The other day I was doing some landscaping (tree transplanting) work around my place here in Nova Scotia, Canada. I know some people who are very knowledgeable about gardening and trees and all that type of stuff so I decided to consult them. I asked if it was ok to transplant trees in the fall with the cold Canadian winter rapidly approaching. He told me that there was an old saying in the tree planting world to that very question. He said the best time to plant my trees was 20 years ago. The next best time is always today.
Preparing the soil with the proper nutrients, organic material, watering the tree, and even providing a bit of fertilizer can help speed up the process, but there is no magic button to grow that tree overnight. If you put too much fertilizer on too quick you will likely kill the tree and you will never get the 20 year old tree you were after.
In the SEO world, we can do everything possible to set your site up for success. We will optimize your on page factors and metrics, provide a good balance of links and social signals with appropriate anchor text, write high quality content regularly, guest post, list your site in relevant directories, comment on blogs and forums from the same niche, etc. If you pour it on too quick though, like with the tree, you will likely get a Google Penalty, effectively killing your websites SEO campaign and hopes of ever getting the traffic you need.
One of the hardest things to do as an SEO provider is to break the bad news to people looking for immediate results. I can’t count the number of times I have been asked, can you get me ranked for this keyword for my business for the Christmas shopping season? High season is just starting. How much would I have to pay to get ranked for the season? Low season is just starting. I won’t have any money in the budget until next years high season. The requests go on. The answers are all basically the same though. I can get you ranking for that keyword for Christmas but not this Christmas. High season is starting? Great! By next high season we should be good to go. No worries about the budget. We can wait until high season of 2015 to start. You should see rankings in time for 2016s high season then! People are never overly impressed.
Im aware that you can go online on sites like freelancer or odesk or the like and find some people promising 1st page results in 2 weeks. I have yet to hear of this working on a long term basis for anyone that does it. I have also never heard of anyone who has gotten their money back from the promised ranking once google slaps a spamming penalty on the domain effectively killing the site.
My point out of all of this is that if you are serious about your dive shop achieving long term success there is no better time to get started than today. If you need assistance in getting this done, we would be happy to help you achieve your goals. We will work with you and give you a reasonable and realistic estimate of when you may start seeing the results that you need for your dive shop to start performing.