Frustration I would say is the most linked word with this question. Whilst it is a valid question, there are many answers to it that could lead to a whole series of blog posts on the manner of SEO. However here are some answers to help you understand.

Analyzing Competition

First of all, if you’re just starting your SEO then you can bet the shirt on your back that there are already competitors ranking for the phrases that you wish to also rank for. This in itself is a disadvantage as your competitors could have quite a head start in the race for #1 listings. And as you’re just setting off, now far behind your competition, it can take some time to overtake them.

Link Building Authority

Search engines and Google in Particular look to the quantity and quality of links to a website when determining where to rank websites. Analysing your Competitors backlinks can be an enduring task as you have to find the truly quality links that are shared by all the top sites for the key phrases you wish to link for. After this you then have to start the process of getting a link to your site from the aforementioned shared top links of your competitors.

Overtaking Competitors

That’s just the start, as you then have to go out and find and build your own links to show Google why you deserve to be ranked above your competitors. There are quite a few ways to generate and build links to your site including Creating Content, guest posts, blog posts, social sharing to name but a few.
Then there’s the onsite structure of your website that needs to be streamlined particularly for SEO. For example, you need to ensure each image file you have contains a relevant title tag and alt tag, each keyphrase has to have a page dedicated to it. Page titles, headers and more all have to be fine tuned to ensure the best results.

To much too fast = bad

Back in the day it was literally a case of “Whoever has the most keywords wins”. Then Google evolved to include a philosophy of “Whoever has the most links wins”. Naturally this left Google’s rankings wide open to manipulation where a spammer could just outsource link building and generate 500 links overnight to rocket up the rankings. If someone overtook them they could then repeat this procedure. Because of this and the advancement of Google’s algorithm, it can now detect a lot of links generated at once and apply punishments to sites Google believes has violated it’s guidelines.

So all in all, there are quite a few reasons that SEO can take so long.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey