Real World SEO Timelines

MICHAEL:
Hi guys, Michael here. Do you want a second opinion on your SEO? Head to theseoshow.co and hit the link in the header. We'll take a look under the hood at your SEO, your competitors and your market and tell you how you can improve. All right, let's get into the show.

INTRO: It's time for the SEO show where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now, here's your hosts, Michael and Arthur.

MICHAEL: Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to the SEO show. We've got three hellos because we are triply as excited as we normally are this week, aren't we Arthur?

ARTHUR: We're very excited. You sound very excited today.

MICHAEL: I am excited. I am excited. Are you touching your mic there? I hear you touching your mic.

ARTHUR: Am I touching it? You can see my hands. Look. Okay. All right.

MICHAEL: All right. Cool. Listen, this is the pitfalls of recording from our homes instead of the studio, but you know what? The world's opening back up at the moment. So we'll be back in our studio in no time. Maybe even next week, right? Yeah. Why not? Oh, wow. That's exciting. Okay. But that's not what we're excited about. We are excited about the topic of this week's episode because we're addressing something that we run into in the real world, running SEO campaigns all the time for clients. And that is the timings of campaigns and what you can expect as a campaign rolls out. And we're hoping that the stuff we cover off will show, you know, what's realistic with timings because often, you know, people will engage in SEO agency and they know that it takes time, you know, all SEO people will say it takes time, takes time. But then as soon as the client's on board, they kind of want things to move quicker.

ARTHUR: Yeah, which is understandable. But it's, you know, I think it's all about setting expectations at the very start of the campaign. So the client knows exactly what they're getting at each stage. And that way you avoid any kind of awkward conversations later on down the track. You know, it's very common after the first month or the second month that, you know, clients will start questioning results and it's just making it clear that, you know, the campaign is working. It just requires a bit more time.

MICHAEL: Absolutely. And so. It's a bit of a tricky situation because if you're investing time with a bad agency, you know, 4 months, 5 months, 6 months, 12 months, that's all just thrown down the sink, you know, while you're sitting there waiting for results. So, for bad agencies saying it takes time and a good agency saying it takes time, you just want to be sure that you're working with a good agency to begin with. So, we've, you know, other episodes have dealt with that but, you know, let's all agree that it does take time. So, we're going to talk about, you know, at the end of month 1, the end of month 3, the end of month 6, the end of month 12, realistically, what you should expect to have been done, you know, the deliverables, the reporting, the results expected at each of those milestones. Yep. Every SEO agency has their way of doing things. So, things will differ a little bit, but realistically, everything we cover up here is a must-have, right?

ARTHUR: Yeah. I mean, I guess the general onboarding will all be the same. You still have the same deliverables. It's just timings might be a bit different.

MICHAEL: Yep. And yeah, you were saying you've worked at three agencies, right? And they all sort of do much the same as what we're about to talk about. Yeah.

ARTHUR: A hundred percent. I mean, it's stuff that needs to get done to, I guess, move forward in the SEO campaign. All right.

MICHAEL: Well, with that being said, let's ramp up the excitement out there. We're getting into it month one.

ARTHUR: All right. Month one. Let's go.

MICHAEL: So we're going to say by the end of the month, this is what should have happened.

ARTHUR: So at the, at the end of the first month, you should expect a couple of deliverables. So I'll just list, go through the list. So the first one would be a technical audit. So basically just running through the site and making sure there's no technical issues. So things like, you know, crawl errors, you know, 404s, like redirect loops, things like that. So making sure that the site is technically sound. If there are any issues, putting together a prioritized list of issues you want to address, basically, the ones that will, I guess, help the campaign the most at the start. kind of let it trickle down throughout the duration of the campaign. The next one would be keyword research. So just preliminary keyword research using the tools available to us to figure out what people would be searching to find the client site. And that would feed into the keyword mapping and then obviously the content strategy later on down the track. One thing that we like to do is a quick wins audit. So basically, we've created this little, I guess, checklist of items that we like to tick off at the start of the campaign. And this allows us to basically get, I guess, the fundamentals in place at the very start. So we start seeing results a lot faster because we found that A traditional onboarding, it takes a while for the deliverables to get sent to the client. So it can take a bit of time for the recommendations to get implemented. So what we like to do is actually just implement the basics straight to the bat.

MICHAEL: Yeah, so an example might be, let's say their homepage, we want the most obvious keyword in the title tag, the H1 tag, the body copy, straight away so that, you know, it's a no-brainer, you don't need to do research, you don't need to have a client approve it all, you want to get it up there so that it you know, Google's finding it. And of course, it depends on what the client has in place to begin with. But yeah, it's always good to try and get some of those early wins. Of course, yeah. What we're sorry, sorry to interrupt, what we should probably mention here is, you know, what we're talking about this whole episode is going to be through the lens of like a general service business, you know, like a business looking to generate leads for their sales team, decent size, decent level of competition. It's not what we talked about, it's not going to be applicable for every business, you know, super complex, ecom sites, sites, e-commerce sites, that sort of stuff. So yeah, that's just a little thing we forgot to cover off, but I wanted to call it. So with that interruption out of the way, let's get back into it. The other thing, backlink audit, right? It was pretty big at the start of the campaign.

ARTHUR: Yeah. So just using the tools available, again, Ahrefs, Search Console and having a look to see if there's any dodgy, shitty links in there. And then if there are disavowed links at the start of the campaign.

MICHAEL: Probably also look at the main competitors backlinks and just look for opportunities for your link building in the future as well.

ARTHUR: Definitely. And then the last thing here is foundation link building. So basically just building out, you know, citations and brand links, which form, I guess, the foundation of our link building campaign later on in later months.

MICHAEL: Yep. So that, that, when we say brand, it's just, you know, your business on a directory most of the time. And these don't really do anything for your SEO authority or anything like that. They're just links that Google needs to see that all businesses have that allow you to be a bit more adventurous with your authority link building in the future. Adventurous, yeah. The other thing is on the reporting front, you absolutely need a snapshot or benchmark of like where your site's at and maybe where it's been for the past 12 months or even longer. So, you have some sort of benchmark to measure success against. How do you know your SEO is working if you don't know where you were at the start? So, in that first month or even before the campaign really starts, your SEO agency should be making very clear that here's where you are and we're going to be seeking to improve on X, Y and Z, for example, your traffic, your rankings, your revenue. What else? And then at the end of the month, you need to have your first monthly report and meeting with the agency. So reporting could be anything, could be a PDF, could be Excel, could be a dashboard, Data Studio, and it could have all sorts of different metrics. In the main, you want to see your traffic, your rankings, your conversions. But really what you're looking for in that first month is how does this agency report? How do they communicate? Are they explaining things in a way that is easy to understand or are they using mumbo-jumbo and maybe not even reporting or not meeting with you? So it's more about sussing out the relationship in that first month as well more so than results because honestly, there probably won't be any results in that first month, right?

ARTHUR: No, of course. It takes time, obviously. And a lot of the first month is just geared towards getting the onsite up to scratch. So until that's up to scratch, you're not going to see results straight away.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So really at this stage, you just want to be happy with the deliverables provided, the quality of them, the depth, the breadth of them, and then good communication, good service from the agency. You know, they're responding to your emails there. Once you're a customer, once you've gone past that sales process, are they treating you as well as they were before you were a customer? That would be month one. Let's move on to the end of month three, your first 90 days with an agency. You can expect a little bit more. In terms of deliverables, what would we have normally done and what should someone expect from an agency?

ARTHUR: So I guess in terms of deliverables, I mentioned before the keyword mapping. So I guess straight after the first month, you'd map out all the keywords to all the landing pages on the site, making sure that you're targeting the right keywords, that there's no keyword cannibalization. So no two pages competing against one another. And you can also start recommending new pages. So off the back of the keyword research, you might find this opportunity to create location pages or there might be a gap, like a content gap somewhere so you can start driving more traffic that way. I guess on the topic of content, you would start auditing the content on the site that's there already. If there is no content, then it's time to start ordering content. So briefing in a copywriter, you know, getting adequate copy for the pages and optimizing using different tools. Like we like to use our own tool Natch, but there's different tools out there like Page Optimizer Pro and yeah, just making sure that it's optimized, it's targeting the right keywords and making sure you're giving that page the best chance of ranking as possible.

MICHAEL: Um, what else? Technical audit should be, you know, the priority stuff that was identified in the tech audit really by the end of month three, the big ticket items definitely should be done for sure.

ARTHUR: Um, and then you can start kind of ticking off, I guess, the medium, low priority items as you go along.

MICHAEL: Um, link building as well, I would say by the end of month three, you would have some authority links, like decent for sure. And you can keep like as business, You know, some agencies will report on the links they build, others don't. So look, you can ask the agency, you know, what links have you been building? Can you show me them? Just see their answer. And you can also use, oh, sorry, go on.

ARTHUR: I was going to say you want transparency when it comes to link building because.

MICHAEL: Transparency. I thought you said transparency. No, why would I say that?

ARTHUR: We're inventing words on the SEO show. Transparency. God, I hope I didn't say transparency. I guess we'll find out soon.

MICHAEL: I'm going to go back and edit you saying it into it just to make sure. But you do want transparency or transparency. Yeah, absolutely. And if they don't want to report on links, if they're holding back on it, that's a big warning bell. Yeah, definitely.

ARTHUR: But look, I've seen, I've seen agencies that are transparent in link building and they have some very, very questionable links. So it's, it's important to know what a good link is as well. So yeah, I guess a lot of clients won't know that they'll just see a list of websites and often they'll look at the quantity of equality. So there have been situations where, you know, a previous agency might've provided, let's just say 15 links, but they were all crap. And then they start questioning, Oh, why, why have you only built five? So it's about educating them as well and letting them know, you know, these links in the past that you have been building have been rubbish and you know, the links that we're building are good. So yeah, making, making sure they're aware of the type of link building that we're doing.

MICHAEL: Yep. As a client as well, you can keep an eye on that stuff yourself by using a tool like Ahrefs and just jump in there, see the referring domains report and see how many links have pointed to the site in the last 7 days, 30 days, 60 days. Now, this tool doesn't always get all of the links right away, but it will give you an idea. If you've been working with someone for 3 months, by the end of that 3-month period, you should be able to jump in Ahrefs and see that some links have been built. Um, that's really, um, that's the main things in terms of deliverables, right. In terms of the end of the first three months.

ARTHUR: Yeah. I think after that you start moving on to content and things, but I guess making sure you have all your keywords mapped out, making sure that the site's technically sound and then moving on to authority link building. Yeah.

MICHAEL: And content creation is normally just an on link buildings, ongoing content creation usually is ongoing as well.

ARTHUR: Yeah, it's ongoing because at the start you'd be doing content for, I guess, the main site, the landing pages, but then as you go on, you'd be doing additional content. Like I mentioned, location pages and things like that. And then later on down the track, having a content calendar for blog posts and additional content.

MICHAEL: Yep. So in terms of the agency keeping in touch with you in the reporting, At a bare minimum, you should expect over those 3 months, a monthly report and a meeting to discuss the results, the wins and losses and next steps. So, that's 3 reports, 3 meetings at a bare minimum. Yeah. Throughout the month, you want good ad hoc service and consultancy. You have a question, they get back to you quickly. You send an email, it doesn't go unanswered, that sort of stuff. At the end of that three-month period, realistically, there should be some sort of a review, you know, a quarterly review or first 90 days review, whatever, just to sort of show, you know, where are you now versus the start of the campaign? How are you tracking against the roadmap that you had in place at the start? Yeah. Are there any adjustments needed? And really, you'll know by the end of that three-month period what the relationship's like. Are they sort of responsive? Are they servicing you well? Do they know their stuff? Or is something suspicious, you know? Are you sort of just putting money into a black hole? Exactly, yeah. What about results? That's a tricky one, right?

ARTHUR: Three months. Well, I think at the three month mark, you should start seeing some results. So there might not be bottom line results just yet. So you might not see a massive increase in revenue, but you should start seeing an improvement in rankings. So, you know, looking into Ahrefs and looking at, I guess, the organic visibility across a different range of keywords. So you want to see, organic visibility improve over that three-month period. It might not be in the position one to three keywords, but it definitely should be, you know, deeper keywords on page two and onwards. Yeah. Making sure, you know, looking into Ahrefs and seeing if they are actually building links, having a look at the referring domains, having a look at the, of the website and seeing if that's improving.

MICHAEL: Alrighty. Well, yeah, all makes a lot of sense to me. Let's, let's chat month six. All right, double month three. We're six months into a campaign here. Double month three? Yeah, you know, you've done the first three months and really, from there, you know, again, you're going to be working month to month with your agency, you're going to be getting your reporting, all that sort of stuff, but I would say the next big milestone is month six. And look, at this point with deliverables, All of your technical should be done well and truly. You know, if it can't be done in the first six months, you've got some serious problems with your site or an agency that's not really moving very quickly. So really, it's just a matter, as we spoke about before, really authority link building is going to be the bread and butter at this point. And then, you know, content creation, ongoing new pages, blog content, that sort of stuff. And it's going to be also a matter of monitoring, you know, regular health checks just to make sure that the technical stuff you've done, the onsite you've done, It's all hunky dory, you know, it's all the way it should be. Um, maybe backlink profile, you know, keeping an eye on that and, um, disavow file updates if you come across dodgy links and that sort of stuff.

ARTHUR: That's it. Yeah. Regularly checking into search console, making sure there's no errors, making sure the site's performing well, looking at the core vital metrics, seeing if you can improve those. Speed of the website. Speed of the website.

MICHAEL: But really the bulk of the actual SEO work that an agency should be doing for you is going to be on that link building. That's where all your dollars are going to be going at this point. The foundation should be strong with your site. Probably internal linking as well needs to be well and truly in place. So like all of your existing content should have been audited and all the internal links set up to, you know, between the existing content and then also with all the new content. So yeah, there's no excuses for any SEO holes in your site at month six.

ARTHUR: I agree.

MICHAEL: You agree? It was like you were worried about there being holes, like, wait a minute, do I have holes in my campaigns at Month6? Absolutely not. What about reporting at Month6? You work with this agency, what should you have expected from them by way of keeping in touch?

ARTHUR: So at month six, you really should be looking to have a similar to a QBR, just a six month review, just to kind of see where, where the site is at, where the campaign's at. If there's anything that can be done to improve, you know, six months is a long time in the grand scheme of things. So, you know, the, the client's objectives and goals might've changed. So just resetting those. But likewise, like we touched on previously, you know, having, having that monthly call, you should have had, by month 6, 6 monthly reports and 6 phone calls to go through all the results.

MICHAEL: And I would probably say at this point, you might be looking at, if your SEO is working, which we'll touch on in a moment, results you should have expected, it might be that you're looking to expand the campaign into other areas or activity based on a particular, you know, result that you've had. So, you might be looking to scale up against a certain category and really go all in because you've got a bit of confidence that the SEO is working or expand to other markets because you've got a bit of confidence that the SEO is working. So those sorts of decisions and the reporting should be feeding into it from your agency. They should be sort of giving you an idea about what's possible in that regard. But let's talk results because by month six, there definitely should be some results. Definitely, yeah. depending on how competitive it is, of course, but you know, you should have some strong rankings. So not just, you know, visibility improving, but we're talking keywords moving up into the top three, lots of page one keywords, you know,

ARTHUR: Actually, you know what, it depends again, like if it's a brand new website, it still might take a little bit longer to see keywords in the top three. You should see some less competitive keywords, but if you're starting from absolute scratch, you know, no domain history, no links, then it might take, you know, upwards of 12 months sometimes, but definitely improvements in rankings.

MICHAEL: Yeah, I'm going to argue with you here and say by month six, even on a new site, I'm not saying like the ultimate most high value competitive head terms in your space. No, I agree. I agree. But if you're not seeing some, that's a fair bit of link building that should have been done. And if you don't, it might be a sign of some other problem with either your content or the domain itself or who knows. But anyway, You want to be seeing an increase in traffic as well, organic traffic. So it's because it's not all about rankings as we always talk about. Like rankings are just a way of seeing that things are working, but you can, um, you could be driving significantly more organic traffic to your site, even if you don't necessarily have those top three rankings. So, you know, are you driving a lot more long tail traffic to your site? Like all those random searches that people type in. And of course, the important thing to a business owner is not traffic and rankings, it's conversions, leads, sales, whatever that might be. So do you have more from SEO as a channel, your organic channel, than you did at the start? You should, ideally, by round six. The strength of your domain as well, you know, jump in Ahrefs, run a report. How strong is your domain now compared to at the start? You know, you should be able to look at your benchmark report that was done and compare.

ARTHUR: Yeah. By month six, you should see some sort of improvement.

MICHAEL: Absolutely. More referring domains, stronger DR score if you're in Ahrefs, that sort of stuff. And then of course, like as we spoke about visibility across the board, you should just have more keywords ranking in Google, like a lot more than you did on day zero. Now, do you, uh, do you agree with that or do you want to, do you want to have another argument about any of those points that were sort of on the same page? What do you reckon?

ARTHUR: I like, I still stand by my point that it just depends on where, I guess, where the site was at, where you started. I still think that, you know, in situations sometimes you might, you know, it might take a bit longer to start seeing a big increase in revenue just because if a site has no history, if it didn't rank previously, you know, getting it to the point where it's driving consistent revenue and improving, it can take time, but not really an argument, just the, I guess, a disclaimer slash asterisks. Like it very much depends on where the site was at when you started. So if the site had, has got history, you know, it's been around for a bit, then a hundred percent by the six month mark, you should start seeing a pretty, pretty good, like increase in both traffic and conversions.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Yeah. I think we're on the same page in that, like, uh, it is month 12. I'm, I'm, ROI is probably not going to be even positive by month 6 because you've been investing month 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. But you should be seeing those little inklings, those little sort of starting blocks, I was about to say. Yeah, starting block, I guess. But anyway, you should be seeing signs of life. I think a starting block is what swimmers jump off into a pool though in like Olympics.

ARTHUR: Or runners, yeah, when they're about to do a sprint.

MICHAEL: All right. Well, let's move on from the support chat. We'll go to month 12. You know, in the SEO world, it's going to be 12 months, you know, you've got to be ready for like at least 12 months. So this is a big one. Like where are things going to be at month 12?

ARTHUR: So at month 12, really the two main things are going to be link building. So authority link acquisition, just getting as many strong authoritative links that you can to the domain. building up that domain authority. And that's ultimately what's going to move the needle once all the onsite is, you know, up to scratch and, you know, more or less perfect at this stage. Um, and the other thing, again, we kind of touched on would be content. So just, you know, putting out content, that's going to drive more traffic to the site because you've already optimized the pages that you wanted to optimize. It's about finding where else you can drive that traffic to or traffic from.

MICHAEL: Ad hoc consultancy as well around, key things going on in your business. So, an example is, you know, for a florist, Valentine's Day and Mother's Day are like the really big ticket dates on the calendar. Absolutely. Your SEO agency should be working towards that, you know, in the 3, 4, 5 months ahead of that date, you know, it shouldn't be something that's done last minute. So, your agency should be giving you ad hoc consultancy around key events and supporting different initiatives that you have as a business, you know, whether you're expanding to a new market or launching a new product. that needs to be fed into your SEO strategy. And you know, you would expect that over a 12 month campaign, there has been an element of that ad hoc planning and consultancy going on as well.

ARTHUR: Um, but it's just about maintaining the site. Basically, you know, you're doing your health checks, you're making sure that the site's performing well, you're constantly, you know, running audits on it, making sure the site speeds up to scratch, making sure it's, there's no errors is everything's just running smoothly.

MICHAEL: Yep. And in terms of reporting, There should have been at least 12 monthly reports and phone calls and three QBRs by this point, so quarterly business reviews. It's just a term we use to describe those quarterly catch-ups. And then ad hoc consultancy should have been consistent throughout the campaign, so they should be coming to you with ideas and sort of input on different things you've got going on in the business, as we said. And then, you know, your inquiries, calls, are they responded to quickly the entire time you've been working with them? You know, good agencies are getting back to you. servicing you well over that 12-month period.

ARTHUR: Yeah. And look, by 12 months, you should see good results. You should see a lot more traffic coming to the site. You should see a big increase in conversions, big increase in ranking. So I think after the 12-month point, there's no excuses. If you haven't seen results by then, then you're probably not going to see results. With that agency or that plan.

MICHAEL: So yeah, definitely at month 12, your ROI would be positive. So you should be making significantly more from the SEO channel than you have invested in the campaign. So let's say you invest five grand a month over the course of a year, that's 60 grand. Over the first six months, you might be making zero dollars extra, but then over the next six months, you might make a gram more a month, two grand more a month, three grand more a month, 10 grand more a month. So then all of a sudden the ROI starts getting very juicy. That's the beauty of SEO when it all works. And you know, around that 12 month period, you definitely should be ROI positive, really. Otherwise something needs to change. So that's pretty much it in a nutshell, isn't it? If your campaign is rolling out along these lines, then you're pretty much getting what we would consider to be a good SEO service. If you're not, if you're not getting reports or you get to the 12-month mark and there's no results, then yeah, it's time to maybe ask a few questions or hit Arthur up. Give him a call on the weekend, Sunday night.

ARTHUR: He'll be happy to talk to you. Why not? I would.

MICHAEL: All right. Well, his mobile number is 040… No, just kidding. Just kidding. But look, thank you for listening to our bad jokes and our SEO chat for this week. Hope you enjoyed that episode. That's episode 18 in the books. We're almost 20. Wow. Who would have thought it? But look, we'll be back next week with another episode of the SEO show. And in the meantime, happy SEOing.

ARTHUR: Toodaloo.