Many small businesses operate on a tight budget. They ponder investment carefully and try to base their decisions on the necessity of expenditures and resources available to them. While your website, and more specifically search engine optimization, may not top the “to-do” list, they can nonetheless be cultivated deliberately and effectively over time.

If you’re not experienced with SEO, success with it can seem unachievable and therefore unnecessary; after all, search engines have become a daily dynamic across an internet that never sleeps. Some invest heavily to optimize to rank high, making it seem difficult to compete without the same investment. But you can be the turtle chasing the rabbit, and with commitment and patience get ahead in the race.

Many factors can help your SEO strategy succeed, and in turn help your website rank high. Just know that SEO is important for the success of any business (including yours), however it doesn’t and won’t come overnight. SEO is a long-term investment that requires work, commitment, creativity, and patience. But in the end all the efforts will have their rewards.

Build a strategy and be patient

You need to set realistic long-term SEO goals and a clear-cut path to reaching them. When laying out your SEO game plan, keep in mind that ranking high for certain keywords (a common approach to SEO) isn’t the only thing that matters. You also need to focus on creating appropriate conversations and sales narratives. Google’s highly intuitive search engine will reward you for original work, quality and problem solving, and in many cases if you create the right content for your audience, the keywords will follow.

You don’t have to know everything there is to know about what makes SEO work. Just follow what you do know in your industry and create engaging and appropriate content:

• Tell about your services and how you can help your customers.
• Help solve problems in your industry.
• Be creative and help with visualization.
• Have some fun with it, too. It doesn’t have to be so rigid all the time.
• Spread the word via your website and social media.

Keep in mind, too, that often the best SEO strategies are not related to working the SEO system at all. Instead, focus on your business products and/or services and most importantly your customers — you know, all the stuff you know about — and let the search engines do what they do.

And did we mention be patient

We know this piece of advice is pretty hard to stomach when you want to get on top, but it’s crucial to stay the course. There is no end to your SEO investment so don’t give up on it. If you stop creating content or optimizing it, how can you expect to stay in the race? SEO is not only a long-term investment but also an ongoing one.

SEO can take months to start to see real fruits of your labor. The seeds you plant now will sprout eventually, but they need time, care and commitment. Be the turtle.