Just now venturing into online search rankings? Don’t worry! There’s still time to catch up. It is possible to compete with anyone—you just need to know where to spend your time, so your efforts achieve the best results.

Here are a few strategies you can use to get a leg up in search, even if you’ve only just started and perhaps don’t even know a ton about SEO yet.

1. Take Your SEO Efforts Offline

What’s that now? Offline? Isn’t SEO an online-only thing?

Yep! But let’s delve into this a little more…

If you have industry connections and can sponsor an event or land a speaking gig, take full advantage of these opportunities that can—yes—boost your SEO. Let’s say you’re planning to speak at a local Chamber of Commerce event. Make sure you score a link on their website! That’s a potent link right there, and other SMBs or reputable sites may link to you as well.

The bottom line is that whenever you participate in an offline event, consider how you can work these real-world relationships to boost your SEO.

2. Prepare for Constant Change and Challenges

Google cares first and foremost about offering searchers an amazing search experience and delivering the results they demand. If they falter in doing this, they risk losing their market-leading position (as well as billions of dollars). So, the proverbial king of search has a couple options:

1. Stay the same and risk a competitor overtaking them
2. Constantly change and update their algorithm to improve search results

With Google choosing to focus on the latter, this means you’ll continue to experience frequent changes and thus be challenged to keep up. Understand this is simply the reality. Will Google make dramatic changes at some point? Perhaps. Yet, most of those have possibly already come and gone. Regardless, the company will continue to adapt and improve to some extent in the years to come—meaning you’ll have to spend time learning or working with your SEO to stay on top of what’s happening.

3. Understand SEO Works Differently in Various Contexts

No two websites are the same. With this in mind, while you may read about an SEO technique that sent rankings and traffic sky-high for one website, there’s a chance your efforts will fall flat if you try the same exact strategy. It’s true—it happens! So many factors and variables are in play at one time with SEO that it’s imperative you know your own website and what you can do to improve given your unique position.

If your website is old (e.g., 10 years+), you may have a much easier time ranking than others. In fact, it may take you just a few months to accomplish what takes most websites a year or more. The reverse could be true as well.

Wrapping Up

Look, SEO isn’t easy. It requires patience, diligence, and hard work over a long period of time (usually at least a year). Hopefully, these tips will help you understand how it all works so you can improve and achieve the results you’re seeking in the space.