8 replies to this topic

[SteelersFan]

Hi,
I'd like to find out what you guys think is a suitable timeframe to give SEO changes to a website before moving on? What I mean by this is if I make some changes to my title tag and website description, how long should I wait before I can say "yes, that change works" or "no, that change doesn't work"?? Would you wait 48 hours, one week, two weeks, a month before trying something else??? I know some search engines index faster than others but oftentimes I see changes in 24 hours from Google which is where most traffic comes from. Sometimes SERPs change in 24 hours, etc.

Any recommendations?

Thank you.

[chrishirst]

Sometimes SERPs change in 24 hours, etc.

And sometimes they change every twenty minutes. Measure the traffic or conversions to study the results of changes in your optimising or promotional methods

It's another subjective metric, some sites/pages you can see a difference in traffic in a matter of hours, others it may take a week to reach a conclusion.

You are not looking for specifics usually (unless it's a PPC landing page and conversions), it's the trends you need to analyse. If the trend is upwards, it was successful. If not .... .... it wasn't.

[Jill]

You typically need at least a month maybe more. While the changes may be indexed within a few days, your results may take quite some time to improve. If you take things off too quickly or change them or add more optimization, you'll never know for sure what works.

[SteelersFan]

Thank you for your replies. It looks like I'm guilty of changing my title and description tag too often.

I'm going to wait a month and see what happens to my changes. Thank you for your replies. :-)

[seocms]

What I would do is spent more time a keyword research than changing your keywords every month. Find out what keywords are good and what are people looking for in your industry. Just like Jill said, results might take a while but if you find the right keywords you will see great results.

[SteelersFan]

What I would do is spent more time a keyword research than changing your keywords every month. Find out what keywords are good and what are people looking for in your industry. Just like Jill said, results might take a while but if you find the right keywords you will see great results.

I have 3 primary keywords that I use for my ministry site. I have put those three keywords in the Google Adwords tool and have gotten a long list of suggested keywords. I have taken the list, looked for the most repetitions of the keywords, and noted any additional words that were used with the 3 major keywords. Then I've tried to incorporate that into my title tag, description, and website text. The website text has the 3 major keywords as well as other suggested keywords mixed up in the text. But my title tag and description tend to focus mainly or solely on my 3 major keywords.

The problem is that I'm having trouble figuring out which of these keywords the search engines sees as being more relevent and thus will result in a higher ranking. The fact is all the suggested keywords are relevent. I just don't know how to pick out the right ones.

Hope that makes sense??

[Jill]

The fact is all the suggested keywords are relevent. I just don't know how to pick out the right ones

It sounds like you already have? You're using them all throughout your site. The fact that you can use them naturally within your content (presumably) means they're all relevant.

[SteelersFan]

It sounds like you already have? You're using them all throughout your site. The fact that you can use them naturally within your content (presumably) means they're all relevant.

Yes, they are all relevent as they relate to the 3 main keywords. I was just thinking, maybe wrongly I don't know, that some might be weighted more by the search engines than others so that if you got the right (or pretty close to right) combination of keywords on a page it might rank higher. I don't know if that makes any sense or not?

[Jill]

It's more the competitiveness level that you have to look at. While all the keywords might be extremely relevant to what you offer, if billions of other sites are optimizing for them how relevant your site is won't make much difference.

The idea is to choose the right ones for your site based on how popular your site currently is, as well as how popular you believe you can make it over the next year.