The Daily Feed Issue #19: How long does SEO take? (part 2)

Welcome to Issue #19 of The Daily Feed. If this email was forwarded to you by a friend, you can subscribe on this page. You can read previous editions of The Daily Feed on our blog but note that posts to our blog are delayed 24 hours or more. Send suggestions for future editions to my personal address at mark@feedjit.com.

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Today I'm concluding my series on how long SEO takes to kick in with a few examples. 

The most effective thing you can do to get your site listed in Google fast and to get a good ranking is to get very high quality back-links. In my experience the best strategy to get back-links is to get main-stream press coverage and by publishing link-bait. See issue #11 for more on link bait. 

If you have a site that's been around for a while, you have an advantage. If an established site suddenly gets a few high quality back-links it will generally ramp up it's search traffic faster than a new site.

Lets look at a hypothetical example. This is based on anecdotal evidence that I've seen. There is no scientific basis behind this and your mileage my vary wildly from these numbers. It's simply what I'd expect to see.

Example: You have a new domain name and a new website. 1000 pages of new, unique and useful content that generally is searched for by many people in a not-too-competitive category. As you launch you get covered in The New York Times. A few hundred bloggers and B-level news outlets pick up your story and either republish it verbatim or add their own 2 cents - all with back-links to you. Here's what I'd expect to see:

Within a few days you have a few hundred visitors from search engines arriving via keywords that are on-target within your category. In other words, if you have a jewelry store your visitors will arrive by Googleing things related to jewelry. Within a few weeks you're getting 1,000 to 3,000 unique visitors per day from Google and the other SE's. 

Now lets look at a few variables:

If your site's domain is already established and has already been getting some search traffic when you get your big NYTimes coverage, then I'd expect to see your traffic ramp up faster and peak at a higher number.

If your established links are "deep links", meaning that they link not just to your home page but to pages deep in your site then you'll also see a better result. If the links you get after your launch from bloggers and websites are also deep links, then you should also expect to see an ongoing boost in ranking and indexing. 

If your site continues to get medium to high quality links over time, then you'll see a much better result over the first few months and ongoing. 

If you have a history of adding a page or three of new content per day before your big launch and you continue to add new content each day after your big launch, then you'll also get better results. Google loves new content.

It's rare to get good coverage in a main stream news publication. But this should give you a good idea of the kinds of things that accelerate getting indexed and that boost your ranking. Links from a second or third tier publication are also great and have a similar, if less pronounced effect on getting indexed and your ranking. 

The best advice I can give you on getting indexed fast is to pretend you're a search engine. If you see a site that's new, has lots of unique content and is newly popular with high ranking websites, you're going to want to tell your searchers about it fast!

Regards,

Mark Maunder.

Feedjit Founder & CEO.

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