The truth is- no matter how amazing your website is, or how many keywords you’ve strategically placed, a brand-new website takes time to rank. SEO experts agree, it will take 2-6 months to see early results from newly implemented SEO work on your website.
If you are a well established business, working on updating your website and brand, be certain to check your current Domain Authority (DA) before considering a domain (web address) change. A domain change can certainly benefit companies with a low DA who are not getting the traffic they need. But for those who are having even some success online, definitely consult an expert before jumping into a domain switch. Also, be sure to consult an expert before pinning that new domain name down to make sure it will help you drive traffic.
It's important to identify your “true competitors”. For example, a small local clothing boutique should not consider Walmart as their competition for women’s clothing. When you are small, you must recognize that your true competitors are other similarly sized companies.
From an SEO standpoint in the online world, you are competing for traffic and keyword ranking. Research is such a crucial part of choosing realistically competitive keywords to target on your new website. In the clothing boutique example, using “buy dresses” as a target phrase will bring up large chain department stores like Nordstrom and The Bay. A phrase like “buy vintage dresses Vancouver” will bring up less competitive and more niche results.
We use Moz software to perform SEO for new websites, researching keywords and taking advantage of their “True Competitor Analysis” tool to help you target the right words and competitors.
The more traffic you can get to your brand new (or recently updated) website within the first 3 months the better. Since search engine ranking takes time, I highly recommend supplementing your SEO efforts with Google pay-per-click (PPC) ads, for at least 3 months. We can help you set up and monitor your Google ads, using the best keywords we have compiled from our research.
Your competitors are also likely paying for Google ads, so it’s important to analyze what your competition is doing if you hope to come up on the top 3. In fact, paid ads will almost always show up first on Google, with organic results coming after.
PPC ads present a great opportunity to target local traffic searching for your service or product in your area.
Read my follow up post, and learn how to improve SEO yourself through blog posts.