You’re an entrepreneur with a new and innovative idea or a local professional with your first business website. As soon as yourself or your web designer hit “publish site”, you brace for the phone to begin ringing off the hook. You’re going to be rolling in the dough and you even quit your day job! Weeks go by and your website has drawn very little traffic despite your promotional efforts on social media and establishing important citation listings. The phone isn’t ringing, your inbox is empty and you’re beginning to panic. What went wrong?

The first thing that needs to be distinguished is the difference between ranking in the search results and ranking on the first page of the search results which is where your business website will need to be to get the most visibility. How quick your business climbs the search results depends on the competitiveness of the industry your business is in as well as the difficulty level of ranking for your targeted keywords. General consensus is that on average, it will take a business between 6 to 12 months to achieve desirable rankings for it’s website.

Ahrefs, a popular SEO tool, conducted their own study to determine how long it takes a website to rank on the first page of the search results. They took 2 million random keywords and documented the top ten rankings for each keyword. They were able to determine that the websites that rank in the number one position had an average domain age of three years. The average domain age for the entire first page of the search results was two years. The study also concluded that 95% of published pages do not reach the first page of the search results within one year of being published.

How can a business owner speed up the SEO process? There’s only so much you can do. You’re at the mercy of search engines and have no control over them. “White hat SEO techniques” are the blueprint of every successful SEO campaign and they include 

• Making sure all of your website’s pages are properly titled and contain descriptive metadata information.
• Link building including establishing citation listings for your website; notably Google My Business, Yelp, Manta, Foursquare and Bing Places.
• Optimizing your Google My Business listing.
• Creating a business blog and publishing posts that are informative, rich in content and answer important questions that your customers would ask.
• Promoting your website’s blog posts on social media as they’re published.
• Integrating schema markup into your website to ensure that the search engines can easily parse your website’s pages.
• Integrating Google Analytics and Google Search Console into your business website. Afterwards, you’ll want to submit an XML sitemap within your Google Search Console account. You’ll also want to regularly check Google Search Console to ensure that the search engines aren’t having problems crawling your website and discovering new content.

As time goes on and your website’s domain name matures in age, it will begin to rank higher in the search results due to it’s domain authority. Millions of websites are launched every month but many go offline several months later. As one might imagine, there are millions of people out there that are only out to make a quick buck rather than deliver valuable content to readers. In this day in age, the search engines are all about user experience. The search engines will reward trustworthy and accountable websites with high rankings. Look at how many large ecommerce websites were launched in the 1990’s; Amazon, Ebay, Zappos and the list goes on.

The honest truth is that most business owners don’t have the time and knowledge to achieve desirable and profitable rankings in the search results. Most large corporations are able to hire SEO specialists and bring them in house. Many medium-sized businesses are able to outsource their digital marketing work to digital marketing agencies with many resources. That leaves entrepreneurs that are bootstrapping with the task of conducting their digital marketing efforts on their own. 

Contact John Mann SEO Consulting

Are you an entrepreneur or small business owner in Nashville, Tennessee that needs help gaining more visibility for your business website? John Mann SEO Consulting can help. We are a Nashville SEO company that specializes in areas such as search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing, content marketing and email marketing consulting. To learn more about our services or to schedule your free consultation, give us a call at 615-491-9819 or complete our inquiry contact form. Let us help you get SEO right the first time!