How effective is SEO really when you're starting out?

I feel like SEO takes a whilllllleeeeeee to really start getting momentum. Probably around 4-6 months minimum.

Maybe it'd take a lot less if you got a lot of press and links from high quality domains, but I don't think many of us IndieHackers are getting much attention from sites like the New York Times 😊

It's a tough one - I'm also trying to drive traffic to a new site and at least in the short term am focusing on content quality & share-ability on social media rather than organic search for the reasons other commenters have discussed below.

I've got my keywords and topic clusters of course, but not necessarily worrying too much about the low return on SEO optimisation I'm seeing so far because it's a new domain and the site isn't huge right now.

Also feel like a lot of people get caught up with SEO - the reality is you can have all the optimised pages in the world, but if the content is terrible users won't stay on your site and you'll have wasted your time anyway.

That said, I'm also thinking about what SEO strategies I can put in place now that will pay off long term.

Was inspired by Zapier who generate 5.5 million unique views a month, with half coming from organic search, by creating a web of 25,000+ landing pages and blogs that capture top, mid and bottom of funnel prospects. The clever part is they don't do the heavy lifting on content creation themselves, but outsource it all to their app partners 🤯

This insight breaks the strategy down with some really clear screenshots...

https://bit.ly/35adXDQ

Best of luck with it all! 😁

It all boils down to the keyword competition.

If you only optimized your homepage, you probably only targeted your main keyword and unless you are on a tiny little niche, this keyword will be too high of a competition to rank immediately.

What is usually a more successful strategy is to build pages/blog posts to target a whole range of low searches/low competition keywords related to your product (eg. long keyword like "how do I X with Y" is unlikely to be your main homepage keyword but could be a low competition keyword related to your product).

That said, it's not applicable to every niche/product, by that I mean you will either have too few/no keywords like this to target (1) or they're also too much competition. (2)

(1) and (2) boils down to the same situation actually : keywords of your niche are too competitive to rank on page 1 overnight and that's okay. You can still do the work but don't expect results next week as you will have to build authority (backlinks) and content before being able to rank for those. And this takes time.

There's 2 ways to approach it :

• either you build content for your users first (eg. mainly to share on social media) and hope for the best/postpone focusing on SEO for a few months.
• or you want to work on your SEO from day-one and you can track your first results by tracking your keyword positions with SEOwl or any other rank tracker. That way you will see how much you progress in the top 100 whereas if you're only looking on traffic as a measure of success you won't see anything until you're page 1 which can be in a longgg time.

tl;dr :

• if you have no competition, you can rank overnight on page 1. But it's unlikely to bring many searches
• No/low competition keywords are unlikely to be your main keywords (eg. homepage keywords) so if you want to target those, build specific pages/blog posts
• Those keywords are likely to be low traffic as well so build a lot of them if you want significant results
• use a rank tracker (eg. SEOwl) to track your progress when you're not in top 10

Most keywords are saturated these days, so SEO will take at the very least 6 months to kick in, and only if you play your cards right. I would not rely on SEO as your short-term acquisition strategy and rather make it your long-term acquisition channel. In the short-term, I suggest focusing on efforts that have immediate impact such as searching for and talking to your prospects directly.