When a client contact us to take over their content marketing, we often warn them that it can be slow. We don’t know what’s been done on their website in the past. We don’t know how Google responds to new content on their site yet. We don’t know when Google will reward the content. We’ve had several clients whose pages were on the front page of Google only a few days after adding them, and several others that took months of regular updates.
Many companies want to know if they’re the former, since of course the faster the content is up the greater the return on investment. While it’s not a fool proof strategy, the following are generally true for websites that see quick results from adding content:
- Good Groundwork – Most of our clients switched to Great Leap Studios after using a bad SEO company that failed to provide results. But even bad SEO companies can do a few things right. If you have a few quality incoming links and your website is somewhat well designed, you’re more likely to have good results.
- Lots of New Content – Clients that ask us to add only 3 or so pages aren’t going to see many changes. Clients that ask us to redo all 25 pages of their website and add 10 more might. Most of the success we’ve had where the SEO worked quickly was when we were able to redo all of it, and use the content marketing tricks we’ve had success with to help create a more immediate impact.
- Older Website – New websites tend to take a long time to rank well in Google with few exceptions. If the website is brand new, it’s best not to expect it to rank well right away no matter what. Search engines want to see that you have been around a while, to ensure you’re not spam, among other things.
- Weak Competition – Of course, sometimes it has little to do with our work and more to do with the work of others. If your website is one of the few that engages in content marketing, you’re more likely to rank well quickly than if you’re up against much tougher competition.
- Updating Blog – While it’s a bit less true now than it used to be, search engines do like to see new and added content. While we can simply redo your website, you’ll see better success if you also have regularly updating blog posts over the course of several weeks.
On our own site and that of our clients, we’ve had a lot of near-instant results for content marketing. It’s simply not something that we can promise, because search engines have a lot of protocols in place to prevent rapid acceleration in search engines in order to protect against spam. So we tell people that content marketing is a slower process because for your website it may be.
But there are many companies that are going to see near instant results for their content marketing efforts (within a week or so), and while we can’t promise you’ll be one of them, the only way you can find out is by trying content marketing out today.
