One of the questions we get asked most often is how long is it gonna take my website to rank on google or being or yahoo or any of those types of search engine platforms.

And it’s a good question because when you get started with a digital marketing agency, you kind of want to know what type of timeframe you’re gonna be waiting on getting results.

And so this is one of the things that we get pretty much weekly from new clients getting started.

So I wanted to address a few things that are big indicators and big ranking factors for getting your website ranked on google and being in yahoo and everything else and then other things that are kind of not quite so important.

Right, so you may want to prioritize certain things over others. So I will get right into my slide here today.

So it’s a very very good question. And most people have this question when they first get started, especially if they’ve never really done any kind of SEO, Search engine optimization is the long term form of the SEO Term.

So, search engine optimization is just optimizing your website pages for the search engines for what types of keywords and search terms that you want to show up for.

For example, people type in tree service and you’re, so city that could be, let’s say tree service Chicago.

You know when people type in Tree service Chicago is your website optimized for that particular search so that people can find it when they do a search right in that local area.

So how long will it take my website to rank on google?  So the short answer is it depends on a few things on how long it’s gonna take for your website to rank on google. Probably not. The most straightforward answer that you’re looking for, but how long will it take my website to rank on google?

Well, let’s take a look at it. So the first thing is Number one is how long has your website been online?

So the first thing that we usually look at when taking on a new client is do they already have a website if they’ve already got a website? When was it published?

When was it built and not even the current version?

But when was the first time you had a website on your domain? So X Y Z. Tree service dot com.

How long has it been published online with a website on it?

That makes an incredible difference in how fast your website’s gonna rank for the keywords that you’re trying to target. So many times. ,We’re taking on a new client. They’ve got an older website. It’s outdated. It’s not really optimized for search engines for SEO.

So what we do is we take a look at everything and if it’s been online for over a year or over two years it’s tipping. Once the website is relaunched in the proper way with all the right content on there,the proper SEO title tags to every page, The H one-paragraph headers, H two headers. H three headers.

All this stuff is optimized and all the contents written properly, it’s going to rank pretty quickly and pretty quickly, depends on if you’re in a suburban area with less competition or if you’re in a main city such as Chicago and we’re going to get into the other factors here in a minute.

But how long has your website been online? If it’s been online for?Years and years?

Once we relaunched the website the proper way with the proper on page?

SEO it typically ranks in a matter of a few months literally.

But because it’s been sitting online for a long time unless there’s some sort of spam penalty against it or the website’s been unpublished de indexed or something like that. Which we can fix pretty quickly.

But if it’s been online for a while you’ve got that trust factor which is part of the algorithm with google ranking. So part of the algorithm there’s several different factors but one of them is trust, how long has this website been online? It’s been online for a long time. Several years.

It’s going to rank pretty quickly. So that’s number one right time. Online. Number two. How well written and SEO.

Optimized is your website content. So if you just toss up, for example a website for your business and and a lot of people do this to get started.

You need a minimum viable product. You need some sort of website up on the internet.

But let’s say you go with a Weebly Squarespace or Wix or something of that nature and you get your website published and it’s just basically a template website with your low you go a couple of pictures and it doesn’t really have the story on it that talks about what city you guys are in, what type of content for people to take action to give you guys a call or put a free estimate for men or anything like that and the content doesn’t flow and doesn’t mention your local area and all the important tree service or tree trimming or tree removal or land clearing or forestry mulching or whatever types of key, the words they’re not mentioned on the website.

So then that website a lot of time is missing the opportunity to rank on google because we’re not telling google or you’re not telling google or whoever built your website is not telling google what you want that website to rank for.

So part of the equation, rank on google is just feed them what they want. So google wants to see what city you’re looking to rank in. They want to see what keywords, which is what people search and google keyword just means.

What is somebody typing in the google search bar to find businesses like yours. Typically it’s tree service, your city tree removal, your city tree trimming your city or if they’re standing in your city tree trimming near me.

Tree removal near me and google is going to serve up the most localized results on their search page when they do that search from a mobile device or from a desktop because they know uh particularly where you’re located based on your IP Address and your device and your GPS and everything else.

So they’re going to show you the most localized results. So if your web pages are not optimized for that local area, a. k. a. Chicago Illinois or Atlanta Georgia or even a suburb, then they’re not gonna know to show your page at the top of that search, right?

That’s that’s one of the key things. So let’s just give them what they want and to show you an example of that. If you look at a website, for example, appear in the title.

What you’ll see is a is an opportunity to type in what’s called an SEO title tag. And so if you’re in Chicago Illinois, you want this one, the title tag to say tree service Chicago Illinois because that’s exactly what people are typing in Chicago to find tree service companies or, you know whatever city you’re in, this particular website there in Fresno California.

So, tree service, Fresno California is the title tag, The SEO title tag of this home page of the website, there’s an opportunity there for you to type in some keywords that google is gonna pick up crawl and they’re gonna say, oh, this website about tree service in Fresno California.

So now we’ve got a head start, right? We’ve got the title on the page were telling google what we want to rank for the next is like the H one header, The first header, and paragraph header on the page, this is the highest quality tree service in Fresno, California, we’re reiterating the fact we’re trying to rank for tree service in Fresno California, are you following my lead there?

So it’s basically like you just got to have the keywords on the pages and feed, google what they want in order to move this website up.

And then the rest of it’s about how much content you have on the website. Are all of these images geo tagged and named before you upload them to the website. Tree trimming Fresno tree removal, Fresno, you know, land clearing Fresno Emergency Tree service Fresno.

That helps to it’s another signal when your images are titled and labeled and named with a keyword and there’s also an attribution area whenever you’re using a website where you can actually toss in the keyword there too, it’s hidden to the naked eye, but google algorithm and crawlers and spiders on the web can read every single keyword that’s on the way, even in the back end coding.

So you want to make sure you take every opportunity to do those types of things. So it’s a lot of granular stuff. But is the content written properly.

This is another indication as a leading tree service company in Fresno, right? That’s telling them again, hey, we want to rank in Fresno. Right? That’s the same thing. So how well is the content?

How much content we sometimes see where our website’s got a couple of pictures a sentence or two and that’s it, Right. You need more content than the rest of the people that are online.

So hopefully that example kind of shows you what you need to be looking out for to get your SEO title tag up in the top of the page, correct your headers and the content correct?

For the keywords you’re trying to ring for number three is do you have a blog page on the website where you can update content regularly? Right?

So if you do you have a blog page to write and publish new articles, well then you’re not putting fresh content on your website regularly.

And so what happens is there’s really no other place on the website to do this, right? You’re not gonna go to your homepage and constantly rewrite all the wording on your home page of your website because that’s the main page, it’s kind of static, it’s not really going to be changed all the time.

Like sure, you can swap out pictures and change images and things like that. But for the most part, you know, if you want to update your content, you’re gonna want to have a blog page and that helps kind of talk about your niche, which is a k A tree service, tree care, plant, health care, tree health care, etcetera and, and different, you know, examples of like, you know, when to trim your tree one of the best time to trim your trees, you know how to tell if a tree is dead.

Do I need a tree removal permit in my city? You know all these different articles and different types of queries that people are searching for online,you want an article about that on your website on the blog so that you can constantly publish new articles on that blog page.

Like there’s there’s nowhere else really to put those. So you need a blog where you can update content about articles that people are already searching for and to get them to your website based on those searches and then oh by the way you know we do Tree service so it helps you rank for everything else too because it increases your website traffic.

So a blog article blog page is very very crucial and critical because you’re updating your content especially if you’re in a large city right.

You want to make sure you have more content than everybody routinely updating new articles on the blog and that’s gonna help kind of cement the fact that you’re one of the most authoritative websites in the local market.

Otherwise if ,you just publish a website with three or four pages on it and you never touch it, it’s not gonna have a very hard time ranking because other websites that are doing SEO, gonna kinda outpace you get more content, more pages are gonna get published.

Google is going to see those as more authoritative websites on that subject matter on that tree service Fresno area type keywords and searches. So they’re gonna kind of push them up to the top. They’re gonna kind of move us towards the bottom.

Now if you’re in a very rural area and there’s hardly anybody out there, Well then by default, your website will probably rank in your local area if you’ve got the address on the home page somewhere or in the footer or something like that.

But when all else is equal, if you’re in a suburban area of a major city or if you’re in a major city, you’re gonna have to pull out all the stops to get your website to rank on google and number one, if it’s been online for a while, you’ve got a head start, that’s great. If it’s brand new domain, you’re kind of swimming upstream for six or eight months to a year, right?

Like you can get there, especially if it’s in a suburban area. We’ve seen websites, brand new domains rank in suburban areas in six months to a year.

But typically if it’s a brand new domain, you want to give yourself a little bit longer and be more realistic about the length of time.

But if it’s been online for year two years, five years, 10 years and you’re revamping the website, it’s highly s SEO optimized. It’s gonna rank a lot faster.

We’ve seen Rankin 60 days, we’ve seen a rank in 90 days we’ve seen a rank in six months, depends on again the population. How many people are doing it? Number four?

No copy and paste content from any other websites on your website. So sometimes a shortcut is if you’re doing your own website or maybe, you know,the family’s doing the website for yourself and there’s a tendency is to go out to other websites may be copy an article, copy a paragraph and go put it on your website just to kind of quickly get some stuff on your website because you don’t really want to think through what to type up and all that stuff because it is kind of hard sometimes to kind of, you know, type up paragraphs and paragraphs and paragraphs content for your website.

So it’s a big no, no, because google has a very smart algorithm and they can scan the web and see other websites with the exact same paragraph on their websites.

So whoever published it first is going to be protected. Anybody that plagiarize is and paste content from another website.

The second person that posted on their website is going to get penalized. In some cases now, it sometimes happens and sometimes doesn’t, but you don’t want to play with fire, right. when your website gets penalized, it’s penalized, it’s pretty much in the sandbox and you’re not going to show up for anything online.

So that’s a no, no, you don’t want to copy and paste content from other websites.

Number five, how large is your home target city? So just to have kind of a realistic expectation if you’re in a major city, let’s say. Houston texas, Chicago Illinois,Los Angeles California Atlanta Georgia, Nashville Tennessee, your website is not going to rank in 30 to 60 days, right?

It’s a major city and there’s probably dozens of tree service companies in the local area trying to rank for tree service, Nashville Tree free service, Houston right?

There’s dozens and dozens of companies with web companies doing their marketing doing there SEO.  But if you’ve been online for a long time already and you re launched the website the proper way with the proper online content coding and everything else on the website, google is gonna see yours is one of the best ones.

And as we keep publishing,as you keep publishing articles on the blog, maybe do some press releases, different things like that.

Get some back links to the website, you’re going to start moving up the totem pole moving up the rankings and eventually get to that first page which also helps kind of push your google map listing up to the top of the top 32.

But if you’re in a major market you’ve got to get realistic, you’re gonna have to publish more content outdo the competition.

Kind of reverse engineer what those first page website ranked websites look like, You can reverse engineer.

Like how many words they’ve got on their pages, what their title tags look like, what the content looks like images, different things like that kind of reverse engineering. Just make sure you’re doing more than those people. It’s it can be a little bit confusing.That’s a major city.

So if you’re in a major city and you’re trying to rank in a major city it’s gonna take a little bit longer. So make sure you’re realistic with that fact if you’re in a suburban area it’s gonna be easier because not as many tree companies are going to be trying to rank for a suburb of the major city.

So you know population size, population density and how many tree companies are in your area, how much competition online there is is going to play a factor as well.

And your ranking in that city Number six is are you listed on all the important directories on the internet? This has had a little bit less of an impact over the last few years but it’s still it’s still pertinent to do. So you know part of SEO.

Part of local SEO Is getting um published and basically cited on all these different online directories and a lot of them are like YP dot com yellow pages dot com dex dot com super pages. White pages. Hot pages. There’s a million of them. Right so you want to get listed in the majority of the big ones and what that does just increases and expand your footprint on the internet where you’re sighted and you’re you’re you’ve got a listing on all these other publications online and all the web is is is just a it’s just a a sea of links out.

There is all the internet is so if you have links coming back to your website from all these other publications and stuff because you’ve got a listing, they’re usually it’s your business name, address, phone number and website U.R.L.

Well then you’ve got a lot of mentions of your website on a lot of other websites. So that helps to kind of solidify the fact that you’re a real business online and that helps google kind of make their mind up and determine that you need to rent for certain keywords.

So the directories make a big impact on that as well. Just getting listed in all those directories online, so let’s play a big role too, especially in the google maps.

Again, it’s had less of an impact over the past probably 2 to 4 years that we’ve seen. The majority of the maps rankings is going to be getting a lot of reviews posting on there and then also uploading a lot of photos on your google map listing.

So some of the things you can kind of do yourself? Number seven, are you a member of Tree Care Industry Association, TCIA? Or the better business Bureau or ISA. Are you are you certified arborist or at least listed on their website and other online websites that mention your website.

So part of SEO, In addition to building the website out properly in the content. And how long you’ve been online publishing blog articles, things like that.

Or how many other websites out there mentioning your website. So that’s what’s called A back link. So a back link is basically just a link back to your website from another website. So if you’re on the TCIA Website for example and you remember well then you’ve got yourself a directory listing on TCIA Website.

It’s got your business name? It’s got your business address or your city one of the two it’s got your phone number and then it’s also got your website address. So somebody on the TCIA website can click on a link that’s XYZ.

Tree Service that click on it. It opens up your website. So that’s a link back to your website and mention you know mention of your website a clickable link on another web site. Back to your website.

That’s what’s called. A back link in a nutshell. So how many back links do you have? How many other websites are mentioning your website?

So the ISA is another good place if you get yourself a listing on the I.S.A website. Same thing as a link back to your website. It’s a listing on their website. Um BBB, Is also a very powerful back link because that shows google that you care about the trust and the trustworthiness of your company and the integrity of your company.

So they also help you rank a little higher to by getting mentioned on the BBB. So if you have a listing their same difference and then other other you know local organizations, if you’re a member of, let’s say your Chamber of Commerce you’re gonna have a listing there with a link back to your website.

If you’re a member of other kind tree related organizations and stuff like that or you sponsor this or you sponsor that you’re usually going to have a mention on those websites that link back over to your website. So those are all powerful for SEO.

And and a lot of it some of it you can game a little bit, you can get mentioned on other websites a little bit here and there just requesting it or asking about it.

But for the most part it’s about what associations are you involved in? Do you have a listing there? How many other websites are mentioning your website?

So we have a press release service that’s plugged into your website and we produce new articles every month. It’s kind of like a blog article and this is just a natural way for you to get back links back to your website.

And so that blog article we post on the news and media page which is AKA. Press release gets picked up by news agency websites. And they mention your website on their website after we published the article. So that’s a good way to get back links.

Otherwise it’s kind of a daunting task to go out and try to find other websites to mention your website. Right, how do you do that? So it’s it’s a it’s a good question. It’s a tough thing to do. So in the SEO World there’s ways to do it, there’s the best ways to do it. There’s the medium ways to do it and then there’s the black hat ways to do it. Which you don’t want to do.

Some of the different ways of getting back links that’ll get you penalized in your website domain is pretty much toast forever. So that’s some of the good things about the back links there. Number eight. I will just say that SEO is an investment in your ongoing long term online presence.

So it’s basically an investment. It’s one of those things that at the very beginning, especially if you’re brand new, you just got your business listed on google business profile.

Just got your map listing live. Just got verified. Just got a website launched. It’s gonna take a little while, right? But it is the most power way to bring in online leads.

Still to this day. Yes there’s paid ads that we can set up right away so you can set up google ads being ads, google local service ads which is the google guaranteed ads. You can set up facebook ads, you can have all these other things, direct mail, everything else SEO.

You know, the proper search terms to rank for is amongst the lowest cost per lead that you can possibly have on the internet and the statistics back this up for the last decade or more where you know you can use paid ads but it’s gonna fluctuate because it depends on how many people are in the market advertising and bidding on the keywords and things like that.

Whereas with SEO, Once you get to that first page,if you keep your content rolling you’re gonna just stay further ahead everybody else and it’s just going to continue to solidify and cement your website to that top of the search page for tree service in your city too,

removal your city and that is amongst the lowest cost per lead and the highest quality leads you can possibly get is with search engine optimization is still to this day. The lowest cost per lead that we see with all of our clients because once you get ranked up there at the top and then subsequently your map listing is on the top as well that dominates the first page of google.

Now the google. Local service ads are doing well to google ads do well to facebook ads do well if properly. But SEO and getting ranked on the first page of google is by far the best quality lead source that you can get. And it’s just like a 24 7 billboard sitting there.

So if you decide you want to pause your your google ads or any of your paid ads, your SEO Is gonna keep you perched at the top no matter what right,you’re still gonna stay there. So hopefully these bullets help.

So it’s basically time that your website’s been published online to recap. You know how how how long is it gonna take? My website to rank on google? Well how long has your website been on the internet, number one?

How well written and seo optimized is your website content? Do you have a blog page where you can constantly update your content on your website? That’s very important.

And no copy and paste plagiarism content from other websites. We see it sometimes when people copy and paste a paragraph or two on somebody else’s website of their website. That’s a big no, no.

How large is your home target city? So population and competition of other tree service companies also play a factor in how long it’s gonna take to rank on google. Are you listing all the important directories online? That’s another one.

And there’s a lot of services out there like text or other ones where you can get listed in all the major directories and it really helps us SEO presence. Number seven,are you a member of TCIA. Right. The Better Business Bureau where the ISA that mention your website and number eight last but not least it is an investment.

So it’s more of a longer term play that pays off very, very well if you stick with it and the company you’re working with and knows what they’re doing. That’s also an important factor. We see it all the time where people say that they’ve been getting SEO.

From a former company and we look at it and there hasn’t really been anything going on. I’m like, well there’s no blog page, there’s no there’s no press, there’s no mentions of the website anywhere. So that’s not really sc on my point, some people just put up a website and they call that SEO.

But there’s way more to it than that. So it’s updating content, different things like that. So hopefully this makes sense. It’s kind of just the main bullet points. You know, you can get you can get really into the weeds with SEO. As well.

I didn’t want to make it too long for this particular webinar here. So I appreciate you visiting and watching today. If you guys want to schedule anything or go over your market, you can visit TreeServiceDigital.com/contact. Or you can call our office at (770) 637 3707.

Happy to talk with you further there. If you’re watching this on YouTube, like and subscribe to our channel. If you’re on the podcast, watching this, like and subscribe to your favorite player, we’re coming up with all kinds of new videos and interviews with experts over the next couple of weeks, and we’ll see you on the next one. Thanks so much.

Have a great day.

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