Today is Valentine’s Day, and I’m here to celebrate long-term relationships. Several of our clients have been with us for three or four years, and the joy of committed relationship is seeing the little love nests of their web sites become fruitful. Here’s a virtual chocolate truffle to my sweeties: Overland Storage in San Diego, SS White Dental Burs in New Jersey, Clifford Law in Chicago, and Prescott Legal Recruiters in Houston.

SEO is a long-term strategy. It takes months to do the work, and months to see results. Like going to the gym. Hiring an SEO firm is like hiring someone to go to the gym for you…except you’re the one that gets to show off the bod.

If you’re thinking about reworking your web site, plan on a month or two to develop the strategy and plan out the work. Optimizing your web site will take a couple of months, then it takes 30-45 days for your first gains in ranking. Next, link development to support your new content and the SEO strategy, including PR and other social media. More links, better rankings, more traffic. Now, you work on improving your conversions. Are you tracking phone calls and emails that come from your web visitors? What can you give away to get some token of commitment? All these go with the territory, so when you’re thinking about reworking your web site, you have to understand that it won’t really be OPTIMIZED for maybe a year. But an optimized web site has leverage–probably the most effective marketing you can do, because of the long-term payoff.

A web site that’s purring along, bringing in traffic and converting them into customers, is worth the effort. Like a new car (and at about the same cost), it’s exciting to feel the power, take a curve, and cruise down the road. Unfortunately, it’s not something you can drive off the lot…it’s a custom rod you spend a lot of time under before you can take it for a spin.