Trust and Time: The Two Ts of SEO

You've probably heard the saying, "Anything worth doing is worth doing correctly." This is true when it comes to implementing a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy for your real estate business. With the proper strategy in place, you will see your business reach new heights by making its way to the first page of any search engine.

However, there is no quick and easy shortcut to real results. If you want to get to the first page of search results, you have to be prepared for the long ride ahead.

Why does SEO take so long?

SEO is not something that happens overnight. While there is no hard and fast rule for how long SEO will take, anywhere from six to nine months for results to start showing is a good benchmark. A major (and the most time consuming) part of SEO is the process of creating and promoting good content both on and off your website. The objective is to promote your business through content that people like, share, and link to, and that takes time. By constantly producing high quality content, search engines like Google will take notice of your consistency and build signals of trust, which will increase your rankings.

The SEO Process

Homes.com's SEO experts go through a two-phase process to get SEO Fuel subscribers' website content ready and to give their sites the boost they need to beat out the competition. During the first few months, we focus on onsite optimization to make sure the website content is relevant and crawlable.

Crawlable websites are websites that search engines can view and index each page as important to a search term. Search term relevancy and quality can be shown through clean code, a good code-to-text ratio, and a large amount of important website metrics that help search engines determine how an Internet user would perceive and use your website.

The second stage is offsite optimization. Offsite optimization primarily focuses on promoting your content through high quality directory submissions, social bookmarking, and guest articles or blog posts published on another relevant website.

The SEO Timeline

You need to understand that every business, even in the real estate industry, is different and that every website is different, so it is difficult to predict an exact timeline. Even comparing any two businesses within the same metro area is challenging because there are so many different variables, including which keywords are targeted and the activity of the competition in that market. All of these things will affect the time it will take to see the results you are looking for. However, there should be trackable checkpoints for you to measure the progress. Here is a general guide you can use to judge how your SEO strategy is working:

• Around the third month, you should start seeing movement within your SEO rankings for targeted keywords. By this time, onsite edits are completed and search engines will start building trust with your website. If, for any reason, you see no change in your rankings, then you will want to stop and analyze what you're doing. You might be using the wrong keywords or your content isn't showing relevancy to your keywords.

• Around the sixth month, rankings will continue to improve. Some of your keyword searches might even begin to show page one rankings, while others are still behind. Remember, the closer you get to page one, the harder the competition becomes. Take this time to create a list of keywords that are behind and focus on getting them to the number one spot by creating high quality content relevant to those keywords. Also, you might want to consider letting those keywords stay behind, because if they have been hovering around the second page of Google for a while, then those ahead of you aren't going to let their positions go that easily.

• By around the ninth month, you should be seeing the results wanted: page one results for most or all keywords. Remember that SEO is an ongoing process that does not end once you reach the top. Now you have to maintain your status on page one through continued focus on your SEO strategy. Try implementing these SEO trends to your SEO strategy to stay on top.

With the understanding that no SEO strategy is going to accomplish your goals in a couple of days, weeks, or even months, you can prepare yourself for the months ahead.

To view the original article, visit the Homes.com blog.