“You wouldn’t expect to get fit in two weeks”
Imagine joining a gym on a Monday with the goal of getting into the best shape of your life. You train hard, eat a healthy diet consistently, get plenty of sleep, but by the next week you’re tired, hungry, and look the same.
You’re not going to see a dramatic change in the fact first week, but it’s about being consistent over a long period of time.
SEO works in the exact same way
A business might start SEO on its website with the expectation of increased traffic, lots of enquiries, and improvements as soon as possible. Unfortunately, that’s not the case, and SEO specifically is about consistent effort over time.
The First couple of months
Let’s talk about what happens when you start exercising and focusing on your health in the first couple of months.
1. You’ll be a bit sore (the good kind, hopefully)
2. You’ll get slightly stronger
3. You can climb up those flights of stairs without feeling winded
4. You’ll feel like you’re progressing
But you might not notice that much of a difference in the mirror
Let’s compare this with SEO work.
1. Technical fixes are being made on the back end to help search engines understand your business.
2. Metadata has been optimised, and rankings are moving slightly
3. You notice a small increase in traffic coming through to the website
4. But traffic and leads don’t explode
5. The website still looks the same for the most part when you look at it.
Just because you can’t physically see changes, it doesn’t mean that they aren’t occurring. Sometimes it’s getting the basics done and starting the effort that leads to long-term results.
It’s not always a linear progression.
For the past 3 months, I’ve been focused on getting into better shape. Mainly because I spend the majority of my time sitting at a desk, and as a result, the weight slowly started creeping up. If I look at my last 7 days of weight tracking, here are my results.
Day 1: 92.4kg
Day 2: 92.1kg
Day 3: 91.4kg
Day 4: 91.8kg
Day 5: 91.9kg
Day 6: 91.6kg
Day 7: 91.5kg
Did you see how there were days that my weight went upwards instead of down? As much as I hate to admit it, that’s normal. Extra water weight, me not getting my steps in, eating a whole packet of Tim Tams at night to myself (yes, that happened), added to this. The point is that results aren’t always positive.
If I were to look at my average weight over 3 months, though, the results are different.
Month 1: 94.8kg
Month 2: 92.9kg
Month 3: 91.2kg
While there are ups and downs, the consistent effort over a long period eventually pays off.
The same happens with SEO fairly often.
Let’s take an example of a keyword that a client wants to rank for. Over a couple of days, the results could be like below:
Week 1: Position 14
Week 2: Position 11
Week 3: Position 8
Week 4: Position 17
Week 5: Position 7
A Keyword going backwards doesn’t mean that the work or strategy has failed; it can be a number of different factors.
Seasonality, increased competition, search intent, and algorithm changes are just some factors that can influence rankings. The importance of this is that it’s a trend over time.
You’ll hit plateaus and that’s normal
With exercise, you’ll always get to a point where improvements stall. Your average time to run a certain distance doesn’t go down, or you’re stuck at a certain weight for bench press. When that happens, people will need to change things up. This might be doing the following:
· Increase recovery time
· Deload the weight
· Change your programme slightly
· Change your nutrition
SEO has plateaus too. A website might be performing well for months, but get to a point where everything stalls for no apparent reason. It’s frustrating for everyone involved, but it’s normal.
Sometimes it’s a matter of sitting down with your marketing team and assessing how the strategy needs to change to get past the plateau.
Consistency beats intensity every time
Someone who trains every day for two weeks and then stops because they’re burnt out will unlikely hit their long-term goal. Someone who takes their time over a 12-month period is going to have a much better chance, as they’ve been consistent and allowed their body to adapt.
The same goes for SEO. Doing a huge amount of SEO changes for one or two months isn’t going to magically make you appear at the top of search engine results. More often than not, you’ll burn out because you’ve put all this effort into the website on top of your other commitments, and then you don’t want to keep doing it. Sometimes you might even get worse results, as Google will see all the changes and then nothing.
SEO is not a fast strategy. It’s about being consistent and letting search engines know that you are always improving, even if it’s slowly. These are signals that get picked up and send trust signals. Google, much like my personal trainer, just wants to see that an effort is being made.
Measure the right things
As a part of my coaching, I have to weight myself every day and believe me that can be hard some days, especially when I see the scale go in the wrong direction. But at the end of the day, that’s not the main number I should be measuring. What I need to look at are:
· My strength
· Body Measurements
· How my clothes fit
· Energy Levels
· How many time my wife compliments me
SEO is the same but just different metrics. I see client’s hyper-fixate on specific rankings and then get upset when it hasn’t moved in a month. Yes, SEO is about rankings, but most people only want to rank higher because they want:
· Better Visibility
· More Sales
· More Enquiries
These are some of the real metrics that should be reported on.
There are no shortcuts
As much as I wish there were, there are no real shortcuts in exercise or SEO. The marketing headlines of “lose 10kg in 10 days” aren’t realistic or sustainable, and it’s the same as “we’ll rank you in position 1 in 30 days”
The results come from having the fundamentals down and doing them consistently
When we look at SEO, a general expected time frame could look like the following:
Months 1-3: SEO Foundational work and early movement
Months 3-6: Stronger Visibility and growing traffic
Months 6-12: Compounding results and greater impact
This isn’t always the case, as situations like industry, regions, competitiveness, and targeting all play a part.
SEO isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon. It’s just a matter of making sure you have the right coaching training you and keeping you on track for consistent progression.