How long should a organic SEO campaign run for?

[adamclark]

Hi,

This is my first post to this forum and I would like to get a general consensus how long people feel an organic SEO campaign should run for. I know that in theory it should be an ongoing process however, many clients won't sign up indefinately for obvious reasons.
I have run campaigns previously for 6 months at a time but I found if a problem arose like a change in algorythim I found it difficult to turn things around (if it meant a fall in rankings) due to a lack of time. I have in the last few months moved clients to a yearly organic campaign which gives me much more time. Is this preceived a good length of time?

I'm based in Ireland and I feel the industry is still in it's infancy here and many customers are not sure what they should be expecting.

Just curious what your thoughts were on this.

Adam

[Wail]

I'm not trying to sound glib, honest.

It depends entirely on the campaign and the client. There's also an important difference between campaign and contract.

We don't do long contracts but often manage long campaigns. If you do well enough your clients will be happy to stick around.

Then it's a case of, in your monthly/bi-weekly, updates saying something like, "In the Google update of dd-mm-yy the importance of X, Y and Z changed. To address this we recommend the following... and T weeks/months for the changes to be picked up." etc, etc.

Heh. I'm a tech, not one of the client-facing people who'd write the actual report, but you get the gist.

[David Wallace]

I would definitely say ongoing or at least as long as they want to maintain great positioning in the SERPs and see good ROI. Initially I think a campaign needs to run for 6 months or in other words, a client should commit to six months so that the SEO has time to make all the necessary tweaks and adjustments to obtain prime positioning. After that, it can run month to month and so long as the client has good positioning, is getting quality leads to the site and that traffic is converting, the SEO effort should be ongoing.

We have campaigns that are in their 5th and 6th years now.

[Incubator]

I agree David, 6 months will allo you to see proper trending and placement which will allow time for tweaks as needed. Google crawls once a month so, if your client is really focusing on Google placement then thats only 6 crawls


Cheers

wc