Let’s face it unless you received an interesting proposal we’d all probably be forgiven for failing to notice that 2020 was also memorable for being a Leap Year, I certainly didn’t notice.

The next official one is of course almost another 4 years away but how nice would it be to be able to turn the clocks back and magically see our businesses leap forward with gains significant enough to make for a brighter 2021.

This got me to thinking if you took affirmative action now would it in fact be possible to give your business a noticeable boost, almost a vaccination if you will, that’s big enough to put everything right? Could you do something today that might put your business back to its former glories by the end of February 2021, as if Covid-19 had never happened?

I am of course talking here about the majority of businesses impacted by the virus and various lockdowns, furloughs etc, in short, the businesses that account for our 10%+ drop in national GDP, not the small proportion of businesses who have boomed in the virus due mainly to lucky fate as to what service or product they sell.

Mid-November to the end of February is of course not far away – not much more than 100 days. So is it realistic to make a noticeable change to your business in such a short period through Marketing?

Online Marketing is, of course, our specialism so let’s have a look to see if it’s possible to Leap forward into 2021 this quickly?

Paid advertising such as Google PPC can generally be switched on within a few hours, so that’s a big Yes, it could make an impact. The main question then of course is “but at what cost?” as the price will be driven by how active your competitors are and how much they are willing to bid up the prices per lead.

So what about our own specific area of Search Engine Optimisation – can that Leap you forward?

Again the answer is a Yes but I think it’s fair to sell general wisdom that it’s a slow process. But is that realistic?

Normally we advise our clients to anticipate an increased prominence of around 2% per month. This is, of course, cumulative so over say a three year period SEO can typically double a business. But can it happen quicker? I thought I’d check out some recent new campaigns of ours.

The graphs that follow show real data from a recent new campaign whereby in month 1 everything is being set up and around the 100-day mark we are plotting progress, in the case of the green graph, we are mapping actual site visitors driven purely by organic high-quality SEO. The red line plots the monthly percentage increase which has risen from 6% in month two to 21% by month 4.

In the blue graph, we are recording how many sessions were recorded on the website, with a similar impressive pattern.

Graph showing new visitors from SEO since campaign start

Graph showing SEO driven sessions from campaign start

 

Not shown is the fact that SEO accounted for 76% of the site traffic in month 4.

Why are the results so impactful so quickly?

In the early days of a high-quality SEO campaign, it’s typical to start looking for quick wins and fixes that can be accomplished without running up huge web design bills for the client, and we tend to focus on those things that make the biggest impact most quickly. We have around 140 possible tasks that can be undertaken within a campaign so even if problems exist in one part of a website or strategy, we can normally quickly find something impactful to do.

Then as an SEO campaign progresses we start to work our way down into the niche areas, each having a smaller impact but collectively adding up to even better results over time.

So to answer the original question… SEO can drive around 10% improvement in results per month, which might just be the kind of Leap forward most businesses need to catch up by the February 2021 imaginary leap year!  But only if you get started quickly!

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