Eric Siu breaks down how long SEO actually takes to work, using his own sites as proof. Most people see real results in 6 to 12 months if they commit to on-page optimization, internal linking, and the skyscraper technique. The hard part isn't the tactics, it's staying patient while you build.
In this video, I'm going to show you how long it takes for SEO to work. My name is Eric Siu. I'm going to show you how to grow your freaking business. So here we go. I'm not even just going to talk about SEO. I'm going to talk about my podcast first. What? What? What? What? I thought we were talking about SEO. We are talking about SEO. So let's look at my screen really quick. This is the podcast I have with my co-host Neil Patel. And well, we have 8.6 million downloads so far. We've been doing it for a little under 2 years or so. And oh yeah, you're seeing a lot of downloads here, right? Last month, January 2018, 589,000. We're probably on track for about 640,000 in a 31-day window, which is not bad. 640, you look at 589, that difference, it's pretty good growth rate, right? So you're looking at it, it's like, oh, it's easy. Well, Neil has a brand, he's got a big email list, da da da. Like, well, Eric, it's easy for you to say you get good traffic, you have an email list, whatever. When I look at this podcast and I look at the other podcast that I have, Growth Everywhere, which gets about 80,000 downloads a month, The issue is it took me, well, after an entire year of effort, I was getting 9 downloads a day. And then the second year I was getting 30 downloads a day. I was spending 6 hours a week on it for the first 2 years. 6 hours per week while I was trying to, you know, run the business. So, that's one thing. And it's the same thing with SEO too. If I look at SEO, if I look at our, if I look at singlegrain.com, which is one of the websites I have, I can see in the last 16-month period, and by the way, this is Google Search Console right here. The new one has 16 months of data plus, okay? So I'm looking at 16 months of data here. You can see that the graph is going up and to the right. We're looking at impressions, we're looking at clicks. You can see it's slowly going up and to the right. Not only that, if you use a tool like Ahrefs, you can look at my website, you can see that the keywords are increasing, the top 3 keywords are increasing. Everything is just going up and to the right. It just takes a lot of effort, it takes a long time to get the flywheel going. If I didn't do the first podcast, if I didn't slog it out for the first 2 years, there's no way I would have the second podcast that's doing really well. I love both podcasts. Now, it's the same thing with this YouTube channel too. You're watching this YouTube channel right now, and as of this video, we're at about 6,200, 6,300 subscribers. But I started with about 1,500 or 2,000 or so in the summertime, and we built out our video team. Noah's sitting over here helping out. It just takes time. There's no shortcuts with SEO. People need to be patient. And most of the time when you're reporting to other stakeholders, let's say you've raised venture funding, your board is going to want you to move really quickly. They're going to want you to spend on on paid advertising. The more you can be in control of what you're running, you're not reporting to a board, to a bunch of co-founders that are not patient. The more patient you can be, the better. That's easier said than done, but I think if you can have a really sense of, a big sense of urgency in the short term, so you're just trying to get a lot of things done, but you're okay with things taking time, at the end of the day, it's going to pan out. What you have to do as well is, if I'm going to give you some practical advice, is you also got to look at your on-page SEO. You got to think about things such as the skyscraper technique, which is from Backlinko. So skyscraper technique is the idea that you're creating a 10, 20, 30x piece of content that's better than the top 10 results for whatever specific keyword you're trying to rank for. So the more epic you can have it, the better. That doesn't just mean more text. It means well-designed and also any other element that's going to give you a leg up. So you got to think about that first. And the other thing with proper on-page SEO too, is whatever kind of content you're creating, make sure you have good internal linking structure going on too on the website. A lot of people forget about site architecture. Also keeping in mind too that there's 2 things that matter most when it comes to Google. It's content and it's links. Don't forget about links. If you've really created a good piece of content, the idea is if you make a skyscraper piece of content, it's really easy for you to request to other people and say, hey, what do you think about this? So obviously you're not just going to go request them all the time, hey, come link to my stuff, come link to my stuff. Ideally, if you can build a relationship, even better. I was at a conference a couple weeks ago. I sat down and then someone from Intercom sat down. Her name is Sarah and she's on the content team. And just like that, we started to build up a collaboration. She actually follows some of the stuff that we do and now we're building a collaboration. And then, you know, easily that's a link from Intercom, for example, and we're gonna be doing other stuff with them too. The flywheel starts to build. We all start from somewhere and I'm telling you, like, even if you're starting from the very beginning right now, I've only had some of these sites for less than a couple years. It just takes time. You have to be patient. The thing is, most people aren't willing to wait, and most people aren't willing to ask for help. You got to be willing to do that too. So if you enjoyed this video, just go ahead and hit subscribe, and we'll see you in the next one to help you grow.
