How do you shorten your SEO feedback cycle?
SEO is one of those things that take consistent effort but to know if it is the right kind of effort you need to know how it is performing, which you only get to know after a while. How are you ppl handling this?
What do you call "a while" ?
You should start tracking your keywords (eg. using SEOwl or another rank tracker) so that you can see where you're ranking way before you start seeing traffic.
Chances are you won't get traffic until you hit page #1.
Yet, chances are you can see progress in your keywords ranking in the 10-100 positions.
A keyword ranking #12 is closer to bring traffic to a keyword ranking #86 or even out of top 100 and if you're not tracking them you won't see that.
That's step 1.
Then once you know that you have more information for your SEO strategy and start getting traffic eg. :
All in all it can be very quick to start seeing some results ie. something to see.
Getting traffic is another story as it's much more dependent on how well you do your SEO, your competition, the keywords and a bit of luck ;)
Good question. I was recently looking into this. The answer I came up with is that you have to publish more content in a shorter amount of time because you'll get feedback sooner. If you publish 20 pieces in a month, you'll have a much better idea of how it's going versus 20 pieces over 3-4 months. Unfortunately, there's no legitimate shortcut to understanding your SEO performance.