The Fine Points of an Effective Online Marketing Strategy

Businesses often want to see immediate results when they invest in search engine option.  They expect the search engines to turn around as soon as updates are made and links are plugged and they want immediate quantifiable results clearly showing improvement in the search engines… in they want it yesterday.  The fact is that effective online marketing doesn’t work like that.

And yes, this post is referencing search optimization as a form of marketing because when you are planning out an effective online marketing strategy, search engine optimization is a big part of that.  Otherwise your efforts are going to be crippled because organic search won’t be a factor in how successful your marketing presence is.

As a business owner, you should understand that marketing takes time.  When you start any kind of a direct mail campaign, it takes time for your content to filter out to the homes of your customers.  Once there, it has to be processed and the decision has to be made for the customer to return – it’s generally not the same day for most people.

When optimization, Google and other major search engines will indeed take note of your website, but it’s not something that’s going to take place immediately.  The fact that you’re there needs to filter out and catch their attention by building back links.  Once they’ve taken note of you, those search engines will crawl your site and place you within the database.  Despite a quick turnaround, it still takes anywhere from 2 to 3 months for Google to completely establish the relevance for your site.

Now that doesn’t mean you won’t see improvement during that time, but you won’t see the fullest potential of your changes for some time.

Effective online marketing is never something that happens quickly.  The work that you’re doing for a marketing campaign will have a number of aspects and each will require a different amount of time and labor.  Some can overlap with one another and some cannot.  For example, it’s generally a good idea to optimize your content before you start building out a lot of site links so that your relevancy is apparent from GO.

It’s understandable to want rapid results from your marketing campaign, but when you’re dealing with not only your perceived brand but your overall presence on the web this isn’t something that you want to rush in any form.  Quality results from a broad scope of targeted traffic are far better than rushed clumps of traffic that don’t convert as well because they were thrown into the sales funnel somewhere in the middle.  They get tossed out like food thrown into a blender on high without a lid.

Your search engine optimization should have the same respect as your other forms of content marketing and social media marketing because it’s equally important to your overall strategy.  Rushed work and link building will breed poor results through reporting but careful time spent managing the link profile for your business will work toward organic improvement with your position in the SERPs and will contribute to a more effective online marketing strategy.