No. Search engine marketing — on Google, Yahoo, or Bing — is one of the most effective tactics to generate leads, help you promote your expertise, reach prospects and stay connected with clients. Search rankings are notoriously unstable, and subject to a variety of factors such as the location of the person searching and whether they’ve logged in to Google and are using personalized results. But one thing they do not depend on is the amount of traffic coming to your website.

Enhancing your website so that it’s listed at or near the top is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Higher rankings can boost your visibility and a drop in rankings can mean a loss of potential consumers. A good SEO project can take three to four months to begin showing a real impact, depending on a number of factors such as the age of your site, the number of quality inbound links you already have, and the competitiveness of specific relevant keywords. SEO is not a quick-fix marketing tactic that can deliver results in a matter of hours or days. Instead, it typically takes a diligent, ongoing process that gradually improves your site’s rankings.