The Waiting Game of SEO

SEO is like any other form of marketing; it is a long term strategy that should be a permanent part of how you operate your business online. SEO is not a “quick fix”, if you’re success depends on immediate search engine visibility; you should be looking at Pay-Per-Click (PPC) strategies and not SEO.

SEO Requires Patience

When undertaking an SEO project, one thing to remember is that you will not see results overnight; SEO takes time to ramp up. How much time is dependent on many factors including:

• How Old is your Career Site URL?
  The older your website domain (URL) is the more trustworthy it is considered in the eyes of the search engines. If your career site has been around a while and has quality content that is useful to search engine users it will take less time to ramp up then a newly established domain.
  
  
• How Search Engine Friendly was your site before?
  If your career website had technical barriers that we’re previously stopping the search engine spiders from accessing your content, often you are able to see results fairly quickly. Keep in mind visibility increases over time and continued optimization efforts.
  
  
• Does your career site have Inbound Links ?
  Links from other topical related sites pointing to your career site count as votes of confidence in the eyes of search engines. The more you have, the more trust your website has. Search engine trust is a big factor in visibility.
  
  
• How competitive are the phrases you’re targeting?
  The more competitive a target phrase is, the longer you will likely have to wait to see results. It also means the more inbound links and content you will probably need. Your goal is to start with phrases that candidates use to search but have modest competition. If you’re hoping to achieve visibility for something as broad as “Jobs” it is unlikely to happen through SEO.

• Who are Your Competitors and What Are They Doing?
  You want to put yourself in a position where your SEO efforts are comparable to that of your competitors with an end goal of going above and beyond what they’re doing. For example; if your competitors are optimizing for the phrase “Minnesota Registered Nurse Job” and their website has 1,000 inbound links and 40 pages of content, we’ll need to work toward that goal in order to be able to compete for visibility.

Before starting any SEO or SEM strategy be sure to research your service provider. There is no barrier to entry for search marketing professionals which makes it very easy for someone to say they are an "expert" when that may not be the case.

In our industry we are used to using search engines to our advantage to research potential candidates it only makes sense that we would do the same for our potential service providers.