One of the most commonly asked questions we get from our clients is why we project a minimum of six months to one year before they can see the results of our SEO efforts more accurately. Increasing your rankings for your target search terms is no easy feat – it’s a long-term process that requires consistent online presence, quality link building, on-page optimization, relationship building, and other online marketing outreach efforts. I want to illustrate the concept of ranking to show you why it’s difficult to move your website up one spot.

Understanding Ranking Gaps

If Google used a point system for ranking websites, then each item on their SERPs will have a score that ranks them higher than the other items on the list. There will be gaps between each listing’s score. The gaps that may first come to your mind are more liner and consistent in nature, like this example:

An illustration of how you may view Google’s rankings under a point system. Note that this is just a visual illustration and not the actual point system Google uses.

As you can see from this example, there are gaps of 100 points between each search ranking notch. Ideally, that’s how it’s supposed to look. In reality, because Google uses over 200 search ranking factors to determine a website’s placement on their SERPs, the gaps will be more inconsistent:

Illustration of the inconsistent gaps between SERPs listings. You will see that there is no pattern to the points granted for each website.

Correlated Search Ranking Factors

The illustration above demonstrates the fact that there is no set computation for ranking your websites on the SERPs. There’s no solid way of knowing if you are about to surpass your competitor on the SERPs or not. You also cannot put a number on the number of quality backlinks, content, and online outreach campaigns you need to implement in order to go up a notch on the SERPs.

What you need to do instead is take a more holistic approach, and improve every aspect of your website and your campaign that is correlated to search ranking. Just a few months ago, Moz.com released the list of search ranking factors and their supposed impact on your SERPs placement.

Prioritizing which elements to focus on based on your analytics data and your market behavior research will give you the edge you need to rank higher on the SERPs. More importantly, earning traffic and links from your audience is just as important as the technical SEO aspects you need to work on. It’s important to aim to be the best in order to be seen by your market as the best. The following can help you get started:

Creating and promoting high-quality, relevant, and shareable content
Connecting with your audience through blogs, social media, and forums
Actively communicating with all possible brand ambassadors, whether it is the media, online influencers in your industry, your peers, or your potential customers
Focusing on reputation building and applying traditional PR strategies to your online marketing campaign

Our guaranteed SEO services puts you on the right track towards better SERPs rankings by preparing your site and creating an online marketing strategy that ranks you higher on the SERPs for a longer period of time. Contact us today and let us know what you need, and we’ll give you a free website audit to get started.