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Paying $600 a month for SEO…when should I expect results?
I’m bleeding money here with zero clients. I built my own website which now has been audited and changes made. This website and Google My Business and a Facebook page were made 6 months ago. I ran my own google ad campaign for 2 months spending $800. I got 20 leads, and only 2 jobs from that, one of which was tiny, but one was big ($4000 profit).
What should I realistically expect? The SEO and site overhaul with audit was done in September. It’s small business and all about competing with other small businesses that are local.
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21 Replies
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You’re gonna get a wide range of answers, but the usual time-frame is between 3-12 months to see actual, tangible results.
By ‘site overhaul’, if you’re talking about moving from one domain to another, deleting/adding content, then that will hinder your ability to catch up quickly and will take some time for your rankings to come back.
SEO is an investment. You’re paying someone (who may or may not be qualified) to essentially take your business from nothing, to a lead-generating machine all at the whim of Google’s ranking signals that they need to understand and perfect.
If we’re talking about local SEO only, then realistically, you should see results faster because the competition is lower. I have no idea what your niche is, what keywords you’re targeting or who your competitors are, but local SEO tends to yield quicker results (in my opinion).
Do you rank for the local pack? (The result of 3 businesses in a map pack when you search for something locally?) If you don’t rank for anything related to your niche whatsoever, it’s usually a good indication that your GMB isn’t optimised enough.
If it’s purely local SEO, then you may want to ask what your SEO is actually doing because the competitive landscape is not as vast with local businesses.
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My idea is that 30% of income should be spend on advertising but it depends on nitche ofc.
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You should invest in Local SEO first.
How are your GMB and Bing Places performing?
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Have you done much on Facebook (apart from your page)? I see a lot of people looking for local services through neighbourhood Facebook groups. What are your reviews looking like on Google? Can you ask previous customers to leave a review for you to help boost them?
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Hey I work in a local niche with a ad spend of 10mm per year. I’ve seen GMB bring in 30% of our leads. If you need help optimizing your GMB listing message me. It’s not complicated but you will need to get great photos and videos. If you have time you can building manual citations for the hell of it.
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Paying $600 for… what? SEO it means search engine optimization and you can use a lot of methods, techniques to do this.
But my question, what about your marketing strategy? I inderstand it is a small business, the one of dozen companies in your city. But the marketing is a key point. SEO is a part of marketing. So, the set of SEO methods depends on your marketing strategy and your business goals.
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Does your SEO provide monthly reports showing growth for certain keywords? Most results come in after a few months, so moving from page 9 to page 2 looks great on a report, but won’t translate in business bc nobody goes to page 2
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SEO is a long term strategy. You need a short term customer acquisition strategy.
If you already ran a google ad campaign, spent $800 dollars and made $4000 profit, why aren’t you running that again???
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As others have said, you should get a detailed list of what SEO services are being performed on a monthly basis. Is he writing blogs? Is he getting you back links? Is he optimizing you’re inner pages with rich keyword copy? There’s probably over a hundred things they could be doing. Or they could be doing one thing poorly and charging you $600/month because you don’t know any better. If he’s doing everything RIGHT it usually takes about 6 months to see a change, but that change doesn’t mean #1 on Google.
If you’re a service based business, I would check out local business ads on Google. I believe their Pay Per Lead, not Pay Per Click. I would also focus on optimizing your Google My Business. That ranks much faster and you show up on Maps pretty high.
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How much traffic would a $600 AdWords budget get you? I always start with paid search so I can better understand search volume and conversion.
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You need to audit what type of content they are promoting for you? what types of backlinks they are creating for your website? Do they are active with forum discussions where people talking about your product or service?
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10% conversion from your Google ads is not bad at all. You should keep your ads going. If you are bleeding cash that badly you should be working on your ads, your conversion, and ways to make your ads more effective and more profitable. SEO is a 12 to 18 month effort to give it a realistic timeline. You probably need to update your site in the middle of that as well, if not at the beginning.
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SEO is a luxury product that takes time to produce, there are a lot of factors about your project left out. For example, what’s your industry, how was the website built, etc. From how you explained SEO is your businesses life-line/hail mary. Under those circumstances you rarely get the success you are looking for
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Is SEO the only marketing you’re doing? I would suggest putting together a plan that spans more than just SEO, Facebook and Google, especially with high local competition.
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Six months and no results? This sounds like money down the drain. You need to switch companies.
It does not take six months to rank, at least if you’re using a good company. A more reasonable time frame is 3 months.
What type of business is this? You should post your website.
