Realistic SEO Timescales, Part 2: How Long It Really Takes (2019 Archive)

Recorded in July 2019 and published as part of a dated historical record. It reflects how search worked then, not current advice.

Why isn't your web designer an SEO?

You've got to make sure you're talking Google's language. And here's something we see a lot: web designers. Be careful not to confuse these guys with people who know what they're doing on SEO — that is a massive misconception. They're designers. They build code, they build your website. Very, very few of them actually know anything, in reality, to do with SEO and how to rank a site. Yes, they'll do some on-page work, but they're not realistically going to spend time building something like schema. A lot of them wouldn't even know what schema is — well, they might be able to look it up on Google.

What is schema and why does it matter?

Schema is Google's actual language, and Google would love you to write schema into the back of your site. There are tools to do it now, but most sites don't have it.

A good way to test whether your site's got schema: Google has a schema testing tool. Type that into Google, find it, and see if your site has schema built in. If not, and you're paying for SEO, ask your agency or the person doing your SEO why you haven't got one — because it's one of the very first basics somebody should have in a site.

You're talking about simple things like telling Google your actual address in a particular format, your opening hours, the prices you charge, the services you've got. You can go into hundreds and hundreds of schema tags: individual products with prices and categories; if you're an author, you can list yourself as an author with your name and the articles you've published. Reviews work really well. Do a bit of research into schema if you've never heard of it or used it before.

How should you use Google Analytics and goals?

The other thing you're going to want to use is Google Analytics. Basic — and yet I still come across websites without Analytics in them, let alone using it. A lot of sites say "yeah, we've plugged it in — we don't look at it though".

I'm not asking you to look at it on a daily basis, but you should be using it to see where your traffic's coming from, see your bounce rates — they call that acquisition. And you should be tracking goals right through all of this. If we've set up goals properly and we're achieving more and more of them, Google sees that as a signal. A goal might just be a form fill; it might be a phone call, a particular product sale; you might assign a value to a view of an article or a video. All sorts of goals can be set up. You should also be using UTM tracking links — those absolutely need to be built into your site and all of your marketing collateral.

What does Google Search Console tell you?

The other thing you want to use is Google Search Console — it used to be Webmaster Tools. Search Console is going to show you the actual terms people have typed in to come through to your site, where your phrases rank, and which terms are actually generating some volume of clicks. And if you've set your goals up properly, you'll see which terms are converting for you. Once you start getting traffic organically, this is where you'll see which organic search terms are working — and which of those are converting into goals.