Just starting your venture into ranking in online search?

Don’t worry! You’re not as far behind as you might fear, even though some companies have been working on their search presence for 10 years.

You can compete with anyone. You just have to know where to spend your time so you get the best results from your efforts.

Here’s what you can do to make yourself competitive 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? Offline? Isn’t SEO online only?

Yes.

But let me explain a little more.

If you have industry connections and can sponsor an event or become a speaker, take full advantage of it. It can boost your SEO too.

If you’re going to speak at a local Chamber of Commerce event, make sure you get a link on their website. That’s a potent link right there. And, other SMBs or reputable websites may link to you as well.

Whenever you participate in an offline event, consider how you can work your 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. They want to deliver the results searchers demand.

If they falter in doing this, they risk their market-leading position (and billions of dollars).

So, Google has a couple choices:

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

Right now, they focus on the latter.

For you, that means you’ll continue to experience frequent changes. You’ll have the challenge of keeping up.

Understand it’s simply the reality. Will Google make dramatic changes? Perhaps. But, most of those may already be done. Regardless, they’ll continue to adapt and improve to some extent.

You’ll have to spend time learning, or working with your SEO in staying on top of what’s happening.

3. Understand SEO Works Differently in Various Contexts

No two websites are the same. You may read about a SEO technique that sent rankings and traffic sky-high at one website.

Then, you may try exactly the same with yours, only to find you fall flat. It does happen.

SEO has so many factors and variable in play at one time, that you have to know your own website and what you can do to improve.

If you have an old website (10 years+), you may have a much easier time ranking than others. It may take you just a few months what takes most websites a year or more to accomplish.

And the reverse could be true too.

Look, SEO isn’t easy. It requires patience, diligence, and hard work over a long time (usually at least a year). So hopefully these tips help you understand how it works and how you can improve the results you get from it.