One of the long standing analogies of SEO and SEM is that SEO is a marathon while SEM is a sprint.
If you let that get too ingrained, you are hurting your ability to make significant impacts with SEO.
That analogy is supposed to highlight that a solid SEO strategy can take time to develop and implement while a PPC campaign can start driving traffic as soon as you have a keyword list and a valid credit card.
That’s an unfortunate analogy that, when taken as dogma, can work to prevent SEO efforts as being too labor intensive. (In fact, I had to lobby aggressively for content changes for the holiday season because the marketing team felt that SEO would take too long. They referred to the “SEO is a marathon” analogy.)
The truth of the matter is that SEO needs a good foundation to work, but that SEO campaigns and tactical improvements often result in quick impacts for rankings, click through rates, and traffic.
The last time I was asked the “Is SEO a marathon or a sprint” question, I felt like it was a softball question with “SEO is a marathon with long term goals and planning” as the desired response. I pushed back saying that SEO is interval training: it’s a long term effort with multiple sprints. SEO work consists of bursts of intense activity with steady work in between.
For that I go back to experiences working SEO projects:
- Title tag and content updates impact rankings in a matter of days.
When implementing content updates to existing pages, I’ve consistently seen ranking changes (and traffic increases) in a matter of days.
In this example, we saw ranking improvements very quickly after implementing title and metadata updates, and those gains reverted when a code release ended up rolling back our content changes. We regained those positions after relaunching the content changes.
Those gains are not always stable as we’re always working against a moving target: search intent, search engine algorithms and competitor sites are all in constant flux. - Visible for new search features days after implementation.
Going after featured snippets or rich results features is another example. Once a new rich result is seen in the wild, you can capture it as soon as you implement the proper code and get the page re-indexed.
When we’ve targeted rich results that were based on page code improvements, our pages were able to qualify for rich results in the days after Google re-crawled the targeted pages. This resulted in almost immediate impacts to CTR.
Those example of quickly gaining features, rankings, and the resulting traffic show the sprint nature of SEO. You can realize these gains quickly, but like a sprint, there is a slow down to the velocity.
In between the SEO sprints, there is foundational work to keep the site healthy, improve overall architecture, and understand what content across existing or new pages you need to meet your market’s needs and rank.
Marking SEO as a marathon is a good way to push that you don’t just “SEO” a page right before launch, but a good PPC campaign doesn’t just buy a list of keywords. For both there is a foundational approach to setting up the campaign and there are short and long term measurements.
For SEO campaigns, I report out on the short term wins but will also temper that with guidance that some of the immediate ranking improvements will revert back and that we do need to have long term reporting to ensure that any gains stabilize. What I try to avoid is the idea that we can’t measure SEO impact until 90-120 days out because we’re afraid that an algorithm update may wipe out our gains.
That holiday campaign? The SEO team jumped in mid-flight and lobbied for changes to the holiday sale page. We showed evidence of quick ranking changes for a prior campaign page as our proof of concept. Once involved, we were able to stage updates to the “SEO tags” (title, metadata) and then to content. With each SEO enhancement we realized increased rankings and traffic within days.
That SEO sprint is now documented and we’ll be using it to help us with future long-term enhancements as we train for the next campaigns.