How Long Does SEO Take to Work?

Almost every SEO client we have asks us

“How long does SEO take for my website to be #1 in Google?”

And it’s a valid question! Sometimes it seems like websites come out of nowhere and are the top-ranking site on multiple keywords and are raking in the organic traffic. Our clients want to know how soon they can reap the benefits of SEO results, too. Unfortunately, the answer is a little complicated and will be different for every client.

Factors that go into the SEO Success Timeline

There are so many different variables to consider. A lot of things go into the “SEO success algorithm”, but taking the time to understand the factors associated with SEO success will help you craft a better SEO strategy and set better goals. While this success algorithm updates regularly, the factors more or less stay the same.  We’ll break these factors into two camps: Business Factors and SEO Factors.

Business Factors

Leadership Support

One of the biggest factors affecting a business’s SEO success is how much buy-in the leadership team has in SEO. Leadership buy-in will dictate the amount of support SEO work receives. If you are thinking about your business and finding that you don’t have buy-in from leadership, it is important to explain to them what SEO is and how your business will benefit from SEO investment.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Another important factor to SEO success is how you and your company are measuring that success. When determining how to measure success, it is important to set goals and define KPIs that align with your business. KPIs will look different for every business, and a local SEO strategy will look different than a national strategy.

For example, if this quarter you are trying to raise organic traffic to your site, a poor KPI would be impressions because this metric doesn’t equate to your goal of increased traffic. The right metric to track in this scenario would be clicks to measure how many people are clicking into your website. Some KPIs take longer to achieve than others. If you were looking to track leads, it would take longer to see success than if you were trying to get more impressions. It’s important to set goals and measure KPIs that equate to your overall business goals, just know that some metrics may have longer time frames to see success than others.

What is going on in your industry

An important factor for SEO is what is going on in your industry and with competitors. If you work in an industry where all of your competitors are super bought into SEO, it will take you longer to see SEO results. To see where your site ranks among competitors, you can use tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs.

Budget and Resources Available

Dollars won’t be able to buy you rankings in SEO. However, the budget, resources, and team at your disposal, when used correctly, will equate to better rankings. This factor goes along with the amount of leadership buy-in you have in SEO campaigns. The amount of financial investment you have in SEO will determine the quality and quantity of SEO tools you subscribe to, if you are able to hire an in-house SEO team, or if you are able to hire an SEO Agency. The budget and resources at your disposal will determine the quality of your SEO initiatives and the time it takes to see success.

SEO Factors

Crawlability of Your Website

The crawlability of your website is basically how easy it is for search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo to scan and understand your website. It is imperative that your site is free of errors or bugs so that search engines can crawl and index your site with ease. Indexing for your website basically means that the search engines are able to display your site in search results. This is clearly a huge factor to SEO success, because if your site isn’t indexing, you won’t see any impressions, clicks, traffic, or leads.

Backlink Profile

Backlinks are external sites that link to your site. Search engines view these links as other sites endorsing your site and your content. These links are signals to search engines that other people trust your content, so in turn, the search engines trust it too and rank it higher. During the link-building process, make sure that you are acquiring quality links, which will lead to quicker success.

Domain History

The more established a domain is, the better it will perform. This is because the search engines are more likely to trust older websites than new websites, because older domains have a built up history with the search engines. It is more important to pick a domain that aligns with your business than to pick one that is older just because of its age. While domain age is a determinate of success, it is a pretty minor one, so just make sure that your domain aligns with your business.

Keyword Competition

SEO success is dependent on how competitive the keywords you are going after are. When gathering your target keywords during the content creation process, it is important to make sure that the keywords have decent search volume but have a low enough competition score for you to rank well. Shorter keywords are usually harder to rank for than long-tail keywords. For example, if you were trying to rank for “restaurant”, you would have a harder time than if you were trying to rank for “restaurants with mac n cheese open late”. This is because every restaurant is trying to rank for “restaurant” but very few are trying to rank for “restaurants with mac n cheese open late”, making it easier to get better rankings quicker. It is important to uncover these longer-tail keywords during keyword research so you can start converting for these niches quicker.

Search Intent

It is important to make sure that you are catering your new content marketing strategy to align with search trends. When mapping out a content timeline, be sure to look at what users are searching for in your industry at that time. Aligning your content with user intent will help the search engines match your content to search queries. If you are able to stay on the cutting edge of what users are searching for, you will see SEO results sooner.

On-page Optimizations

If the content on your page doesn’t align with the best SEO practices, it will be harder to rank quickly. Consider adding title tags, meta descriptions, keyword integration, internal links, header tags, and schema to your site to optimize it for search engines. The website ranking hinges upon the user experience, so it is imperative that you make your site as user friendly as possible.

Core Web Vitals

User experience is at the core of a lot of Google’s ranking factors, so it is important that you website is running smoothly with no bugs or errors. A technical SEO audit is all about checking your website, making sure that your website is running smoothly and that page speed is high. Users hate slow websites, so in turn, Google hates slow websites. Doing regular website audits and resolving any technical issues on your site will improve user experience and lead to Google holding your site in higher regard. You can check out your core web vitals on Google Search Console, along with tips on how to fix any problems. To see better results quicker, it is imperative that you have a site that is focused on a good user experience.

The Hard Truth about SEO Time Tables

It takes time for your SEO specialist or agency to research your company and industry. It’ll take time to perform the necessary analyses and audits.

And then it’ll take even more time to produce high-quality content that your audience and Google want to see.

That’s only the beginning.

Google will take its sweet time recognizing your website and assigning it to the right authority. It’ll take time for Google to see that you’ve been making changes and then compare the quality of those changes to other websites in the same market.

It’s important for any business owner to know all of this before signing on with a digital marketing agency or hiring an SEO specialist.

Every agency has a ton of stories about clients who quit them after only a few months because they weren’t seeing the results they expected (even after being told that SEO takes time).

Okay, okay, but about how long does SEO take?

You’re never going to get a satisfactory answer to this question because the question assumes that there’s an end to your SEO efforts.

If you want to keep growing your business and your domain authority, you have to keep up the good work. SEO is an investment – like your 401k. Could you get rich faster if you went to Vegas and bet on black at the roulette wheel? Maybe. Could you try a “black hat SEO” method that will improve your rankings in just a few months? I guess. But if you try a get-rankings-quick method, you could end up losing all of the progress you made once Google’s algorithm catches up with you.

Instead, if you stay consistent with your SEO strategy, your efforts will compound over time, and then you’ll be able to enjoy the benefits of your hard work. If you want to see quality results that last, craft an SEO strategy that is centered around crafting high-quality content that users are looking for. Make sure that you build your content strategy around positioning your website as an authority figure using the EEAT guidelines. The quicker your content library is full of high-quality and authoritative content, the quicker you will see SEO rankings climb.

Still looking for a hard number to answer “how long does SEO take?”

I’d say give yourself and the SEO team at least a year before you start asking where the results are. The results you might see after six months of implementing a smart SEO strategy is nothing compared to the results you’ll see after a year. After two years. And so on. Time, commitment, and consistency will get you where you want to be. Stick with the SEO plan, even if you aren’t seeing noticeable results after several months.

SEO is a long-term marketing tactic. It isn’t going to generate sales quickly, but if you’re in it for the long haul, implementing a smart SEO strategy has one of the best ROIs for any business.

If you have any more questions about SEO, check out our Digital Marketing 101 Guide. One of the SEO experts at Digital Strike can help you form an SEO strategy that will generate leads and conversions for your business. Contact us today for a free SEO consultation and learn more about our SEO services.