If you plan to hire a search engine optimisation company and you have already met a few legitimate companies, you might be wondering why all these genuine companies do not guarantee number one rankings and tell you to be patient when it comes to search engine optimisation. On the other hand, you might have also come across SEO agencies offering quick results or guaranteed page 1 rankings, and other such things. The truth is that search engine optimisation is hard and takes a long time to deliver results.

You might also be wondering why people opt for SEO when there are other avenues that deliver quick results such as PPC ads or social media marketing or other kinds of paid advertising. The advantage of SEO is that the traffic remains stable for a long period of time once you achieve your SEO objectives in terms of rankings or traffic. Also, organic rankings bring a lot of additional benefits in terms of increase in trustworthiness in the eyes of the consumers. After all, consumers inherently trust the organic search results and an organic listing on the front page is always going to have better brand awareness and better trust ratings.

Coming back to the question of why SEO takes so long, the fact is that there are techniques that can deliver organic results quickly but those results often last for a short period of time, and more often than not, lead to penalties from the search engines. Therefore, it is always better to stick to established procedures and practices when it comes to search engine optimisation.

The process of SEO involves on page optimisation as well as off page optimisation. In terms of on page optimisation, there are certain technical aspects that need to be tackled. For instance, if you have a really old website, there might be hundreds or thousands of pages with broken links. Fixing these links takes a really long time. Similarly, you might have issues with page loading speed due to certain underlying technologies or wrong technical setups. Fixing such issues also takes a long time.

The other aspect of on page optimisation is the quality of content present on your website. If you already have a lot of low quality content on your website, it is going to take a really long time to identify that poor quality content and replace it with higher quality content. Similarly, identifying duplicate content issues on a big website takes a long time.

In addition to the on page optimisation, there is also the question of off page optimisation which essentially refers to links from other websites. Since you can't just buy links from other websites as search engines do not like bought links, you need to make efforts to obtain them organically. Typically, it is done by posting high quality content on your website and marketing it to ensure that it reaches as many people as possible in your industry. In this manner, that content should be able to attract high-quality links from other authority domains. Another way is to publish high quality guest posts on other sites in your niche and this also takes a really long time.

Overall, thorough search engine optimisation takes a really long time as issues need to be identified first and once the issues have been identified, fixing those issues takes a lot of time. It also takes some time for search engines to re-crawl the website and reward it for making those optimisation changes. Therefore, it is important for you to keep in mind that legitimate search engine optimisation is going to take time and if someone is promising guaranteed quick rankings, they are lying through their teeth. Therefore, stick to legitimate companies if you want to enjoy the benefits of your investment in search engine optimisation for the long term.