October 7, 2006 I recently read forum post on the three signs of a nightmare client, and was thinking, “wow, I get a lot of problems from customers wanting too much for too little.” I thought it would be a good idea to talk about time and return.

It starts with the submission. Google is known to have the longer time period of the three big boys. I haven’t really had a problem with them, and usually get my sites indexed in about a week or 2. Every once in a while it takes about 4 or 5 weeks, but that also has a lot to do with a lack of a full site. (that’s a killer by the way. I learned the hard way. Don’t start submitting and marketing a half-built site). DMOZ should be your main submission goal. Being human-edited though, it can take some serious time to be indexed. Sometimes as long as 18 months. Yeah, no shit. But it is also used by a number of search engines as a means of including a site.

So now you are in Google and have submitted to DMOZ, why is your site not on page one? Because there are almost 50 million other sites out there in the same category. I used to often get a customer’s pissed off call because I have been working on their site for about 2 weeks and they are not number 1 on Google when searching for “car.” Yeah….that’s odd. I say “used” because I have learned a few lessons in my young life, and am now secure enough to turn a potential customer away. With so many sites out there, you have to prove yourself. You have to prove that your site is relevant and important and should be ranked well. We have been talking about this and will continue to do so in detail, but this article is on time, not optimization details. Anyway, you have to have an optimized site (which takes time), and you have to get link popularity (which takes even more time when done legitimately). Also, a new site has to compete with sites that have been in the search engines for a great amount of time. It’s not always the determining factor, but tenure can have an effect on a site’s ranking. It’s the Internet. It takes time. Do yourself a favor and let your future customer know what to expect up front. I usually tell my customer’s that the design and initial optimization of a site shouldn’t be longer than 2 or three months. (keep in mind this is an average on a fairly simple site). At which point I continue with SEO maintenance and link building. We also do some neat things with press releases and other marketing tactics that are really opening some doors for us and in turn our customers. I advise that you should see some form of substantial result at 6 months. At 10 — 12 months, the customer’s expectations should have been met. Some of you don’t have customer’s as much as you consult for a larger company. This consultation involves just that, consulting, and the lack of actual implementation yourself. Advise your customer, after a change has been made, for better or worse, there should be some change at about 3 — 4 weeks. This is often plenty of time for a re crawl and redetermination of ranking. Obviously, there are exceptions to every rule, and again, this is a loose timeline. I try to stick to this standard to keep me safe though. If things are great early, you have a happy customer and you are done. If things are half way done 3 months too late, you have a mad customer that will tell everyone they contact, and you are still stressing the work on a site. Not a good situation.

Well, I hope this helps with the time issue.

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