How long does it take for SEO to start working?
When you start to Google this term “How long does SEO take?”, you often start to hear a rather obnoxious opening to the article that starts with “how long is a piece of string!”.
Or something of that nature; however, well, as the owner of a business, you naturally want to know where you stand.
Therefore, any SEO business just stating “it depends”- well, that’s good enough.
However, we do understand both sides of the coin: as a business, you want to plan, yet as an SEO agency owner, you naturally don’t want to set unrealistic objectives.
This article will therefore dive headfirst into why search engine optimisation can sometimes deliver results quickly. Still, on the other hand, sometimes things can move at a much slower pace.
Give me the short version:
Here are the main factors that basically decide how long your website takes to rank on page one of Google:
- How old the website is (accumulated domain authority and Google’s Sandbox period)
- How has SEO been approached in the past? (Are there any Google penalties?)
- What’s the content marketing quality like? (How high is the Google EEAT score)
- Is the content well-written, or has AI content been slapped all over the shop?
- Are the links good or a bit spammy? (Is there any link penalties in place?)
- How has the website been constructed? Does it set out all of the main services and products in a logical manner?
- Is there a ton of technical SEO issues that need to be worked through?
- How many product lines are being sold? If there are more, you do need to appreciate that SEO work needs to be applied to every keyword.
- How much budget do you have?
Most importantly, who are you competing against? Have you recruited the right level of SEO expertise to compete with your direct competitors?
How old is the business’s website?
Sometimes a business has owned a domain name and a business website since the beginning of time.
A business may therefore have owned that domain name for, say, decades.
Now, what’s great about that is that even though the business may not have thrown themselves to the wheel and gained much traction on their SEO, they still have a domain name that’s been live for some time.
This means that without much effort, the business will have most likely improved its “domain authority”.
It may have accumulated some high-quality directory backlinks and other backlinks during that time span. The business may have written the odd blog post and made some web design improvements also.
Great, therefore these businesses have a good head start, sometimes a large head start when compared to a brand new website.
A brand-new website that’s just been designed and gone live, presuming that the domain name has never been used before, well, optimising that site it is much, much harder.
Google doesn’t know anything about that business or its domain name, so it tends to trust websites that have been live longer. That is, even if SEO work hasn’t been applied all that much.
The size of your website i.e how many pages?
How many products or services are you flogging?
If you’re selling a ton of products or services, you have to appreciate that this will take a massive effort to optimise all of these different keywords.
Every distinct keyword needs to be optimised separately; the business needs to prove to Google that it is a good retailer for each product category.
This involves a ton of work; it’s hard work.
The reason is that Google’s algorithm needs to understand which products or services you sell and whether your offering the best advice in relation to those products or services.
So, if you’re selling rather nice German dishwashers, that’s great, but so are over 100 other e-commerce retailers.
So, why should Google place you at the #1 position for Bosch or AEG dishwashers in the U.K?
Well, that’s where content marketing, Google EEAT comes in.
Basically, you have to prove you’re the expert on German dishwashers; this mostly involves offering a lot of super helpful advice.
Writing content marketing, creating video content, and implementing web design changes to show you’re an expert on what you’re selling involves a huge amount of time. It’s a massively time-consuming process, which is why businesses that sell more product lines need more SEO time.
Don’t be deterred
For businesses selling fewer products or services, these e-commerce stores are easier to optimise. Cut-through can often happen within 6 months if you sell a more condensed product line and are more laser-focused on what you are selling.
For example, if you’re selling, let’s say just tents online, this is much more straightforward than retailing every form of camping gear and bikes.
Local, National or International SEO?
Businesses naturally want to shoot for the stars; a local business on the high street often wants to sell its wares nationally or internationally.
A rather cunning fox of an SEO agency owner will tell you “the sky is the limit”, and “build it, and they will come”.
However, when the marketing budget dries up, cash flow as well, then the agency owner may suddenly be hard to get in contact with.
Therefore, you have to be realistic with how far a marketing budget can go.
From the outset, therefore, you need to determine whether you need local, national, or international SEO.
The rates for these services vary massively, as does the amount of work.
Let’s give you an example: now you can begin to enter the mind of an SEO company owner and how they often price their work.
Local SEO
If you’re living in a glorious British city, let’s say Cardiff, your SEO work can then revolve around keywords which are related to that city.
Now, in a fairly large city like Cardiff, there’s still a lot of work to do to make a business more visible. This is what is referred to as Local SEO.
National SEO
This is much harder than local SEO, because you’re no longer laser-focused on optimising for just one city. You’re trying to rank for terms (keywords) that people would search when they want to purchase from a national retailer.
Such as “Dishwashers with next-day delivery”.
This means you’re trying to leap from all those smaller local suppliers catering to just one city or town.
You therefore want to enter the ring with the big online retailers delivering their kitchen appliances to the four corners of the U.K.
This is a much harder feat; it means targeting keywords with a much higher search volume and a national focus in terms of retailing your products or services, and you will be competing with other SEO companies and businesses with big, fat marketing budgets.
International SEO
For this, you may have got out of bed this morning and thought the sky is the limit. I don’t want to sell my organic coffee beans locally, not nationally, no, I want to take on the world.
Great- but this is massively expensive.
You’re then competing with international brands, with international marketing budgets.
This is why we return and go full circle for a second, and say be wary of the marketing business owners telling you “sky is the limit”, let’s go take over the world, because when going against brands spending colossal amounts, and the project fails to deliver, this is how businesses end up going bust when the goals are simply unrealistic.
Be realistic and set out how far you want to cast the net before you go fishing for customers.
Which CMS platform has your business chosen?
Some CMS or content management systems are just rubbish, basic, badly designed; it would be like trying to turn up at an F1 race with an old diesel MOT failure, saying, “I think I can win this”.
Therefore, to win, the website needs to be up to the job.
By being up to the job, we mean the following:
Fast Use Google PageSpeed insight tool to check how fast or slow your company website might be
Good page layout (don’t use a one-page website)
Updates (choose a CMS that can be updated)
Text (To be good at SEO, you need to hire wordsmiths, aka copywriters, so don’t choose a template or a website that you can’t add much text to.
How much time is being spent?
It’s all well and good to crack the whip over your SEO consultant’s head, saying, “we need more sales”, but how much time is being invested?
Regarding organic search engine optimisation, you only get good results if you put in good-quality work.
Then there’s a lag.
Googlebot is a very busy bot; it has millions of tasks crawling and indexing the entire web.
Googlebot most definitely likes to drink wine and eat copious amounts of chocolate on a Friday evening!
We deviate: you may write a piece of content marketing today, but it might, depending on the crawl budget Google assigns to your website, only be indexed a few weeks later.
This creates a delay or drag to when you start to see SEO results; this is another reason why SEO is slower than many businesses realise.
Is the work actually good enough?
It’s all well and good to have blind ambition, but your work, your backlinks, content marketing, and technical SEO are all measured against the competition.
They are measured by Google’s algorithm, which is so complex it blows people’s minds.
It uses over 200 data points, called “ranking factors,” to gauge a business’s organic SEO performance.
So, you might think, well, I spent that whole Saturday morning writing about how lovely my handmade candles are, why isn’t Google rising my website like I am getting beamed into a spacecraft?
Well, the reason is a bit like boxing: are you powerful enough, do you have the knowledge, technique, and stamina to go up against the competition?
Is content marketing the best possible answer to that query?
Or is it just 500 mere words of mumbling waffle?
If it’s just waffle, marketing text written to hit a word count, Google won’t index the work.
The work will be displayed within Google Search Console as “crawled and not indexed”, meaning Googlebot and Google’s algorithm have had a good look at the written work, decided it’s a bit on the rubbish side, and not bothered to include it in its index.
Quality is everything when it comes to organic SEO
How many winter jackets do you own?
Probably a lot, I probably own around 10.
Then you purchase a quality wax jacket, like a winter jacket made by Barbour, and you don’t need all those other winter jackets; you’ve bought a bit of British quality.
So much so that quality, although it might be more expensive compared to how much you spent on your other coats, actually offers much better value in the long run, because those other 9 jackets are now redundant as you only want to wear a quality garment.
Now use that approach when writing your content marketing.
Do you need to be typing away on your MacBook Pro at 8 pm on a Friday, saying to yourself, “I will make this business a success so much so that you feel like you’re going a bit mad”?
Well, no, because quality SEO beats quantity every single time.
So, don’t aim for churning out masses of content marketing, instead concentrate on quality, a longer form piece of content marketing that, if you were placed in the shopper’s shoes, you would find very useful.
How big or small are the competitors you’re competing with?
Let’s finish on what is perhaps the most important point: businesses, when they are actively investing in SEO tend to believe they are competing in a vacuum.
However, when it comes to SEO, whether it be local, national, or international, you’re definitely not competing in a vacuum.
You’re constantly being compared and measured against your direct competitors; they get the edge and move up.
It’s a bit like playing Snakes and Ladders; as the businesses you’re competing with gets stronger ranking factors, they move up. Perhaps the
PR team have done an absolutely amazing job; they have managed to get your radical wedding dress designs featured on Vogue’s website.
Therefore, they now have new relevant backlinks, and bang, that business then moves up the ranks and leapfrogs several other businesses.
This is what makes SEO exciting: you can’t get lazy, you can’t get complacent, because if you do, the competition will slap you in the face with a big fish.
Therefore, in SEO, you are constantly comparing the following:
- Number and quality of backlinks
- How much quality content marketing have they published?
- What’s their web design like, etc., etc
Benchmarking and comparison in SEO doesn’t mean you’re envious of the competition; it means you should weigh up what is working for them. Then you have the opportunity to reverse-engineer that, incorporating what works into your work (that’s obviously not implying copying their work).
Just as famous crisp brands used to say “new and improved recipe”, well, that’s what SEO agencies should be looking for their clients.
Which businesses have the best recipe? How can you build on that to make yours taste even better?
How you implement this in the world of marketing is simple in theory, and it plays on the premise MOZ Seo mentioned years ago: why not aim to be 10x better than the competition?
Therefore, making your SEO offering 10x better, that way you can leapfrog the competition in Google’s results and in the LLMs by not being marginally better, but by being miles ahead.
This, in reality, is much harder to achieve, but it’s a good concept to work with.
So, the important part is how long does SEO take?
As you can see, the lazy answer would be to say “it depends.”
However, when you read through this rather glorious and well-crafted article, you can begin to appreciate the different components that go into determining where a website should rank in Google’s results.
Here’s our best stab at answering that question, without knowing the specifics and recalling from our experiences as one of Cardiff’s best
SEO companies:
Local business
For a local business with a small to medium amount of competition, we would look to make a good improvement in organic visitor numbers between the 4 to 6 month mark.
Now, any business, such as an SEO agency claiming uplifts in organic traffic beyond seasonal trends, is possible within weeks and is telling big porky pies. Their noses will expand, get longer, and, in our opinion, be business-grabbing.
Because of the reasons mentioned above, Google’s crawling and indexing cycle is affected by Google updates.
This means when you implement work today, there can be a delay before you start to see improvements to your business’s SEO. Saying things can be achieved in days or weeks is misleading.
National SEO
Things are much slower here. In local SEO, you’re racing in the open air; in national SEO, it’s like racing in a car through dense, thick treacle.
Things move more slowly in national SEO because competition is often fierce.
Therefore, anyone claiming notable upward movement in organic traffic levels in less than 6 months is being a bit too ambitious.
International SEO
Now you’re moving from driving through treacle to driving through a series of block walls. It’s incredibly hard for a business to sell products internationally, and therefore, things are slow.
We are the SEO experts.
We hope this article has been useful to you.
We hope it’s not the normal dribble that SEO agencies produce.
We like to be straight talking with our clients, we like to give them the full picture, no sugar coating our advice.
It’s only then that the client and the marketing agency can work together, as they have a clear view of the scale of the mountain to be climbed.
If you like our style of dispensing solid SEO advice, thank you, and we would love to work with you if you are on the same page.
The author of this work is Ryan Walsh, who operates without an ego but would go so far as to say I am one of the best, if not the best, SEO experts in my home city of Cardiff.
So, if I can help further, or you would like a quote from our glorious agency, why not give us a ring?