If we take a good look at the witch’s brew that is SEO, we can easily recognise the algorithms and probabilities that go into the great cast-iron cooking pot known as search results. We can all appreciate the magic and wizardry that takes a simple, undoctored website and thrusts it onto the world stage. But the one thing, the one Eye of Newt that some clients can’t seem to get their hands around is the practice of patience. And this mana is perhaps one of the most important ingredients in the recipe for a successful SEO venture.
To be blunt, if an SEO firm is built on a foundation of strong ethics, they will offer a prescription of patience in order to let their work take effect. Changes will not take effect overnight – a curt snap of the refresh button is not going to bump you to the front of the line. When you look back at the development of an optimized website, chances are, you worked in a collaborative environment, either with a business partner or SEO staff to create you new site. But this relationship does not divorce itself because of a launch – in fact, it is in the vapor trails of your launch that you and the SEO pros will fine tune your creation. This is a tough pill to swallow in the instant gratification universe, but patience has a great ROI.
You remember the due diligence you conducted in the lead-up to launch? That is the same focus you should retain for after launch in the form of monitoring. Work with the SEO pros, or use your own muscle, but either way, you should track your optimized results over the course of a year, watching for changes in phraseology, spotting trends that may have initially slipped below your radar but have recently taken flight, or taking note of link traffic. As a writer, I often forget that language is an ever evolving thing, like bacteria that have been on this planet for millions of years, ever changing and evolving, languages are always new and improved. This is a central notion to remember about SEO – aside from the mathematics of the optimization equation, SEO plays in a space that is fluid. Language is ever evolving, especially the morph master English language, so your optimization is only ever relative to a point in time. Relevance is a moving target and it takes patience to track it down.
