Setting my own expectations with SEO

Last month I decided to start building up my own website’s SEO marketing channel, specially to help sell JSON-LD for SEO.

Over the past few years I’ve only done the most basic work with SEO because that was all that I needed. Write articles, publish them, repeat.

In order to continue growing my business I decided to focus on growing the portion of SEO traffic to my site (and apps).

I’ll share with you parts of the plan and what I’m doing as I go but today I want to explain one common mistakes with SEO.

That’s around the improper expectation of results.

SEO is sometimes promised as a magical way to get tons of free traffic and customers. You just have to do these 10 weird things and BOOM, there’s traffic.

Kai and I talked about this in the Shopify SEO: Simplified audio course but it bears repeating:

SEO is a long-term strategy.

It won’t change over-night.

There’s no magical shortcut you can take, at least without risking all of your traffic to a shady hack.

In the short-term SEO just looks like work.

It can take 3 months, 6 months, 12 months, or even longer before there’s any measurable results.

But once it happens, it can really happen.

A friend of mine focused exclusively on his SEO traffic and grew his site to over 180,000 organic visitors in 12 months. Now he has more than enough traffic to sell his products and services too, and his email list is growing like crazy.

Even though I’m just starting to work on my SEO, I’ve tempered my expectations. I’m not going to worry about the impact until at least 3 months from now.

Ideally with this SEO strategy I should have pretty consistent results with very low-risk of any Google corrections.

Structured data and JSON-LD will be part of my SEO strategy but only a minor one. Since I’m selling my apps on here now they can get a variety of Rich Snippets. But even then, those pages are only a minority of my traffic.

If I used a Shopify store to sell my products though, I’d be installing JSON-LD for SEO so I can get Rich Snippets on just about every page over the next 2-3 months. Product Rich Snippets can have a measurable boost to organic traffic and they are pretty easy to get with the right structured data.