How Long Does SEO Take To Work?

Impatient with the distinct lack of traffic, clicks, and conversions on your law firm’s website? Concerned that your site isn’t rapidly rising to the top of the search engine results pages for various Google search terms? The days of “If you build it, they will come,” are long gone when it comes to internet traffic. Since the first website was created on August 6 of 1991, the rise of website prevalence and competition has been meteoric, even for law firms. Today there are more than 1.88 billion websites your law firm must compete with in order to get the attention of your desired audience. This is why the field of SEO, or search engine optimization, has risen to such prominence and why law firms, like yours, need a little help getting the search engine ranking and organic internet traffic you seek.

Unfortunately for your firm, ignoring the problem won’t solve it. In fact, ignoring it can relegate you to the far recesses and forgotten realms of the World Wide Web, which is definitely not where you want your website to be. After all, you’ve spent a lot of time, money, and effort to make your website a virtual representation of your business on the web. You’re proud of those efforts and you’d like to have them pay off on your law firm’s behalf. This desire is why optimization of your website is essential.

When Should You Expect SEO Results for Your Law Firm?

Of course, once you begin learning about search engine optimization the next question quickly becomes how long does SEO take to work? The truth is that there are many moving parts involved in an effective SEO strategy. These parts take time to work individually and must eventually work together for your SEO efforts to pay off for your law firm. If you try the DIY route to promote your website, you’ll find that SEO success takes even longer to occur. However, if you put a team of experts to work on your behalf, you’ll see results much sooner. How soon? Call Array Digital today at 757.333.3021 to learn how we can help you achieve your SEO success goals with our proven SEO success strategies and techniques and to learn how quickly you can expect to see favorable SEO results for your firm.

It would be nice if there was a specific prescribed amount of time for digital marketing and SEO efforts to pay off. Sadly, this is not the case for any website on today’s internet. The truth is that not all SEO strategies are created equally. We’ve mentioned above that SEO involves many moving parts working independently and collectively to help you achieve higher search engine results page (SERP) rankings. These are just a few of those moving parts:

• Keyword research to find competitive keywords as well as low competition keywords
• Creating quality content for your website, blog, social media, content marketing, and more
• Building backlinks with a focus on quality links
• Social media strategies for SEO
• Technical SEO (including metadata, 404 errors, non-relevant pages, and other elements that aren’t always visible but impact search ranking)
• Improving page speed and other user experience issues.
• Researching and understanding search intent, search volume for specific keywords, and the motivation of searchers

With all these things in mind, it takes most law firms four to six months to begin seeing increased traffic and SEO ranking for their target pages. Significant results, however, can take longer, even up to one year depending on how much keyword competition exists for your practice area (and your target keywords) and how many local law firms with which your practice is competing.

How Do You Know if SEO is Working for Your Firm?

Some SEO strategies are better than others. It is in your law firm’s best interest to work with an SEO agency that has unique and specific experience helping practices, like yours, achieve their SEO goals. There are a few key elements that will let you know your SEO efforts are working for your law firm, including things like the number of impressions your pages are getting as well as their CTR (click-through rate).

Array Digital knows that quality content is one of the most important factors for on-page SEO to consider. The second essential ingredient for a lawyer when it comes to SEO is link building. Backlinks improve authority, which builds trust with search engines and audiences alike, something every attorney can understand. Another important factor to take into account is that you don’t get so caught up in your efforts to appeal to search engines that you forget to make your website and efforts appealing to your target audience.

Additionally, don’t underestimate the importance of local SEO. With nearly two billion websites competing for the attention of internet audiences, local SEO helps bring those numbers down substantially by marketing to your local audience, which is likely part of your target demographic. It helps to narrow the competition for target keywords and search engine ranking results significantly.

Why Does SEO Take Time to Work?

Because SEO is such a painstaking process with many moving parts and various elements working together for a “big picture” approach, it simply takes time for most law firms to begin seeing significant results. The great thing about SEO, though, is this: once you begin seeing results and improved rankings, your SEO efforts will sustain themselves over time. At least, until Google’s algorithm changes and your efforts need to be tweaked to adjust to these changes.

Once you master various ranking factors to achieve a better position in the SERPs, it will take some time for your position to fall, even if you quit investing in your SEO efforts altogether. However, that is not advised for any law firm that wishes to remain competitive for relevant search queries.

If you’re asking, how long does SEO take, it is important to change your view of digital marketing. Digital marketing is a different beast than traditional print, film, billboard, and radio advertising. An effective SEO or digital marketing strategy is a long-term proposition, one that will provide a positive return on investment for many months to come. When you work with SEO experts to create a quality SEO campaign, you will find that conversions do occur. Your results will pay off over time. These results are likely to include the following:

• Higher SERPs (search engine result pages) rankings
• A higher-quality backlink profile with more backlinks coming your way
• Increased organic traffic
• Better conversions, both in quantity and quality

In fact, your SEO work will continue to reward your law firm as long as you learn to view these efforts as a marathon rather than a sprint.

Why is a Slow Build in Organic Traffic Better for Your Law Firm?

You may have heard that there are methods to achieve higher SEO ranking faster. Many of these “faster” methods are referred to as “black hat” SEO methods. While they may provide faster short-term rankings for your law firm’s website, they will ultimately bring the wrath of Google and other search engines down upon your website. The end result is a much longer and slower journey back up in the rankings if your website is ever able to recover.

For this reason, it is better to avoid the risk of being identified as an unethical (something no law firm wants to be associated with) or black hat website. Plus you get the benefit of avoiding the penalties search engines levy upon these sites. Take the slow and steady climb to the top of the first page that legitimate SEO efforts deliver and watch your metrics soar as a result. Lawyers seeking aggressive, sustainable, high-quality SEO will value the SEO strategy that Array Digital offers our clients.

Optimize Your Options and Expand Your Business with SEO

Array Digital understands the challenges your law firm faces when it comes to standing out on the World Wide Web. We’ve dedicated our time, talent, and efforts to mastering the steps involved to help your website achieve first-page rankings in the search engines in a manner that is effective and sustainable in an acceptable and appropriate time frame.

Savvy business owners understand that a long SEO strategy pays off best over time. The same is true for your law firm. You don’t have to start from scratch building a new website to get great results. You do need the right SEO services to help you grow your search engine profile. Array Digital is so much more than a typical digital marketing agency. We will work with you to manage every algorithm update, improve domain authority, and attract more inbound links so that it feels like you have a new site to call your home on the web.

Visit the Array Digital webpage today and fill out our form to request a free consultation or call 757.333.3021 to discuss your search engine optimization needs and how we can help you accomplish your conversion goals as quickly and effectively as possible. We’ll help you tame the search engine beast so that your website gets the organic traffic you need to enjoy true SEO success!