How long does SEO take to show results?

One of the most common questions that SEO companies are asked is, “how long does SEO take to show results on my website?”

Businesses are investing their money in SEO companies trying to fix their website and boost it online.  They want to know when they’re going to see the impact of their investment.  SEO isn’t like paid media on TV or Ads where results can be seen almost as soon as ads are shown. It takes time to see success in your SEO – but how long?  The answer varies, but the general thought is 4-12 months.  It depends on many factors, such as national or localised targeting.

Here we will answer this question and break down the elements that impact the length of time it takes to see results from an SEO plan.

How does SEO work?

The first thing to note is that SEO is about occasionally making changes to your hosting, in terms of speed, but also about your website directly.  We run website scans to see where problems reside, then working through those to get a “clean bill of health”.

So let’s say you have a crazy 5,000 missing alt tags on your website, so crawlers have difficulty in identify what they are or what they mean.  You fix them all today.  Great.  So tomorrow you should see results, right?  What about in the next few weeks?

Not really.  There is no magic wand to say “Google will see this in x weeks, by which times you will see a dramatic change”.  It just doesn’t work like that.  When you make these changes, it’s down to Google to reindex your pages and all content.  This can be several days, or even a few months.  It depends also how often Google crawls your website.  If you make regularly changes and your site is performing well, then some changes will be picked up fairly soon.  The downside is if you have a vast scattering of issues on your website, making this one change, won’t make a massive difference very quickly at all.

You should expect to see results from SEO in about 4 to 12 months

There are numerous articles online about this, but so far as we can tell, major SEO changes, such as SEO overhauls where a company picks up your site and “Starts the SEO”, can take many months to take any effect at all.  If it has been bad SEO for a long time, this will take quite a while.  And while many have little of the stuff, patience is the virtue here.

Examples of SEO challenges:

Local Hairdressers

Let’s same you have opened a new Hairdressers, or your website has been going a few months, but not working well.  Since it is local, and there maybe 5-10 hairdressers in your area (maybe double that), it’s less of a challenge to target those main keywords.

National Courier

But what if you are a Courier Services company, and you want to be on page one for Courier Services.  This can be hugely challenging, given the big players out there – and the fact they are super-well established.

It’s impossible to give a figure that applies to all websites though, and the best that an SEO  agency can do is give a best-guess estimate based on analyzing a website’s current performance and the proposed strategy.  Some key terms however are just a huge tough hard nut to crack, and can take months if not years to ‘nail’ those golden keywords.

SEO takes time – it just does!

In all honesty, SEO takes time. Google (and other search engines) want to show the best result for any given search query, and it takes time to index all your SEO work, get it picked up fully and deserve to rank better. You’ve got to earn top search visibility.  Just doing the work, and “yep that’s done”, won’t be the “be all and end all” of your plan.

Put bluntly, and referring to our examples: simply putting “National Courier” on your homepage will NOT make you number one, or even number 11; not for some time!

The age of your website, and its history can affect it

If your website is new, or it was setup with bad SEO from the start, these factors that influence the time it takes to see results from newer SEO.  Do not think that changing something in the last week will affect it tomorrow.

A young domain will nearly always take longer to show success from major changes than an established domain.  This is because it hasn’t yet built up any authority or earned any backlinks; or respect.  In comparison, an established domain of many years will usually have earned at least some level of authority and have some backlinks pointing to it.  Thus making changes will reflect in a shorter timespan.

An established domain doesn’t automatically mean that you’ll see quicker results to SEO changes.  If your website has been affected by a penalty, such as a slow website, lack of any SEO work, or lack of website updates, you likely won’t see quick results anyway.  It has to re-earn that trust, and “pick up” those changes.

User Experience

It seems really obviously really, but user experience plays a big role in good SEO.  Are your core services visible on your homepage?  Does it load nicely, and easy to navigate?  If you sell products, is that obvious from your homepage?  Do you provide services to specific sectors or consumers?

If you sell products, such as clothing, can the user filter by various factors?  Is it easy for them to find a Medium, White T-Shirt?  The more of this, the better.

Summary

Our goal within SEO is to do all we can to improve the ranking of your main keywords, as well as providing a WordPress Support service, all within one package.  And while searching for keywords on one computer might show up a bad result, doing it on another can often bring up a different result, based on location, network and much more.   SEO is not an exact science.  It’s not a case of “if you do that and that, you will be at number one”…….. if it was, everyone would do it and everyone would be at number one… no wait.. how?!