How Long Does SEO Take?

How Long Does SEO Take, Really?

For the sake of a concrete answer, I’ll say that you can start to see the effects of a fully fledged SEO strategy within 6 months. You may see results sooner than this (some website owners claim to see results in as little as two weeks), or the process could take upwards of a year.

If you prioritize speed over sustainability, those tactics will end up hurting you in the long run. Google is automatically suspicious of any website that has a sudden increase in ranking, as it’s assumed black hat tactics are responsible.

You should note that there are a number of factors that can affect your SEO results for better or worse. The time it takes before seeing significant results depends on things like the age and authority of your site, any penalties hindering your ranking, and if you’re aiming for long- or short-term results.

HINT: For SEO success, you want to aim for long-term results. Your website will perform better and rank higher.

Here’s a rundown of the top nine issues that will answer “how long does it take for SEO to work?”

These 9 Factors Can Affect How Long Your SEO Strategy Takes

1. The age and authority of a website
2. Its backlink profile
3. Errors, hosting issues, and penalties
4. SEO-friendly design, structure, and architecture
5. Keywords Strategy
6. Competitor Analysis
7. Content strategy
8. On-page and off-page SEO strategies
9. Core Web Vitals

Many website owners have unrealistic expectations about their SEO efforts, imagining instant results as soon as they start working on their strategy. But SEO takes time and a lot of energy.

And that effort never truly ends.

SEO is not a one-time deal. It’s an investment that requires maintenance and ongoing attention to see any sustainable results. There is a lot that plays into how long the SEO process takes, so let’s not waste another moment.

There’s no secret ingredient for SEO. It takes time, planning, and careful readjustment to achieve and maintain rankings, ROI, and traffic.

Unfortunately, I can’t give you a straight to how long SEO takes to work. A straight answer simply doesn’t exist.

So let’s dive in to the factors at play when asking, “How long does SEO take?”

1. Authority and Age of a Website

Domain age is not a sizeable SEO ranking factor, but attributes associated with how long your website has been around are.

Matt Cutts, a former Google Engineer, previously claimed that domain age has little to do with the ranking process stating, “The difference between a domain that’s six months old vs. one-year-old is really not that big at all. As long as you’ve been around for at least a couple of months, you should be able to make sure that you can show up in search results.”

Despite this claim, many more recent, conclusive case studies demonstrate older domains benefit from SEO efforts more quickly than newer domains.

This is because older websites tend to have more backlinks, making the website seem more trustworthy to search engines. If your website is new, you can combat this by acquiring backlinks quickly (but also honestly).

Links will occur naturally over time if you’re producing solid content and promoting it well, which often means the older and more authoritative your domain, the more backlinks it will generate with each passing year.

But it’s not just links that make a difference here. Older domains tend to have libraries of content built up, and likely earn more clicks on name recognition alone. Google sees all this and factors it in when ranking.

This shouldn’t discourage anyone by any means; just be aware that a few dues must be paid before a newer domain gains a competitive edge. The best way to do that is by applying and sticking to the ever-evolving SEO best practices.

2. Building Links

Link building is a very time-consuming challenge. However, it’s an essential component of Google’s algorithm.

Avoid all black hat tactics when link building, as a Google penalty, is a costly mistake to fix. The best way to build links is to develop quality and engaging content regularly.

Use social media marketing to cross-promote the content and encourage audience engagement. To make the most of your time and effort, look for additional ways to repurpose the content into snippets and shorter posts, which will give you more time to focus on other areas and further increase your SEO success.

Remember, older, more established websites have an advantage here.

They naturally have a more extensive backlink profile, which is why it often takes time to rank over your competitors. Many try to find a quick solution to this problem with paid links, which at one time produced quick results, but these paid links are classified as a deceptive form of SEO.

Instead, marketers need to focus not just on the number of links, but the quality of those links. Links from disreputable, low-quality sites will do more harm than good and hinder your efforts to optimize.

Should you gain a significant number of links in a short time, Google will likely be wary and assume black hat SEO was at work. The legitimate way to establish a backlink profile takes time and effort before you’ll begin to see results.

3. Errors, Hosting Issues, and Penalties

Before suffering any headaches wondering how it takes for SEO to take effect, consider fixing any damage that’s already done. SEO errors, unreliable website hosting, and Google penalties take longer amounts of time to recover from.

Depending on the number of 404 errors, broken links, 301 redirects, and inconsistent optimization, resolving these errors can show positive results in as little as two weeks.

However, be aware Google doesn’t index all the changes at once. You may see an increase quickly in some aspects, but not in all.

Keep in mind, that when you update or make changes to any pages, you have to rely on Google to find those changes and re-crawl the page. This doesn’t happen overnight, and sometimes, takes a few crawls for the changes to register.

Other common SEO issues include fixing crawling and robots.txt issues, sitemaps, .htaccess, web.config files, and other components to your website’s architecture and linking structure.

Most of the time, you’ll begin to see results fairly quickly after resolving the issues, but not always.

For example, if you’ve updated a few links on a sitemap, you may see results within a week; however, if you’ve updated numerous links, it may take a few weeks. Older sites tend to update faster, especially when there are more inbound links than newer sites with fewer links.

4. SEO-Friendly Design, Structure, and Architecture

A large component of website traffic and ranking also involves your site’s design, CMS system, and URL structure.

If not properly handled, these factors can drag down your page ranking. You want to ensure your site’s architecture and URL structure supports proper optimization for a high ranking.

Choosing the correct responsive design for mobile optimization is critical, as more than half of internet searches originate from mobile devices. Plus, more than 90% of internet users say they use numerous device screens. By having a responsive design, you’ll ensure your website works properly on all devices.

Google also recently switched to a mobile-first initiative, meaning it will crawl mobile pages first when determining indexing and determining rank. If you have a poor mobile experience, that will more than likely translate to your position in the SERPs.

Take the time to run your site through Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test, and if needed, enlist the aid of a developer to get your mobile presence up to speed.

You’ll also need to factor in other areas that need changes, such as large CSS and Javascript files, which are linked to external files. This also includes choosing the right CMS that is search engine friendly and offers extensive SEO capabilities.

Once all of these issues are resolved, and your site is structurally sound, you’ll notice a slow but steady increase in ranking.

5. Keyword Targeting

Think about what somebody will Google to locate your content when creating it. We call those terms “keywords,” and you’ll always need to select a few to target with every piece of content you create.

This begs the question, “what does it mean to target keywords with content?” Essentially, it boils down to including it a certain amount of times in a way that fits with the content.

For instance, this article targets “how long does SEO take?” as its primary keyword. As you scroll through the article, you’ll notice how we place it in a way that makes sense within the context.

When asking why that is, it’s important to think about how Google’s search engine works. Last year, Google introduced the Multitask Unified Model update (AKA “MUM).

It emphasizes meeting user intent in every search rather than spamming a keyword. Whenever you include your target keyword in your content, be sure to do it in a way that enriches the article.

6. Competitor Targeting

You can learn a lot by analyzing your competitors, especially if they dominate the search results.

While you can’t steal their secrets, you can learn valuable insights for your own SEO strategy, such as keywords, patterns, and new practices to try.

Analyzing your competitors will also help you target better keywords related to your industry.

This process does take time, but the good news is, it also saves some time in the long run. Emulating your competitors gives you insight into real strategies that get proven results, which means you aren’t starting from scratch.

Luckily, there are plenty of tools that can help you evaluate and analyze your competitors, like SpyFu and SEMRush.

Take SEMRush, for example. Simply fire up the site and select Domain Overview from the left-hand menu, and type in a competitor’s URL.

This will take you to a page that covers their top paid and organic keywords, backlinks overview, traffic numbers, etc. From there, you can investigate further into each.

But when we talk about competitors and SEO, it would be remiss not to mention that those very competitors do play a significant role in how it takes for SEO to work.

Unless you’re in an incredibly specific niche, it’s more than likely that you’ll be facing massive competition in the SERPs.

Think about a local veterinarian or dentist’s office. There are probably hundreds per city, each with a website trying to rank. The problem is, that only ten of those sites will rank on the first page of Google.

Because the competition is so fierce, it will likely take longer to see SEO results.

On the other hand, if you’re selling shirts made from recycled tin cans, you have a good shot at a high rank based on a lack of competition alone.

If you’re actively trying to figure out how long your SEO efforts will take to pay off, you must factor in the level of competition and demand surrounding your product or industry.

6. Content Marketing Strategy

According to Kapost, those who have a content marketing strategy in place will see as much as an 8% increase in website traffic. In reality, we often see more.

We all know that quality content reigns king for producing SEO results; therefore, you need to spend a great deal of time creating a content strategy and implementing it effectively.

If your website doesn’t include relevant and authoritative content, you have a steep hill ahead of you. You’ll need to fix the content on your website and map out a strategy to create and publish additional content.

As you create content, you’ll also need to consider the ranking factors Google uses when evaluating pages. This means a thorough understanding of its Quality Rater Guidelines, knowledge of its algorithm updates, and dedication to staying on top of any new updates or developments are critical to a successful strategy.

This isn’t an overnight fix by any means, and it will take months to see the full results, but they’ll have a long-term impact.

Meeting Search Intent

At the core of a successful content marketing strategy is writing for search intent. “Search intent” is the term SEOs use to describe the “why” behind every search.

For example, look at the results for the term “laptops:”

The top results are all signaling transactional intent. People searching for “laptops” want to buy laptops, rather than just learn about them.

If you created an article targeting the keyword “laptops” and wrote about the history of laptops, you wouldn’t rank anywhere near the first page because you wouldn’t be meeting search intent.

Meeting search intent comes down to answering your audience’s implicit questions. In our above example, the top articles answer the question, “what are the best laptops right now?”

For another example, let’s imagine you wanted to rank for “how to start a blog.” To successfully meet search intent and answer your audience’s questions, you would need to provide a detailed overview of each step of starting a blog.

Finding Questions to Target

Critical to your content strategy is finding the right questions to target. Otherwise, you’ll be producing content aimlessly and achieving little results.

Before you hit a single key on your keyboard, it’s essential to get into the mindset of your average reader. What are their goals, and how can you help achieve them?

Empathizing with your readers allows you to create relevant content for their lifestyles. To this end, I recommend making a customer persona. These enable you to understand who your readers are on a fundamental level.

Also, several great tools can help you find questions real people are asking. For example, AnswerThePublic provides questions that people ask relating to a given keyword.

7. On-Page and Off-Page SEO

If you’re hoping to see some truly sustainable results a little faster, check your on-page optimization.

By making adjustments to your meta tags, header, anchor text, title, descriptions, and alt tags, you’ll often see results within a few days. This is usually one of the first items people address in SEO.

Get this done quickly, and it could shorten the time it takes to produce results from SEO.

Your off-page optimization takes a little bit more time to build, as you’ll need to link to authoritative websites. Consider blog commenting, high-end directories and citations, guest blogging, and social media sharing to further your off-page optimization. Be genuine in your efforts, or you’ll be considered spam.

For more on how to use off-page optimization for better search results, read my full guide here.

9. Core Web Vitals

As part of Google’s mission to improve search, Core Web Vitals became a ranking factor last year. This means you’ll need to calibrate your website to meet CWV’s three primary metrics:

1. Largest Contextual Paint – Your page’s loading time; aim for less than three seconds.
2. First Input Delay – The amount of time it takes for your website to become usable.
3. Cumulative Layout Shift – How much your page moves around after loading. Pages with a high CLS are a poor user experience and Google will rank them less often.

To view your website’s core web vitals, visit Google Search Console and find your website’s overview. Then, navigate to Core Web Vitals on the far left side of the window, under Experience.

Or, you may view these same metrics with PageSpeed Insights.

Boosting Page Speed

If you don’t want your website to fall behind in rankings, you must take every measure to boost your page speed. Here are the fastest ways to do so:

• Optimize media assets – Oversized photo and video files are notorious contributors to slow loading times. Ensure all images exist in JPEG and/or WEBP file type. Also, use third-party streaming services for videos, such as Vimeo.
• Use caching – Caching your pages can dramatically increase your page loading times. If you’re on WordPress, installing plugins such as WPRocket will make this process easy.
• Have a good web host – If your hosting service is slow, your page will lag behind no matter how optimized it is. If your provider isn’t giving your the speed you need, it may be time to upgrade
• Use a content delivery network (CDN) – If you’re serving a worldwide audience, you’ll need to use a CDN to ensure your site loads fast for everyone. CDNs store site files on worldwide servers, so there are no distance latency issues. 

While tuning your site, use tools like GTmetrix to test your loading times. If you’re page is loading slow, there’s no point asking “how long do SEO results take?”

So, How Long Does It Take to See SEO Results?

When will I see the results of my SEO actions? How long does it take to rank in Google?

Unfortunately, there is no definitive answer for how long it takes for SEO to take effect, as search engines and requirements are always changing.

Every site is different. You simply can’t measure in hours, days, weeks, or months how long SEO will take, nor can you measure the number of hours you should spend working on it.

There is no quick fix for website rankings. You will need to spend a decent amount of time working on your SEO strategy, but I promise you, the effort will slowly but surely pay off.

FAQs

1. How long do SEO results take?

The answer to this question varies but you can expect to see the results of a solid SEO strategy within 6 months. Be prepared though, that it could take up to 12 months before you see results.

While some website owners have claimed to see results within 2 weeks, prioritizing speed over sustainability will hurt you in the long run as it could get your site flagged as spam by Google. Getting flagged as spam by Google is a tough position to come out of and should be avoided.

2. Why does SEO take so long?

Simply put, SEO takes so long because the search engine algorithms have gotten so sophisticated. You can no longer end up on the first page of a SERP just by keyword-stuffing your page. A solid SEO strategy now has many more aspects and factors that play into a page’s results and ranking.

Since trends and searches can change, a lot of time goes into creating a strategy, deciding on an audience to target, and doing the research to see what keywords and content your preferred audience is looking for.

Once a strategy is determined, next, you have to consider some of the aspects of a good SEO strategy: domain age, inbound links, and page authority. All of those factors take time to become established. They can not be faked or manipulated.

In order to establish authority and start receiving inbound links, a page is pretty reliant on user activity. It can take time for user activity to pick up and authority to be established and recognized by a search engine’s algorithm. 

Once your pages are established, it will then take time for those pages to be crawled and indexed by Google.

3. How much does SEO cost?

On average, most SEO services in 2022 cost anywhere between $750–$2,000 per month.

The average SEO expert charges between $80 and $200 per hour.

A one-time project makes things more expensive, with the average costs between $5,000–$30,000.

4. Is it worth paying for SEO services?

Yes. No matter if you’re a single-person business, a startup, or a large corporate agency, SEO is a valuable investment.

If the scope of your SEO needs is small enough for one to perform on their own, then it may make sense to take that route, versus hiring an agency.

Your best bet is to weigh out what kind of SEO services you think you need, and budget what you can afford to decide if hiring an agency is the right choice for you.

5. Why is SEO important, and is it difficult to learn?

SEO is important because it helps get eyes on your content. Without SEO, you’re leaving traffic (and therefore conversions) on the table. For folks after local SEO, knowing that 78% of navigational searches lead to an offline conversion is enough proof. And even the process of refreshing old content can bump up your organic traffic by an amazing 111.3%.

Even with all its nuances, SEO is not difficult to learn. However, results often take time, so patience and a willingness to evolve with algorithmic updates are key.

6. Does my SEO strategy need to be reviewed or can I set it and forget it?

An SEO strategy is no different than any other aspect of digital marketing in that it is constantly evolving.

What keywords and content your audience is interested in is going to vary depending on trends and current events. That’s why it’s important to keep your SEO strategy growing and evolving, too.

You’ll also want to keep track of what is working and what isn’t. You’re wasting time if you continue to lean into an SEO strategy that is not giving you the types of results you want after a few months.

7. SEO sounds great but it still seems so overwhelming. Are there digital marketing firms that I can hire to take care of this for me?

Of course, there are! There are many digital marketing firms in the virtual space that live and breathe everything SEO. They keep up with all of the latest trends and know just where to look when it comes to finding keywords and doing research on your audience.

But even just finding a firm to help you can be an overwhelming task. Luckily, I found this comprehensive list full of great firms and consultants that can help you get your SEO strategy up and running.