Determining timelines for SEO projects and/or work is an essential component of your company's SEO campaign.  Two important considerations here are when to actually start investing in SEO, as well as how long before the client starts to see results from a successful SEO campaign.  Time-sensitive offers and campaigns and seasonal offers probably should not involve SEO, where branding awareness should.  Be prepared to wait several months before seeing concrete SEO results.

Determining timelines for SEO projects and work is an essential component of your company's SEO campaign.  There are several factors which help determine when to actually start investing in SEO; here are some of them:

 • If you have a highly time-sensitive offer, such as  “save 10% in the next three days", plug that into your paid search campaign rather than make it a focus of  your SEO work.

• If you have a seasonal offer to promote over a period of a couple of weeks, or if you have new product launches that you want noticed quickly, investing in paid inclusion is likely your best bet. This can guarantee that your URL will be seen by some search engines, although it doesn’t guarantee it will get listed.  (Remember, Google and many other search engines do not accept paid inclusions.)

• If you have time-sensitive news, such as a big product launch, consider optimizing the press release you post on your site   and submit it to the wire services so it is picked up and posted under the most appropriate terms by Google News and others. This can happen in a matter of minutes if you have access to an SEO PR expert and your PR people are used to working with that expert. Press release optimization is one of the faster growing segments of SEO.

• If you are trying to let the world know about your brand marketing, your standard offers and your very existence, focus on classic search engine optimization. This can take anywhere from one month to three months or longer to get a highly visible rank in major search engines.  Another timeline to consider involves determining how long a successful SEO campaign will take and when the client will start seeing concrete results.  There is no quick fix to SEO. Paid search campaigns show up online almost instantly and only require that you have a place to link to.  Optimization campaigns, on the other hand, can take much longer, and usually last at least several weeks, if not months.  Here are some of the factors which affect that timeline:

1. The competitiveness of the search terms you’re targeting and your site’s true relevance to them.

2. Whether your site is built using programming that’s “search-engine friendly” and if the SEO firm involved has to reprogram much of it.

3. How prepared and able you are to work in cooperation with the SEO firm you use. The fact is, client-side delays in selecting final search terms and posting new pages are the most frequent causes of slow rank movement.

4. Whether your linking relationships will all have to be built from scratch or whether you have relationships with peers, news sites and related sites that could turn into linking partnerships quickly.

5. The number of pages on your site and how many of them need to be optimized.

6. Whether you employ questionable practices such as cloaking or duplication (nearly-identical pages posted on the Web), which can drop or delay your search engine ranking.

7.  The timing of a site revamp or new launch. Too many marketers spend most of their energy focusing on the new site and only once it’s over do they think, “OK, now it’s time to get my traffic-driving tactics together.” Clearly, the problem with that approach is that optimization requires tinkering with your site itself, up to and including the actual copy on the page.  Plus, great optimization campaigns are built on hours of research. Your SEO firm needs to research search terms and potential link partners before it can start. And, if you have a “living” site that changes frequently with different products, new press releases, etc., you’ll need to have your internal copywriting and technical staff thoroughly trained ahead of time by the optimization firm.  This means that you need to pick an optimization firm as one of the initial parts of your site launch or redesign plans, not at the very end.