properly optimised for SEO. The quicker it gains authority points, the better, and the higher Google will push you up its rankings.
Websites often get stuck at number 1 because they are not being updated regularly and are not producing regular SEO content. If your website has been live for a while and your authority number is still low, Google might be penalising you.
How to find my website ranking
Don’t know your website’s domain score? Drop us a line and we’ll send you your website’s ranking along with some other words of advice on how to rank higher, quicker; and ultimately overtake your competitors.
2. How much SEO are your competitors doing?
Take a peek at what your competitors are doing with regards to SEO for small businesses and if it looks like it’s working…follow suit!
Things to check for are:
How well optimised is their website for SEO?
How high is their domain authority?
How many blog posts are they posting per month?
The answers to these questions will give you an idea of the amount of work you’ll need to be putting into your own SEO to be able to outperform your competitors.
In general, most business owners are fairly clueless about SEO for small businesses, which is good news for you since it makes the competition relatively minimal. Most of the small businesses who are ranking highly are actually only doing the bare minimum, and usually without much of a structure. This means, therefore, that with the right SEO specialist working with you, your garden will start to flourish before your very eyes; and you’ll find out how SEO is the best kept secret for small business owners!
Interested in our SEO packages for small businesses? Check out this SEO case study of Tempo Music School, a client of ours who went from ranking below 20th to 1st for all their target keywords including ‘bodhran classes in ireland’ & ‘flute lessons in ireland’ after implementing our tailored SEO strategies.
Don’t know where to start looking for an experienced, SEO specialist you can trust to do the job properly? Look no further, dear business owner. Mamma’s here! Give us a shout and we’ll send you a free report of your website, outlining what needs to be done, along with information on what the two competitors of your choice are doing.
You’re welcome!
How to track my website ranking
So, where is my website ranking on google? You might be wondering. The way to track how well your website is performing is to type each keyword into Google and manually count where you are in the rankings. Sound time consuming? Yeah, it is. We take this arduous task off your hands by including monthly reports as a part of all our SEO packages for small business explaining exactly what we did and the growth we gained this month in comparison to last.
Drop us a line and we’ll take a look at your website for you completely free of charge and let you know what we can do to help!
