What is the shortest path to see SEO results?

Short answer – there is no quick path.

… but why?

With other forms of advertising (PPC, social media, etc.) you can change call-to-action on your ads, get new copywriting done, change out visuals, etc. to expedite traction, conversions, etc. None of that exists within SEO.

If you hyper-condense what goes into SEO and pretend that it only consists of content and backlinks, the logistics of catching up to competitors that have been optimizing for years is unavoidable.

• If you have 10 backlinks and your competitor has 1,000, it’s going to take a long time to catch up (the proper way).
• If your competitor has been blogging for 5 years and you’re just starting, there’s no way to write 5 years of unique content over night.

There are ways to automate backlinks and scale them quickly, but there are two problems with that.

1. The quality of backlinks suck.
2. The “link velocity” (speed of you acquiring backlinks) will be an obvious red flag to search engines.

If they see you go from 10 links to 1,000 in a week, they know you’re gaming the system and you’re likely to get penalized. Google’s “Penguin” algorithm monitors backlink issues like this.

There’s also ways to automate “scraping” content from other websites and “spinning” it to try and re-purpose the content. Google’s “Panda” algorithm catches this and you’ll likely get penalized.

Consistency is the shortest realistic path for SEO success.

• Don’t start blogging unless you can commit to doing it at least once per week. There’s no value in one blog post every other month.
• Don’t start building links unless you can do so regularly.
• Don’t start a website until you can give it the time it deserves.

At the end of the day it all boils down to time. Either you are putting in the time or you must pay someone to put in the time for you.