It’s sometimes difficult to find an analogy between the normal day-to-day work that us SEO types get up to and what goes on in the news and then other times something happens that just drops a peachy blog item in your lap. Such a thing happened this morning as the analysis of the England performance unfolded on BBC news and various pundits were ask for their opinion.

I suddenly realised that our love of the England team is pretty much related to our love of SEO. Bear with me, it’s not as odd as it sounds…

All through the World cup we have been greeted at every match by the sound of the vuvuzela ringing around the stadium as the fans cheered on their teams with gusto. Even those teams that weren’t expected to do well were greeted with a good blast because it didn’t matter – their fans were behind them.

However, as England failed to play any convincing football in the first two matches, what we got in the UK were lots of people moaning about the noise, inventions to cancel the noise out and complaints to ITV and the BBC. We certainly weren’t going to put up with that racket if our team were coming home!

And we also laid into the team. Oh boy, did we lay into the team. They were old, they were slow, they were paid too much and the manager was a bunch of things that I daren’t repeat here ‘cos my mom reads this stuff.

As I watched in the pub last night, the build up to the match was pretty much a somber affair with the odd mumble about how bad the tournament had been and what a bunch of losers England were. They had no chance of winning, no chance of getting through to the next round, they were written off.

Then Defoe scored a goal that looked like it was going straight through the goalie. The place exploded and out came a vuvuzela. They’re OK to blow now, we’re winning.

So how does this relate in any way to SEO, y’know, the stuff I normally waffle on about? Well it comes down to the expectations of the results.

We expect England to win convincingly, especially in a group that easy. We expect them to trounce everyone they meet (especially or except Germany, depending on your point of view) but they vary rarely do. What England do is they have a slow build up and when they win, we love them and when they don’t, we hate them. It really is love and hate, two polar views that I’m sure no other team is subjected to. Except maybe the French this year – their campaign was laugh-a-minute.

And it’s much the same with SEO. SEO is a long slog and many people expect there to be results in the first few weeks. At an SEO training course we ran a month or so ago, someone actually mentioned this fact. They said “It’s an awful lot of work to see no results”. They’re right, but the results are building and eventually, they will have an effect.

We often work with companies for a couple of years on their campaign because it can seriously take that long for the big results to come in. It takes this long because you’re competing with so many other companies who are probably doing the same sort of work. They’re ‘doing SEO’ too and unfortunately there’s no ‘switch’.

Until our customer gets top ten, we are a bit like a defeated England team. Nobody really likes to spend money on something that doesn’t get instant results, but sometimes you’ve just got to live with the pain. Eventually, like England, your site will rise in the rankings and at that time you can break out the vuvuzela and blow it triumphantly, but if you give up on it early, you’ll always think it was a waste of time and worse, you’ll never see the results.

There, that’s as good as it gets. Not my fault, you can blame the fact they opened the pub at 3pm and put the match on.