One of the most frequently requested questions for SEOs is, “How long does SEO take to show results?”
It’s a popular topic in the business.
Businesses, understandably, want to know when they’ll see a return on their investment, but SEO isn’t like paid media, where returns can be seen practically immediately after the advertisements are activated. SEO success takes time to manifest. But for how long?
This tutorial will provide an answer to this question as well as a breakdown of the factors that influence how long it takes to see results from an SEO strategy. We’ll look specifically at:
What Does SEO Success Look Like?
To answer the issue, we must first define SEO success in order to ensure that the measurements of success are unambiguous.
When setting together an SEO plan, it’s common to include campaign goals and KPIs.
Let us dissect this.
Goals = the final results that you desire to obtain.
KPIs = Metrics that show progress towards your objectives.
These are both crucial indicators of success and, ultimately, the outcomes of your work. In most cases, these objectives and KPIs look something like this:
Goals = To raise income by a certain amount during a 12-month period.
KPIs = Organic traffic, visibility, impressions, or rankings growth.
Of course, defining goals entails establishing quantifiable but achievable benchmarks. To address this question, we’ll look at how long it normally takes to see results across fundamental KPIs, keeping in mind that goals are typically far more unique to a firm and alter significantly dependent on a variety of circumstances.
You Should Expect to See Results From SEO Within 6 to 12 Months…
SEO should produce returns between 6 to 12 months. We define results as an increase in traffic and accompanying leads or conversions. This does not necessarily imply that you will have met your objective by this point, but any company engaging in SEO should expect to see results within this timeframe.
It’s impossible to provide a figure that applies to all websites, therefore the best an SEO can do is provide a best-guess estimate based on an analysis of a website’s current performance and the recommended plan.
There’s no getting around the fact that improving your SEO takes time. Google (and other search engines) aim to offer the best possible result for every given search query, and ranking takes time. You must achieve high search visibility.
However, with the correct strategy in place, 6 to 12 months is a long enough time to observe the benefit of SEO efforts and justify continuous investment in growth.
The Factors That Determine How Long It Takes to See Success From SEO
Let’s look at the aspects that influence how long it takes to see SEO success to assist you better understand how long it takes.
1. Your Website’s History
One of the important elements influencing the time it takes to see SEO results is whether or not you’re working on a fresh domain.
Because it hasn’t yet established any authority or gained any backlinks, a new domain will nearly always take longer to show success than an established one. In comparison, a well-established domain will have attained some amount of authority and will have some backlinks pointing to it.
A brand new domain can anticipate to see results in 9 to 12 months, not 6 to 12.
However, having a well-established domain does not guarantee faster results. If the domain has previously been harmed by a penalty, a core algorithm update, or SEO work that violates Google’s webmaster standards, you won’t likely notice immediate effects.
When starting a new project, it’s always a good idea to get a sense of the site’s history. While looking at impressions on Google Search Console might give you a sense of site performance, the SEMrush Organic Research Tool can help you figure this out quickly.
In the tool, enter your domain and set the ‘Estimated Traffic Trend’ to all time. This will display the projected traffic for the site over time.
In the example below, the site has lost a substantial amount of organic visibility, indicating that there is a problem that has to be fixed or a quality issue that needs to be resolved. A new SEO approach on a site that has lost exposure would most likely take more than a year to produce results comparable to earlier performance.
This following example, on the other hand, indicates no past site difficulties or losses in visibility, implying that the correct strategy could deliver expected benefits within the standard 6 to 12 month term.
Estimates of how long it will take to see results are often predicated on a site with no previous issues that must be resolved first. Always evaluate how a site has performed over the last two to three years when making projections.
2. The Competition
Results can be observed much faster in low competition domains and search queries than in competitive ones.
Attempting to rank a website for competitive personal finance keywords (for example, ‘credit cards’)? It may take two years or more to achieve prominent page one visibility. On the other hand, for local or limited lower competition keywords, promising results could be obtained in 3 to 6 months.
Keyword Difficulty is denoted by the KD% column. This is a percentage ranging from 0 to 100, and the higher the percentage, the more difficult it is predicted to rank for by SEMrush.
Expect it to take longer to show results for high KD% keywords. But competitiveness is more than just Keyword Difficulty.
Consider how your competitors got to where they are now and what they are doing to retain their visibility. Your plan and projections must take into account the competition, particularly the aggressiveness of other people’s strategies.
You may also use the Backlink Gap Tool to determine the competitive gap based on backlinks:
3. Your Resources
You have no control on the history of a website or the competition.
However, you can (generally) regulate the resources allotted to an SEO effort. It’s critical to understand how this affects the length of time it takes to see results from a campaign. The more resources you can devote to SEO, the faster you’ll usually notice benefits.
The most crucial resource you will require is time. Let’s look at an example…
Two small business websites are fighting for the same keyword. They are both aware that technical SEO, content, and backlinks are the primary drivers of SEO success. Both use the services of a freelance SEO consultant. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll suppose that both of these sites begin on equal footing.
Website A hires their specialist for 5 days every month, whilst Website B hires theirs for only 2 days.
Naturally, website A should expect faster results.
Be mindful that discussions about the time it takes to see an impact must consider the resources being allocated, and that the best way to shorten this (within reason) is to allocate more to the project.
It is common practise to create a backlog of action items at the outset of a campaign (detailing all of the opportunities and activities) and then prioritise this based on the available resources. This can help to highlight the prospects that remain untapped and could be realised with additional investment.
Let’s Look at the 3 Silos of SEO Success and How These Impact the Time to Results…
There are three main pillars to SEO performance, and each of them can have an impact on how long it takes to see results. Let us investigate.
Technical SEO
If technical SEO issues exist on a site, they will need to be resolved before you can experience the growth you’re looking to see.
Technical SEO relates to things like:
- Crawling and indexing
- Site speed
- Canonicalization
- Structured data
- Duplicate content
- XML sitemaps
- Hreflang
- and more
Resolving issues around some of these areas will have a bigger impact than others, but the fact remains that any technical problems should be fixed.
Content
You’ve probably heard that content is king, and content is still one of Google’s top three ranking factors.
Because Google’s purpose is to offer the most relevant results for a given search query, why would poor material score well in the SERPs?
It is critical that you prioritise developing amazing content that matches a searcher’s purpose, but also that you take the time to study what is currently ranking and figure out how to build something better. You can learn a lot by analysing content that is already performing well.
Poor quality (or even mediocre) material might delay results, but amazing content that is meticulously planned out and brings something unique to a topic can enable your site to rank higher.
Backlinks
Backlinks are one of Google’s top three ranking factors, along with content. These are trust and popularity factors that have the potential to boost a website’s rankings.
After all, links are effectively trust votes between two websites. However, you must recognise that there is rarely a shortcut to obtaining high-quality backlinks.
It takes effort and usually entails developing excellent content that others want to link to. And bridging a significant link gap with competitors can take time.
However, not all links are created equal, and higher quality connections might ultimately boost rankings faster than lower quality links.
You can focus on expanding your backlink portfolio, but keep in mind that the necessity to repair a significant link gap may cause results to take longer to appear.
Other Considerations
Following the implementation of your approach, it is critical to monitor your site to confirm that it is seeing results. SEO is not a one-time effort; an effective strategy necessitates regular reporting and upkeep.
SEO should be a constant process, and viewing the channel as a long-term, ongoing technique can assist justify the investment.
The more resources you can devote, the faster you’ll normally notice benefits, but each website is a unique case. Before forecasting when success is likely, it is critical to pay particular attention to technological concerns, content quality, and the strength of the link profile.
