How long does it take for SEO to show results?

There is no way to guarantee SEO results within a specific time frame, simply because we can never guarantee what we cannot control and Google is not under our power.

There may be rough estimates that should be clearly explained to the customer, ie expectations that are not guaranteed.

Your client should understand that there are no miracle cures and you have no secrets. All you can do is follow best practices to ensure incremental growth. This is the key to manage customer expectations correct.

But back to the question: how long does it take for SEO to show results?

What are we trying to achieve?

First of all, it is important to understand and adjust the goals of your client. What do they look for when investing in an SEO strategy?

Most clients would insist on improving rankings for the keywords they already know they are targeting. In many cases, these are unrealistic keywords that can take years to reach.

This is where “adjusting” the goals comes into play.

By expanding these keywords to make them longer and less competitive, you can be more confident of hitting SEO goals within a realistic timeframe. Make sure the customer is made aware of:

• Long Tail Keywords can actually bring organic traffic that converts much better: the more specific a search query is, the closer the searcher is to completing their buying journey.
• Keyword gap analysis helps in identification business gaps that can help a business stand out and find its unique audience.
• Discovering new keywords and expanding existing keywords helps diversify organic traffic sources, which in turn helps maintain more consistent organic visibility. If you lose a position or two on a short-tail search with a huge search volume, you risk losing 20-30 percent of your traffic. If you lose a few long-tail rankings here and there, your site will still generate pretty much the same amount of organic traffic. Google’s SERPs are very dynamic and diverse: ranking drops are inevitable, so diversification is the key to stability.

Overall, the best way to meet customer expectations is to aim for gradual organic traffic (and conversion) growth. That way, you’re focusing on positive results coming from a large number of pages, rather than worrying about rank monitoring for a few key pages that might be extremely slow to move up.

What are the metrics that everything depends on?

And yet the inevitable “it depends” will keep popping up.

Every website is different: some websites benefit from active SEO work faster than others, even if you focus on gradual traffic growth and not on a few rankings.

The SEO timeframe mainly depends on:

• The size of the site: It’s easier to get cumulative growth when the site is big and already has some opportunities
• The history of the site: If the site has been experiencing a slow but steady decline in rankings and organic visibility for a number of years, it can be difficult to flatten and ultimately reverse that curve. If a site has been affected by certain updates (like the Product Review update), Google needs to re-run that update in order for any previous work to reflect the rankings (or not). No SEO expert can ever be sure when the next update will come, so your SEO results will be obvious. And let’s not even talk about a rather unpopular fact that none of the recent google updates has an obvious cure: you have to work on everything under the sun in hopes that it will help, and sometimes it doesn’t.
• Current backlink profile (and possible actions to take): Things like backlink cleaning can take some time for Google to recognize and act on the changes
• The age of the site: New websites take longer for Google to finally accept that they can be trusted.

There are of course more factors. Whether a website is already an entity is another factor that can affect how quickly the results come in. The current structure of the website is another big thing that can be challenging: restructuring a website can keep Google finding it for a long time, even if you do everything right.

Obviously, client turnaround is another factor to discuss: some companies require a lengthy approval process for every change needed to make their websites more SEO-friendly. New and optimized content can take weeks or months of the legal review process to complete.

Other companies simply don’t have development teams to help them with the on-site work, so they rely on freelancers. This is another layer of the back and forth process that slows them down, especially when ongoing technical tasks are required. Additionally some CMS are easier to manage (these are Wix, WordPress and some others), while others require technical skills.

SEOs are seldom lucky enough to get the keys from clients’ websites that allow them to go live with all the necessary changes in a matter of days.

So how long does SEO take?

Taking all of the above into account, the minimum time it takes for SEO to deliver tangible results (i.e. relevant traffic that converts) is six months.

In most cases it takes you about 12 months to be proud report on the results could you reach

Quick wins are possible…

Of course, there are tricks to deliver some results in less time to keep your customers happy.

For example, Optimization for brand search is something that can quickly help your customers see more traffic that converts like magic (because people searching for a brand name are very likely to convert once they manage to land on that site).

Internal linking can quickly improve the performance of existing pages, especially when they are optimized for less competitive searches.

Exploring rich snippets possibilities and use structured markup (where it makes sense) will likely improve CTR without having to wait for rankings to grow (which will happen more slowly).

Updating old articles currently ranking in the first two pages of search results can also provide quick wins if you get it right.

Those are the first steps you need to take when starting active SEO work.

It’s actually a never-ending process

This is another thing that should be made clear when customers ask that inevitable question: how long will it take?

SEO actually never ends. You can’t just optimize a website and watch your organic traffic come in and convert. Google’s algorithm is developingcurrent content becomes obsolete (needing to be monitored, updated, and re-optimized), and competitors continue to receive backlinks and other important boosts.

You must always keep your SEO efforts fresh, developing new content and new things link generating Assets and lead magnets, discover new search patterns… The list goes on and on.

An effective SEO service also always involves researching new tactics, closely monitoring competitors (and learning from them), and constantly investigating new SEO opportunities (like new keywords, new rich snippet opportunities, and new media).

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Ann Smarty is the Founder of Viral Content Bee, Brand and Community Manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas. You can find her on Twitter @seosmarty.

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