The Adido Digital Blog

To get the best from your SEO investment, timing is crucial. The thrill for most SEOs is seeing month's worth of hard effort paying off and getting to the top of rankings ideally when the search volume peaks. SEO is a bit like surfing in this respect. To get the best results, you have to put a lot of mostly manual effort preparing things and doing the same things over and over before you can enjoy the benefits. Unlike surfing however, if you get your SEO right, the fruits of your labour can last for months and years (and actually improve), rather than finishing in a heap like the gentleman pictured above probably did.

There is still a misconception about SEO with some business owners who still think that you can get to the top of Google overnight. While this is a trend which is starting to change, and despite our best efforts, we still experience a good amount of comments along the lines of 'we are expecting to see results in the next few weeks'.

Indeed, speaking to some business owners recently in some industries there is still a general consensus that just building a website will instantly start to generate leads every day! Unsurprisingly these industries are hardly cutting edge...

However, for those that are looking to get better results in the search engine results pages on the holy left hand side of the results, you can't afford to wait. If you ask any reputable SEO company about how long results will take to achieve most will tell you that it can take anything from week to years, depending on many factors (up to 400 according to Google). These factors will include many things such as;

• How competitive your industry is
• How much traffic there is on the phrases you are targeting
• How good your competitor websites are
  
• How old your website address is (domain name)
• How well you've maintained your website over the years (frequency of updates)
• How well built your website is (are their technical things harming your rankings?)
• How well written the content is (does it use the words you want to rank for in the content?)
• How many links point to your website
• How many internal links there are between each page
• and many, MANY more...

So if it takes months to get good rankings and there are dozens of things to fix to get your website liked by Google, when is the best time to invest and start fixing the problems?

Well, the easy answer is always NOW. If you can fix things with your website to help improve your ranking now then it is only going to work in your favour. However, this isn't always possible due to budgets, resources and skills. If these are in short supply then a more considered approach will be needed. Rather than spending on SEO when budget is available it makes sense to time a good SEO campaign with your searchers. To help find out when the searchers are searching there are a few free tools which can be used.

The first is to use Google Insights. If you've not used it before, it is a really powerful tool to help you see what happens in your industry from a search point of view.



The insights tool allows you to compare multiple variables against each other and to build up a great picture of the micro and macro detail of your market. One of the best things about the tool is that you can see graphically where the peaks in your market are. If you know your market well then perhaps this might not be very surprising but in some cases you might see some unexpected highs of traffic.

In the frivolous example above, we can see Pink Floyd had a spike of interest back in 2005 due to their appearance at Live8. Interest and searches for The Beatles increased at the end of last year when they released The Beatles Rock Band.

In your industry you may find that there is an overall increase in traffic or perhaps even a decrease due to the recession. If you need to get more of an idea about what's happening and how the market is working overall in your industry, this is a great place to start.

The second tool to use is Google Adwords keywords tool. In the same way Google Insights can show you about trends in your industry, Google Adwords keywords tool can help show you which months are busiest for your target phrases. You can use the keywords tool for free and play around with various phrases as you wish.


One of the big things you'll miss if you just use the tool when it loads is Search Volume trend. Use the drop down below as shown above and then click on the relevant option to show it on the table. Using the same phrases as above, you can see that last year, the Beatles had a big amount of searches in September as the insights tool showed us. The key thing about this tool however, is that it gives us numbers instead of graphs. We can use these numbers to try to predict rough traffic estimates for our SEO purposes. We can also sort these columns by clicking on them to get a comparison of various phrases for traffic.


If we can see here that a phrase has had a good amount of traffic in the last few months and has a peak in six months time of X no of searches, then we need to start thinking NOW about how to capitalise on this. Starting work a few weeks before the peak seasons starts is not going to give Google and the other search engines enough time to see your website in a positive light and push you up the rankings.

So if you can't afford to invest in SEO on an ongoing basis, perhaps these tools will be able to help you plan out when to start spending your budget and when to speak to a digital marketing agency to get your house in order.