I love analogies.

Especially when teaching SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to my clients. Here’s one of my favorites:

SEO is a crockpot, not a microwave.

Just like a delicious roast needs time to sit, cook, and develop into something juicy for dinner, so does your SEO.

If you don’t think crockpot with your SEO, don’t invest in it

If you’re ready to spend money on SEO, don’t expect your traffic to heat up in 1 week, 2 weeks, 1 month or even 3 months. If you own a low authority website (as in, Google doesn’t think much of it) or starting a brand new one, it’ll take even longer.

SEO is slow

If you’re not willing to wait 6+ months for results that start to move the needle (and a good SEO person will make a difference), then don’t invest in SEO. It takes time for search engines to crawl, index, and figure out what your website is all about.

Even if you dump thousands of dollars into your SEO in a single day, you can’t force Google’s hand.

Websites that rank on the first page of Google get there because they’re patient, methodical, understand ranking factors and EARN their spot over time.

If it’s mission critical for your website to show up in the search engines in the very near future, for whatever reason, spend money on Pay-Per-Click. You can start a campaign tonight and be getting traffic in a few hours. Microwave your traffic. PPC is excellent for this.

If PPC isn’t for you, spend dollars in other marketing channels. Hire sales people to cold call, go Guerrilla, set up a booth at an industry tradeshow — SEO isn’t the only type of marketing out there, remember.

Don’t hear me wrong in this rant

SEO is worth the investment. That’s why I provide SEO consulting services. When done correctly, with patience, SEO is a gift that keeps on giving.

But, if you want microwaved type of results for your website, don’t invest in SEO, or you’ll be disappointed.

Crockpot image credit

Video Transcript

Hi everybody! This is Eric from ProtoFuse.

Today I want to walk you through something you’d probably don’t hear a whole lot, — “Don’t invest in SEO”. Now, that’s really hard for me to say because I love SEO, I’m very passionate about it, I provide services and our company does consulting. I really think it’s worth the investment, but here’s a really helpful analogy if you’re kind of on the fence on whether or not you should invest your marketing dollars in search engine optimization.

The key here is don’t invest in SEO if you’re expecting fast results and here’s where the analogy comes into play. SEO is like a crock pot. It is definitely not a microwave and I’m sure you’re enjoying my wonderful drawings here. SEO is very much like a crock pot because it’s slow. If you’re expecting to spend money in SEO and get results in a few weeks, a month, or maybe even two months, you might be setting yourself up for failure.

You need to take a long-term approach. It’s a minimum of probably a month. If you have a brand new website, that could probably take a little bit longer to gain any sort of traction to see a boost in rankings or traffic. I usually like to give a benchmark of around 6 months or so before you really start to see any movement on keywords, organic traffic, and SEO is not something that you can just throw money at and expect that a mound full of money is going to make any difference. It takes time to build authority. It takes time for Google to crawl index and figure out if the content you’re pushing out is relative to what you want to rank for.

Definitely, think crock pot analogy rather than microwave. If you need traffic very quickly and you’re not willing to wait one, two, three, four, or six months a year to get that organic traffic, there’s different ways to approach it. You can invest in Pay per Click. You could get on the first page of Google within a few hours, if you want to, depending on your industry and your niche and how much you’re willing to spend for a particular keyword. You can hire more sales people, knock on doors, get the word out about your product or service, or you can just do guerrilla marketing and there’s so many different ways that you could approach in spending money.

But, don’t spend money on SEO if you really want that fast results. That’s the key in all of this. Think long term with it. If you do, you’ll be able to work a lot easier with an SEO consultant or a service provider and hopefully, they are leveraging expectations.

So, that’s it! Think crock pot and not microwave when it comes to SEO.