What to Expect

Having a great, high ranking website can get your phones, or the phones of your clients ringing, and your E-mail box filled with requests for quotes rather quickly. However, as you wait for your SEO to kick in, it may be a good idea to get a few new customers from some traditional marketing, networking with other business professionals, and Google Adwords, as those methods often produce results faster than SEO. Later, more and more of your business will come from your SEO and social media efforts, and also word of mouth.

You’ll know when and if you want to slow down on your Adwords, as your site climbs the ranks to the top of Google. SEO, and other free marketing will probably replace your Ad Words advertising rather quickly, as Adwords can get to be a bit pricey. Even though you’ll eventually want to try and phase out Adwords, it will be a good idea for you to learn Adwords marketing from a pro, for both your own business and the businesses of your clients should you plan to run an agency. The default settings at Adword will gobble up your budget and give you poor results if you don’t know what you’re doing. So get educated on the right way to run your AdWords campaigns before beginning.

Your SEO efforts can pay off in as little as a couple weeks, or sometimes a couple months, but the real benefits will come when you reach the top of Google for your best-chosen keywords. Realize that can take several months or longer depending on the difficulty of your niche, the competition, and how correctly and persistently you stick to the program.

If you have chosen the right business model, you should be in this for the long-haul. Keep plugging away. You will eventually reach your goals. Remember the old saying: “Quitters never win, and winners never quit.”

Setting up your website should take you about 1-2 weeks, depending on how hard you work at it.

Setting up Videos, Articles, Web 2.0, Google Places etc, should take another week (but you will often have to wait for the confirmation postcard from Google).

Implementing your basic SEO strategy that incorporates all the above marketing and your money site should take another week. Your SEO efforts can take a couple months before they kick in full force, unless you started with a healthy seasoned domain that was already ranking on Google.

Your offline marketing will be done on its own schedule.

So you could very well be seeing clients from your efforts within a month of starting.

Once you’re getting calls and seeing customers you will start to build a base of happy repeat customers who will need more services and who will refer other customers. This building of a good base will go on for months, and will give you the experience, a cash-base, and breathing-room you will need going into the future.

Don’t get too comfortable at this point. It will soon be time to grow.