Why your Organic Small Business SEO is a Marathon, not a sprint

Ranking high in search engine results is an important goal for businesses. When relevant content from your business shows up in the first few results on Google, Yahoo, or Bing, you receive more website traffic. The visitors pouring in can potentially become customers, driving up sales and letting other people know about your products and services. Let’s explore Why your Organic Small Business SEO is a Marathon, not a sprint.

Businesses are so eager about the promise of search engine optimisation (SEO), that they want to see quick results. Maybe within days or weeks of building their site or starting a blog, they expect to surge to the top of Internet searches. They figure that their immediate success is a given if they apply the right SEO and content marketing techniques.

Often, these unrealistic expectations lead to discouragement and disillusionment about the benefits of developing a strong online presence. Fast results, whether for SEO or content marketing overall, are highly unusual. Rising to the top in search engine rankings requires a steady, long-term effort.

Why your Organic Small Business SEO is a Marathon, not a sprint

The following are some of the reasons SEO demands a long-term commitment:

• Ongoing keyword research.
  A common misconception about SEO is that once you set up your business website and include the most appropriate keywords in its content, you’re set for SEO success. The reality is that you regularly need to research keywords, adding new ones and modifying the ones you already use. Your keyword usage will depend on changes in the products you’re offering, the popularity of certain search queries, the time of year, and other important factors. You can’t just stick to one initial set of keywords and hope that they’ll carry you to the first three results on Google.
• A steady build in content.
  Businesses dream of a viral video or blog post that pushes them to the top of search engine results. More realistically, SEO depends on steadily producing high-quality content. These include website landing pages, product descriptions, blog posts, articles, graphics, and videos. Developing a body of content related to your business area will increasingly make you attractive to search engines. But it won’t happen overnight.
• Link-building.
  Your SEO improves with high-quality links to your content. Building links takes time and involves a steady effort. Links can come from a variety of sources, including social media, other websites, review sites, directories, and online media coverage about your business. Attempts to force link-building by rapidly building numerous backlinks – and with little consideration for link quality – can result in SEO penalties.
• Giving search engines time to work.
  There are ways to help search engines find you, such as registering with Google Search Console and using plug-ins that help search engines crawl your site. However, it’s still going to take time for your new content to get discovered.
• You’re not alone.
  The Internet is flooded with content, including all of the content produced by competitors in your industry. If they’ve been around for longer and have already developed a strong online presence, competing with them for higher positions in search engine results won’t be simple. Your business is only one of many voices. That doesn’t mean you should get discouraged and write off SEO as a lost cause. All it means is that you’ll need time to make your voice distinct, unique, and noticeable.

Don’t look at SEO isolation as a quick trick or a gimmick to making your business stand out online. Strong SEO practices involve persistence, research, and expertise.

They require a steady effort over time. When you contact us, we can help you adopt and refine strong SEO strategies and stick to them for the long run. Steadily, you’ll become more attractive both to search engines and website visitors.

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