It’s a slippery slope: most people know that they want their website to show up on the first page of search results, and they don’t understand why they aren’t there already. When potential clients come to me and tell me that they’ve done SEO work to their website already – whether they’ve done it themselves or someone has done it for them – I start off by asking them a few questions to see where their website SEO actually stands.

1)    Do you have specific keywords that you’re trying to rank for?

2)    How much time has passed since you had your site optimized?

3)    Do you have tracking enabled to see how well you’re actually doing?

A lot of people don’t understand that keyword strategy means that you’ve actually chosen specific keywords you want to rank for and are working on bringing your website to the top of the search results for those keywords. Many people have given me a list of keywords that they want to target, then come back to me and ask me why they aren’t ranking for a keyword that is not on the list. It’s because we didn’t optimize for it.

It is true that often you will rank for keywords that you aren’t specifically targeting (Google and Bing Webmasters will tell you what those keywords are; just another reason to register with them.) However, to expect to rank for any keyword that seems at all related to what you’re selling without targeting it specifically does not work. Imagine that you own a grocery store, and I am your shelf stocker. You tell me that you want me to buy oranges, lemons, limes and grapefruits to put on the shelf. I do; I buy them and they’re there and ready for people to buy. Sometimes the fruit distributor brings bananas; this is an added bonus, but I can’t control whether he brings them every week unless you notice that people are buying them and specifically ask me to stock them. Then you show up one day and you ask why there aren’t any apples there. You didn’t ask me to get apples. See my point?

I ask how long it’s been since you’ve had your site optimized because very often people don’t know that it can take 3-6 months to rank for a keyword, and often up to 12 months or more of concerted effort if the keyword is really competitive. And I will also tell you that sometimes you just aren’t going to be able to rank for that keyword that you want to rank for so badly. If you’re in a highly competitive market and are competing against monstrous companies with thousands of dollars of monthly SEO budget and years of brand recognition, the chances are slim to none. Regardless of how difficult it is to rank for a keyword, it is rarely an overnight success. It makes more sense to track progress to ensure your rankings are improving than it does to think your SEO consultant is failing because you aren’t on the first page within a month or two.

You’d be surprised how many people don’t have tracking and yet wonder why they can’t make improvements to their rankings. There is no way to know if you are improving if you don’t have a way to measure that improvement. There is no way to know if your traffic has increased or decreased; if there are specific pages where your visitors are jumping ship; if you have been hit by Panda or Penguin, if you don’t have tracking enabled. AND, tracking is FREE. Implementing Google analytics is relatively painless and gives you insights to all sorts of information, and they’re not the only one out there.

It is only after asking these three specific questions that I start an SEO analysis of a site to see how I can help and why their SEO strategy might not be working. Once those three questions have been addressed – and depending on the answers – I  have a better idea of whether my job with the client is helping them improve their website’s technical SEO components, or whether it’s more about expectation management.