If you’re considering investing in search engine optimization, you’ll want to know how long SEO takes to pay off. While it can typically take at least 6 months to see meaningful results when doing SEO, there are things you can try to speed up the process. Here’s what we recommend to set your website’s SEO up for success.
How Long Does SEO Take To Work?
SEO can start benefitting your site right away, but you’ll likely need to put in a few months of consistent effort (around 3-6 months) before you start noticing significant changes in keyword rankings and traffic. This can be due to many things including the following:
- The time it takes for you to start doing SEO – like creating SEO content, fixing existing pages on your site and securing backlinks
- The time it takes for Google to crawl and index your pages
- Your site’s age and domain authority
- Your existing keyword subsets that make up your organic profile
- The competitiveness of the industry keywords you are targeting
- How consistently you post new content / add backlinks
We recommend waiting at least three months to see how a piece of SEO content will perform in regards to keyword rankings, six months before making any major adjustments to your SEO content strategy based on traffic, and 12-18 months to start seeing the compounding (and best results) of SEO.
What Affects How Long SEO Takes to Work?
When you think of SEO, you probably start by thinking about keywords and backlinks. Those are both important factors in your website’s performance, but they are far from the only thing that can impact your website and how long your SEO takes to work.
The Length of Each SEO Deliverable
This may seem obvious, but you have to factor in the amount of time it actually takes to create pages, reoptimize content and secure backlinks when it comes to how long it takes SEO to work. Building new pages for a website that include keyword research, topic ideation, SEO optimization, design, internal linking, brand messaging and calls to action takes work! The same goes for custom link building strategies, on-page SEO and the likes.
The reason why SEO deliverable completion times are important to consider is because let’s say you sign up for a 6-month SEO plan with an agency. Without considering the time it takes to create the SEO deliverables, you might think you’ll get a stellar report at the end of month 1. In reality, month 1 will likely be spent doing the in-depth research and strategy for your site as well as getting started on some of the highest priority deliverables.
You might have a few SEO deliverables finished by the end of month 1, but the clock for reporting wouldn’t even start until that first piece of SEO content is published near the end of that first month or the date that first backlink was established.
Google Crawling and Indexing Pages
Similar to the first point, when considering how long it takes to do SEO you’ll also want to remember that Google doesn’t automatically crawl and index your new pages the second you put them up! Typical Google indexing time is anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. So if it took a month to get that amazing new SEO blog post up, you’ll have to factor in another couple of weeks before Google even notices it’s there and starts to potentially reward it with keyword rankings or traffic.
If your site has other technical issues like a long page loading speed or on-page SEO mistakes (we’re looking at you, multiple H1s on a page!!), this could affect how long SEO takes even further. Understanding website crawlability can be a good way to remove any variables that would make SEO take longer than normal.
The Age and Domain Authority Score For Your Site
The current age and domain authority score for your website will be something to consider when asking how long SEO will take. If your site is brand new with no authority score on Google yet, buckle up and know that you’re in for a slightly longer ride to make a dent with your SEO efforts.
That being said, engaging in SEO for your website right out of the gate is the absolute best time to get started! Doing SEO early on will make your life so much easier down the road when you’re in position to actually win high-value keywords and steal online market share from your competitors.
If your site has been around for a while and already holds a decent Authority Score on Google, the length of time it takes for SEO to work will likely be shortened. We’ve had many clients come to us with solid websites with good domain authority that just fell out of the habit of doing good SEO. As soon as we started doing things like applying strategic SEO content onto their site and securing backlinks, we’ve seen clients get pretty amazing returns within even a few weeks of doing SEO.
Current Organic Keyword Profile
If your website has been around for a while and already ranks for quite a few keywords on multiple pages, you’re in a great place to continue that success! Because of the existing ranking pages, search engines already see your website as a trustworthy and helpful resource for searchers in regards to the subjects you’re ranking for.
Best case scenario for SEO not taking very long to work is that your site is already ranking for keywords and your organic keyword profile is made up of keyword phrases relevant to your industry. If you work in the personal injury legal space, for instance, if your site already ranks highly on multiple pages for search terms related specifically to “personal injury attorney”, your chances of making new content that ranks around similar keywords is very high. Google considers your site an authority in that space to some level.
On the flipside, if you either don’t already rank for very many keywords, or the keywords you are ranking for aren’t all that relevant to the products and services you sell, then it will likely take longer to do SEO. This doesn’t mean you should give up, it just means you should temper your expectations a little bit as to how quickly you’ll start seeing rankings and traffic from your SEO efforts.
As you add content and expand your website, this previous success can give your new pages a leg up when it comes to ranking faster for SEO. This is one of the compounding benefits of doing SEO long term.
How Competitive Your Niche (and Keywords) Are
If you are operating in a tiny niche with few competitors, you will likely see SEO results sooner than a big fish in a bigger pond. The amount of time needed to make real progress will be influenced by what other people in your industry are doing with their own SEO strategies. Looking at competitors keywords can help give you insight into what’s working for them and where some of your biggest opportunities may lie when it comes to SEO.
The other crucial thing to consider when wondering how long SEO takes, is just how competitive the keywords you end up targeting are. It may be tempting to only target the highest search volume keywords you can find. While you can try this, the time it takes for SEO to work will go up exponentially. Depending on your industry, these high search volume keywords may already be owned by a competitor who has put in tons of SEO work, thousands of dollars, and been doing so for years.
For example, look at this list of insurance-related keywords. If you wanted to rank number one for these keywords in 3-6 months, you’re out of luck:
Employing this sort of a keyword research SEO strategy is one of the main reasons that small business don’t stick with SEO. It may take years to see SEO results, if any at all.
The better strategy is to work up to those higher volume keywords over time by building a base of related, less-competitive keywords. These keywords likely have lower search volumes, but as you continue to win these long-tail keywords you start building a nice organic keyword profile that puts you in the arena to jump up for those higher search volume, more competitive keywords over time.
Plus, you will have been getting SEO rankings and traffic all along the way – that’s a win win.
Content Posting Frequency
It’s no secret that Google uses a very complicated algorithm to serve up search results. But one thing you should know about algorithms is that they are hungry. The more you feed them, the more they keep coming back. Sometimes people do some SEO work on their site a single time and then wonder why SEO is taking so long for them. The truth is, they’re not engaging enough with the algorithm for it to care.
The more frequently you post new content or build new authoritative backlinks, the better your chances are of gaining new rankings. As you consistently put out content that answers user intent, provides valuable information and is SEO-optimized, Google starts to see you as an authority in the space and will start to favor your content in search results over other, less-invested parties.
While there’s no benefit to going overboard – search engines might get suspicious if you suddenly go from one blog post a month to 18 posts a day – posting 1-4 blogs a week can help you rank much faster than sites only putting out a few blogs a month.
Link Building Efforts or Lack Thereof
The work you do on your own website, also called on-page SEO, is essential in helping you to rank quickly. However, don’t ignore the power of off-page SEO (aka. link building). One of the factors that search engines use to evaluate a website’s authority is how many backlinks it has. Once you have some valuable, authoritative content on your website, link building services are a great way to quickly build credibility with search engines.
In our experience, applying links to expertly written content that already ranks is the quickest way for SEO to take off. Check out this example of a law firm SEO client that saw a 6X increase in traffic over a 30 day span once backlinks were applied to their site.
One thing to know is that this client had already been engaging in good on-page SEO, consistent blogging and strategic web page content creation for a few months leading up to this point. We took some of their very best blogs that were ranking for great keywords and applied links to those pages and saw these huge SEO results very quickly.
Can You Speed Up How Long SEO Takes?
Wherever you are in your SEO journey, there are things you can do to speed up how long SEO takes. From strategies to partnerships, here are some of our top tips to start seeing your SEO work faster for you.
Manually Request Indexing on Google Search Console
Warning! Simple SEO hack incoming! One of the easiest things you can do to help your SEO take less time is to make sure your sites are connected to Google Search Console, create and publish your new page on your site, and then do the following:
- Go to “URL inspection” on the lefthand navigation bar
- Past the URL of the blog you just posted in the search bar at the top and hit inspect
- Click the “Request Indexing” button on the righthand side
This doesn’t guarantee immediate indexing of your new web page, but it does put it in the priority queue to help speed it up. Pretty nifty, right?
Post Blogs Regularly, Targeting Low-Competition Keywords
We covered this partly above, but posting blogs regularly provides two main benefits: first, you’re building up a regular content cadence that can improve your trustworthiness and authority in Google’s eyes, and second, you’re putting out more individual pieces of content that each have a good chance of ranking for different keyword subsets and building your organic profile more quickly.
Ideally, for SEO to take less time to work we recommend posting at least 1-4 times each week to build a natural, reliable cadence. We highly recommend starting with low-competition keywords to help speed up your results.
