Why SEO Takes Time

Welcome, everybody, to another edition of the Zupo SEO Talk and Tea. Today we'll be talking about why SEO takes time. That's generally a question I always get asked a lot. SEO is a little bit unusual when it comes to marketing, because unlike other marketing platforms, there's an instantaneous kind of success. You can go ahead and get started with Facebook marketing quickly, Google Ads pretty quickly, but SEO does take a lot of time, so we're going to be discussing that today.

Also, because this is SEO Talk and Tea, we'll be discussing the tea we have. Today is a black tea, which I generally like when I want something a little bit stronger. If you've ever had a milk tea or any Boba shop kind of teas, you've probably had a black tea and it's probably what you think of when you think of tea, especially when it's iced with Boba, you're probably having a black tea.

But let's go ahead and get brewing and talking about why SEO takes time. I think the way to understand why SEO takes time is that we have to understand the context of search engines and SEO. A lot of people when they start SEO, they really want to rank overnight. They would say, "I have a great site. I have a great business. My competitors are already ranking. That's kind of unfair. Why can't I rank tomorrow?"

I think the best way to kind of understand why SEO is not so instantaneous, why you can't rank overnight, is to understand it from Google's perspective. Right? When Google, as a business, they are a search engine, of course, they're Alphabet, and now they have a lot of different other models. But for the simplicity sake, let's just focus on their search engine business.

For their search engine business, they make money by ensuring that their customers or users want to use those search engine. And the way that you want to make sure someone wants to use your search engine is to progressively and consistently give good results back. That's probably why we don't use other search platforms like Yahoo or Bing of the past. That's why a lot of us use Google, because it's fast and gives us good results. Now, the best way to understand this, then, is if Google wants to ensure that they're providing good results and that they're consistent, they want to make sure that whatever they're returning is of high value, and that's kind of why SEO takes a while.

Google likes to see relevance, authority, but also they want to see consistency. They want to see that you have a resume, and a track record of doing well in this space. They want to see that you have authority, that you've been publishing content, that you're known in the internet world for what you're doing, and the longer track record and history you have on your website, the better you'll do. It doesn't benefit Google to see a new website tomorrow, immediately rank it above everybody else, because how do they know that that website is strong, authoritative, relevant? They need to take some time to understand these things. Right? For SEO purposes, it doesn't benefit Google to rush these things. They want to see you take the time to invest, build your website, build its SEO assets, so that they can read the site, see that you're proving yourself, then they'll rank you later. Right? Once that you've done a good track record of good SEO work.

Now, this is a lot of personification and metaphorizing ... I don't know if that's a word ... but I'm making a metaphor of SEO. This isn't directly from Google's mouth, but as someone who has practiced it for very many years, this is the best way I feel like I can explain it so that people can understand.

I also like to explain it on a different perspective though. Imagine we've done SEO together for two years. You've now, after long hard work, you rank number one for many different keywords. You're doing really well. Suddenly, Joe Schmoe out of some random garage decides to create a website overnight in your vertical, in your space, in your locality, they've created a website. And oh, by the way, because they created this website, gamed some keywords, they're now ranked number one ahead of your website. You'd be pretty pissed. Google would be pretty pissed, too, because they don't want to have their users see such high variability of search results. What I'm trying to say is, Google is inherently competitive. It takes a long time.

But for website listings, it doesn't benefit you if they change relatively quickly, either. It's better for you if they move a little bit slower, so that once you attain a high ranking, someone who has a terrible website doesn't overnight overtake you. You understand what I mean? What I'm trying to say is, SEO takes a while.

Because, one, Google wants to make sure that they're returning good results, and they're not going to return results that just got started yesterday, or just started doing SEO work a week ago, and suddenly we're going to rank them. They need to see a body of work that proves that this site has the authority, has the relevance, and should be ranked.

But, second, of course, from a different perspective, you don't want SEO to be the high variable of rankings, because you want to ensure that by the time you get your site ranked on the top page, or first page, or top spots, that you have some legacy for it. You can have some time to own that ranking. It doesn't benefit you if another site can take you over relatively quickly.

Therefore, that's kind of the perspective I'd like you to take. SEO takes time because it's not a pay-to-play platform. Google wants to see you prove yourself, and second, it also benefits websites of businesses that it doesn't move that quickly. Because, once you do, you put in the hard work and you've attained good rankings, you can maintain and hold it longer, and you run less of a risk of someone having more money, and/or someone trying to game the system and outrank you overnight. You don't want that to happen. And that's where SEO is really beneficial, and that's the double-edged sword of SEO taking time. It does take time, but once you own the space, that same time you took will benefit you and prevent other competitors from over-ranking you. It kind of serves as that moat to help shore up your marketing, ensuring that you own those leads.

Again, I hope that answers the question about why SEO takes time. It takes time for numerous reasons, and I think it sometimes just takes a different perspective to see why taking that time is actually beneficial. I hope today's video was helpful for you. Hope that clarified the situation a little bit about why SEO takes time. I'm going to go ahead and enjoy some black tea now, and if you liked this video, I hope you hit "like". If you really liked the videos, please hit "subscribe", and I hope to see you guys again in future videos. Thanks.