How Long Does it Take for SEO to Work?

When you search on Google for “how long for SEO to work,” a snippet of text shows up that says 4-6 months. This is the featured snippet Google has chosen to display, and it is from a 5-year-old Forbes article.

As an SEO professional I know search can be biased, but when a different search on a different day yields similar results, it suggests the 4-6 month timeframe is realistic.

While this is the answer Google has decided to highlight, and while it comes from an authoritative source, the reality is, as always, a little more complex. If you go beyond the headline – something unheard of these days – you’ll get to the real answer: It depends. 

 

It depends on what you are trying to accomplish with your SEO efforts. Are you too focused on outputs or vanity metrics? How long your website has been around, how authoritative does Google consider it to be, and what SEO efforts have been done before? There’s a big difference between building an online presence from scratch and fixing a few issues that are preventing an established website from reaching its true potential.

In order to get a good answer you need to explore the unique challenges different websites have and the different approaches to SEO depending on the challenge. 

SEO: Timelines May Vary

 

When talking about SEO timelines, one big reason why the most common answer is “it depends” can be attributed to the fact that every business, industry, and website is different. They each exist in their own competitive landscape and have unique conditions that affect their ability to attract organic traffic. If an SEO professional can give you an exact answer upfront, without having done any analysis beforehand, they are probably over promising their results. An honest approach to SEO would require an audit, keyword research, and a holistic look at your business and your industry. Only after having looked into the specifics, should you be guessing on a time frame for SEO results. 

SEO Audits – Begin With the End in Mind

An SEO audit is a process of evaluating your website’s performance and identifying areas for improvement in order to help your blog posts rank higher. Here are some key elements that should be included in an SEO audit for blog posts:

1. Keyword research: Identifying the keywords and phrases that your target audience is searching for and incorporating them into your blog posts.
2. On-page optimization: Making sure that your blog posts are properly optimized for search engines, including elements such as meta titles and descriptions, header tags, and alt tags for images.
3. Content quality: Assessing the quality of your blog posts and making sure that they are well-written, informative, and engaging.
4. Technical SEO: Identifying and fixing any technical issues on your website that may be preventing your blog posts from ranking well, such as broken links, crawl errors, and slow page load speeds.
5. Backlinks: Analyzing the quality and quantity of backlinks pointing to your blog posts, and identifying opportunities to acquire more high-quality backlinks.
6. Mobile-friendliness: Making sure that your website is mobile-friendly and responsive, as mobile optimization is becoming increasingly important for SEO.
7. User engagement: Identifying ways to improve user engagement on your blog posts, such as adding social sharing buttons and encouraging comments.
8. Analytics: Reviewing your website analytics data to identify areas of improvement, such as high bounce rates, low average time on page, and low page views.

Website Audit

Technical

In order to estimate a timeframe you need to have some inkling as to what the scope of the project is. This comes from performing a website audit and it’s the first thing any SEO expert should worry about. The aud it should be a deep technical audit that looks at all the challenges that aren’t visible to the nakes eye. Various softwares will help with this. Some are free ones that Google supplies, like Google Search Console and Google Analytics. Others are from third-party vendors and typically require a paid subscription. Two that I like are Screaming From and the site audit feature from aHrefs. The key aspect of a technical audit is that it unearths issues that you would not know about just by clicking around on the site. It requires access to the site and software that focuses on technical issues like canonicals, metadata, alt-text, and redirect loops. These are incredible important factors and also contain some fixes that might get you that “immediate satisfaction” clients like to see. Just making sure your title tags and meta descriptions are optimized and unique to each page can give you an immediate boost in the rankings. 

If there are a lot of issues here more time and money will be needed to make your website successful. On the bright side, you should see some quick improvements when fixing low hanging SEO fruit, but you’ll have further to go to be truly successful. 

Content

Another necessary audit that will give you an idea of the scope of work is the Content Audit. This is performed in order to see which content performs well, which needs work, and which you should get rid of all together. More content isn’t always better and the wrong content can actually hurt you. You’ll want to consider whether you need all the pages on the site. Too many pages can make the site hard to navigate, which is more of a User Experience (UX) issue, but many pages often mean thin pages. Try to create informative, authoritative pages by consolidating some of your content. In order to finish the content audit though, you need another important piece of the puzzle, which takes us to the next step. 

Keyword Research

 

Which keywords should your website rank for and what does the competition look like? Keyword research tells you not only what people are searching, but how many people are searching a typical keyword and how they are phrasing it. You can start with a single keyword, which probably has quite a bit of competition and then add modifiers, which will turn it into a long-tail keyword. The advantages of long-tail keyword is that they tell you more about the users intent, have less competition, and are used by people further along in the discovery process. These users are more likely to convert as they have often gained quite a bit of information in order to end up looking for these long-tail keywords. 

Some Do’s and Don’ts for Achieving SEO Results

Here are some do’s and don’ts for achieving SEO results:

Do’s:

1. Conduct keyword research to identify the keywords and phrases that your target audience is searching for and incorporate them into your website’s content.
2. Create high-quality, informative, and engaging content that provides value to your target audience.
3. Optimize your website’s on-page elements, such as meta titles and descriptions, header tags, and alt tags for images.
4. Make sure your website is mobile-friendly and responsive.
5. Use social media and other online platforms to promote your website and acquire high-quality backlinks.
6. Monitor your website’s analytics data and make adjustments as needed.
7. Use internal linking to help search engines understand the structure of your website and the relative importance of your pages.

Don’ts:

1. Don’t use keyword stuffing, which is the practice of loading your website’s content with keywords in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings.
2. Don’t use hidden text or links in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings.
3. Don’t participate in link schemes or other black hat SEO tactics that violate search engine guidelines.
4. Don’t use duplicate content, as it can negatively impact your website’s search engine rankings.
5. Don’t ignore the importance of user experience, as it can negatively impact your website’s search engine rankings.
6. Don’t ignore the importance of technical SEO.
7. Don’t ignore the importance of having a good website structure, navigation and organization

It’s important to remember that SEO is an ongoing process, and it’s important to keep up with the latest best practices and search engine guidelines. Additionally, it’s a good idea to consult with an SEO expert or professional if you are not familiar with the process.

Just because we’re saying SEO can take 4-6 months to see results doesn’t mean you should stop after 6 months and just try to maintain what you have gained. Optimizing something is an ongoing process and you can do it with website that have been around for decades or brand new content. Your SEO efforts will get lighter as time progresses, but they never go way; websites need constant care.

Ideally, you’d be seeing better results after 12 months. An important takeaway is that if you don’t see results after 2-3 months and then stop your efforts, you’ve wasted resources that could have been deployed elsewhere. If you can’t commit to 6 months of SEO work, it might not be worth it to start at all. SEO is not a tactic to quickly generate sales, it is a long term investment into your website and its performance in organic search.

To illustrate what long term SEO should and shouldn’t look like we have some real-world examples. 

Early win with no follow-up:

Sometimes certain events beyond the control of your friendly SEO consultant can impact your online traffic. There might have been a new product launch by one of your vendors, a natural disaster, or a worldwide pandemic. Sometimes the marketing department came up with a great idea, the SEO team did a fantastic job optimizing the site and you had a really good month. Then what? Can you just sort of cruise on those accomplishments in the long term. The short answer is no.

SEO is an ongoing process and those gains will eventually fizzle away. Here, we see elevated results for a while, but eventually, they drop down, though still higher than they were before the spike. So in this case you can say that SEO works immediately, but assuming that your goal is to have more than one good month, the real answer is that SEO is a long term strategy. 

Example of a Quick Win strategy resulting in low-quality traffic:

Notice the decoupling between impressions and clicks. This is a site with an increasingly high bounce rate and a low dwell time, which at least indirectly will negatively impact your rankings.

So what gives?

There are many news stories and trends that you can jump on to appear in people’s search results, but if you don’t belong there those users are likely to feel like they clicked on your website by mistake or fell for some sort of clickbait. If everyone is searching for kids pools because the weather is getting nicer you could write a blog post about kids pools to capitalize on this traffic. The problem is that you’re selling nuts and fasteners and there is no reason for anyone searching for kids pools to end up on your site. This is an example where how the user’s intent matches up with your authority is not taken into consideration, and intent is incredibly important. 

So once SEO starts to work, how long will it keep working? Again, in this case the impact was immediate. The problem is that these new users had a 100% bounce rate and zero dwell time. You can capitalize on trends that are irrelevant to your business, but those result in low-quality leads. It’s also rare that you’ll get traction from a “newsjacking” strategy. Alternatively, you can take the long view and focus on topics your audience genuinely cares about, and build sustainable traffick that way.

Successful long-term SEO strategy:

Continued long-term efforts beyond 4-6 months. As you’ll see there’s an increase in traffic first without clicks really following, leading to a decrease in the conversion rate. But as their SEO efforts continue and specific opportunities to optimize for conversions are implemented, clicks and impressions have the same relative growth. In the first 4-5 months, there isn’t much improvement as the groundwork is being prepared. Then traffic starts increasing at a natural and steady pace. A month or so later, clicks start to catch up and they continue to rise together. After one year clicks and impressions have both doubled.

This is a classic example of setting the expectations early and where the short answer of 4-6 months seems very accurate. If this company had been expecting quick results, they might have quit right before they started seeing results. 

SEO Tasks and Timeline

While every case is different there are some best practices you should consider, no matter the website. An SEO timeline could in theory look something like this. 

Month 1 – Website Audit and Keyword Research

As mentioned earlier, an audit of the website and keyword research is the first step. Analyzing the space that you work in and your competitors as well as your own business and website is necessary to figure out where there are weaknesses and opportunities. Month one will work as a set-up month and will include more one-time tasks that set you up for success down the road. 

Month 2 – Implementation

Assuming that one month was enough time to do the analysis and set-up tasks, month two is when most of the implementation will start. Some websites need a complete overhaul and some only minor tweaks, so what month two looks like varies from project to project. You will implement more technical fixes that you identified in month one. You should also have started on your content strategy but first you need to make sure that the website is firing on all cylinders, so people can find all that quality content that you will be producing.

Month 3 – Add Quality Content

While it is possible to see some near-immediate improvements to your website, expect to continue to put in work without big jumps in the rankings. Now is the time to focus on adding quality content to the site. Consumers enjoy reading custom content and feel more positive about a company after doing so; this is an important aspect of making SEO work for you.

Month 4 – Monitor Preliminary Results

In month 4 you should start to see some improvement to your rankings, but not nearly where you want to be. At this point in the process, there aren’t necessarily any big new items to implement, but rather it’s about keeping up the good work. You should continue to produce quality content and monitor for any technical issues on Google Search Console. While it would be nice to have all technical issues resolved by now, time and budget constraints don’t always allow that. Try to prioritize so the most important edits are done earlier, but leave some technical optimization for later months. This will be an ongoing process anyway as new issues arise. 

Months 5 & 6 – Start Link Building

Now that you have all this great content and your website runs like a well-oiled machine, it’s time to work on those links. One part of technical SEO is getting rid of all the toxic links that Google could penalize you for; this should have been done in earlier months. Now it’s time to replace them with quality links from authoritative sites. A big part of link building is doing Public Relations. You should be promoting your content across multiple channels, like social media and email. Reaching out to and maintaining healthy relationships with industry partners is your best avenue into gaining quality links and generating leads. 

Months 6 – 12 – Conversion Rate Optimization

Until now we have been focused on a technically optimized site with quality content generating a lot of traffic. But if that traffic doesn’t lead to conversions can you really say that your SEO is “working”? This might be a good time to look at optimizing your webpages for conversions. We need the traffic first, there’s no point in a conversion-friendly page that nobody can find, but without conversions, it will be tough to keep the lights on and the employees paid.

In addition to optimizing for conversions, you still need to continue to produce quality content and monitor for technical issues. You should be actively managing social media and, if you serve local clients, your Google My Business profile. This means replying to all reviews and engaging with your audience.

So, How Long Does SEO Really Take?

SEO is an ongoing process and not something that only happens in the first 4-6 months. This period is just as crucial for your SEO to work. At month 12 you should expect to see a lot more traffic and a lot more conversions than you did in month 4. While this might not be a satisfying answer, since it depends on each individual case, I would say that after 4 months you should expect to see some improvements from SEO in almost all cases, but you should expect to see a lot more after 12 months. 

The longer you wait to start SEO, the longer it’ll take to see results — too obvious? So if you’re ready to optimize your website, partner with the Bayshore Solutions today. We have a full-service SEO department that covers all aspects of website optimization.