“I’ve been work­ing on my web­site for a cou­ple of months, and I still don’t see any results?”

“When can I expect to see my web­site on the first page on Google?”

“How long does it take for SEO to start working?”

These are only a few of the ques­tions our clients ask a lot.

And we get why.

If you ask an SEO expert, they’ll prob­a­bly tell you: “it depends”.

As frus­trat­ing as this answer is, it’s true. Numer­ous fac­tors can affect the suc­cess of your SEO cam­paign. We’ll run through them in this article.

SEO is the answer for busi­ness­es in indus­tries that can’t do paid adver­tis­ing. With­out doing SEO, many busi­ness­es can­not thrive in today’s dig­i­tal landscape.

Accord­ing to 82% of 75 SEO experts sur­veyed, it will be six months until you see an increase in traf­fic and one to two years to see the full results of your SEO cam­paign. But sure­ly the results seen depend on what your SEO cam­paign involves and the qual­i­ty of those strategies?

We agree with the sta­tis­tics. In our expe­ri­ence, it can take from two-three months to more than a year to see sat­is­fy­ing SEO results.

SEO is much more than just set­ting up your web­site, doing a cou­ple of things (that every­one else on the plan­et is doing), and expect­ing to rank in 1st place. It’s man­ag­ing part­ner­ships, stay­ing authen­tic to your audi­ence, han­dling con­tent, and lots of ongo­ing work. The job is nev­er done.

Factors That Might Affect Your SEO

Search engine opti­mi­sa­tion (SEO) is a com­bi­na­tion of var­i­ous vec­tors and best prac­tices that, when work­ing togeth­er, can impact your results positively.

Some of the fac­tors can include page reli­a­bil­i­ty, con­tent rel­e­vance, con­tent qual­i­ty, user expe­ri­ence, good-qual­i­ty images, and some tech­ni­cal aspects such as page speed, web­site crawla­bil­i­ty, web­site secu­ri­ty, and more.

It’s impor­tant to remem­ber that no two web­sites are the same. If you see a pos­i­tive effect on a web­site doing cer­tain things, there is no guar­an­tee that you’ll see the same result doing the same things on anoth­er website.

The aver­age time for SEO to take effect can vary depend­ing on a few factors:

• Does the web­site or brand have good author­i­ty built already?
• How estab­lished is the brand with­in its niche?
• How com­pet­i­tive is the niche?
• Is the web­site rank­ing for high-pri­or­i­ty key­words already?
• Do peo­ple share con­tent from your web­site online?

On aver­age, in a rea­son­ably com­pet­i­tive indus­try, you can start see­ing pos­i­tive move­ment with­in 3–6 months after the begin­ning of your SEO campaign.

If your web­site has zero or low author­i­ty, this might not be the case — it will def­i­nite­ly take longer to see some changes if it’s a brand new site.

This is a no-brain­er, but we have to point it out — how long it takes for SEO to work also depends on how much time and effort you are putting into work­ing on SEO. Are you doing it your­self, or did you hire a team of experts to help you?

That’s why sta­tis­tics show that large com­pa­nies see results faster — they sim­ply have a ded­i­cat­ed team of experts and resources to work on SEO regularly.

SEO is Never Done!

Remem­ber that.

Your SEO work will nev­er be done.

The real­i­ty is that SEO is a con­stant job. You should cre­ate mean­ing­ful con­tent and work on your web­site con­stant­ly if you want to see pos­i­tive results. And once you climb to the 1st posi­tion, you should­n’t stop either.

The ques­tion “how long does SEO take to start work­ing?” can be mis­lead­ing. It sug­gests that you can stop putting in any effort after 6–12 months, but that’s not the case.

That is because search engines like Google change their rank­ing algo­rithm and how they present infor­ma­tion to their users every day. Some changes are sig­nif­i­cant, some are small, but they all affect rank­ing posi­tions, and you should adjust your SEO efforts accordingly.

How Long Does It Take For a New Website to Rank?

The short answer to this ques­tion is six months to a year on aver­age, but again, it depends on many out­side fac­tors. A brand new web­site will take longer to rank well in the search engine than a web­site with authority.

The author­i­ty of a web­site can be built in time by pub­lish­ing high-qual­i­ty con­tent and cre­at­ing links and men­tions to the web­site from cred­i­ble sources.

SEO experts believe that new web­sites are often placed in some­thing called “Google Sand­box”. This fil­ter inten­tion­al­ly stops you from rank­ing well in the first months, even if Google believes your web­site is the best result for the giv­en search query. This is like a pro­ba­tion peri­od, and it’s done to avoid cheat­ing the Google algo­rithm or scam­ming poten­tial customers.

In our expe­ri­ence, a brand new web­site needs a min­i­mum of 6–12 months to start accu­mu­lat­ing a decent amount of traf­fic. Of course, we’ve seen some ear­ly results — some web­sites start rank­ing well in the third or fourth month. How­ev­er, often those num­bers are not that sig­nif­i­cant, and it main­ly depends on the type of indus­try and how com­pet­i­tive the niche is.

How Soon Can You Expect SEO Results?

If you’ve been work­ing hard the last cou­ple of months to build a good SEO rep­u­ta­tion for your web­site, it’s nat­ur­al to won­der how soon you can reap the fruits of your labour.

It’s impos­si­ble to give an answer that applies to all web­sites, but most SEO experts say they see the first pos­i­tive results as soon as 2–3 months. We’re talk­ing about a mea­sur­able increase in key­word rank­ings or web­site traf­fic, not achiev­ing all your SEO goals.

Fac­tors like domain age, con­tent qual­i­ty, com­pe­ti­tion, and the con­ver­sion rate can affect the peri­od in which you can see some changes.

Even Google has men­tioned that SEO results can be expect­ed 4 to 12 months after the begin­ning of the campaign.

How soon can you expect SEO results depends on the cur­rent state of your web­site. Tech­ni­cal issues such as web­site crawla­bil­i­ty, secu­ri­ty, and bro­ken pages need to be addressed as soon as pos­si­ble. All this needs to be done for Google to start eval­u­at­ing your web­site seriously.

Oth­er SEO issues such as rewrit­ing con­tent and writ­ing new blog posts are not that urgent and can be done after you make sure all tech­ni­cal aspects of your web­site run smoothly.

If you want to see results, you need to work on your off-site SEO by build­ing links and men­tions for rep­utable brands from the industry.

You also need to focus on com­pe­ti­tion research and eval­u­ate what tac­tics your com­peti­tors use to rank on the first page of search engines.

Why Does SEO Take So Long to Work?

As we already men­tioned, Google and oth­er search engines are con­stant­ly updat­ing their algo­rithms. They test how their users behave on a giv­en search query and eval­u­ate which search result will sat­is­fy their needs best.

At the begin­ning of the SEO indus­try, it was rea­son­ably easy to “manip­u­late” the algo­rithm to rank on the first page. Peo­ple used strate­gies like key­word stuff­ing, cre­at­ing spam­my con­tent, shar­ing the same con­tent across the inter­net, or even buy­ing links from PBNs.

In today’s dig­i­tal era, these meth­ods won’t bring you any results and might also bring penal­ties to your web­site. Google has opti­mised its algo­rithm immense­ly, so it’s impos­si­ble to scheme it the same way. Google pri­ori­tis­es its users and will always do so. Google’s pri­ma­ry goal will always be to make sure users find pre­cise­ly what they are look­ing for.

The pri­ma­ry fac­tor on why SEO takes so long for you is your indus­try. Do you have a lot of com­peti­tors? Are they work­ing on SEO? It also depends on the bud­get and resources you have to invest in SEO.

If a com­peti­tor has a ded­i­cat­ed team of SEO experts that work full time on SEO strate­gies, and you work on your own and spend 4–5 hours per week, you can­not expect to see the same results for the same amount of time.

Today’s dig­i­tal real­i­ty is that it’s almost impos­si­ble to come across an indus­try in which less than 4–5 com­peti­tors are active­ly work­ing on their SEO.

With SEO, there is always some­thing you can improve, always some­thing you can imple­ment. There are tons of rel­e­vant con­tent you can cre­ate and new key­words to target.

SEO is a long-term strat­e­gy. Con­sid­er it as an addi­tion to your dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing efforts.

How Many Hours Per Week Should I Invest in SEO?

SEO is an invest­ment. One of the main things you need to con­sid­er is how much time and resources can you put into it. Are you going to work alone? Or are you plan­ning to work with an agency, or are you plan­ning to hire an in-house team?

SEO can come with a lot of costs, so you need to esti­mate how much you are will­ing and able to pay per week or month. From there, you can fig­ure out if you can afford to hire an agency or a full-time employee.

Research shows that for ulti­mate SEO results, you need to spend, on aver­age, between 4–10 hours of work per week, espe­cial­ly in the begin­ning. The time can drop to 1–3 hours of week­ly main­te­nance once you make sure your web­site is well opti­mised and tech­ni­cal­ly reli­able. So, if you want to see sig­nif­i­cant results, we advise you to stay with­in that timeframe.

But this also high­ly depends on your indus­try. If your busi­ness is in a com­pet­i­tive niche, you’ll need to put in extra hours week­ly to make sure you are competitive.

Don’t look at SEO just as a cost; look at it as an invest­ment in your brand pres­ence. The more you opti­mise your web­site, the eas­i­er it will be for your cus­tomers to find you and pur­chase from you.

How Do You Know If Your SEO Efforts Are Working?

We get that you might feel frus­trat­ed that you’re not sure when or if at all your SEO efforts will bring you some pos­i­tive results.

So how do you mea­sure your work? How can you know if your hard work is pay­ing off?

Annoy­ing­ly, the answers to these ques­tions are not straightforward.

There are numer­ous online tools that can help you eval­u­ate the per­for­mance of your web­site. Some of these can also show you his­tor­i­cal data and allow you to see how your web­site pro­gress­es over a time period.

Tools like Ahrefs and Sem­Rush can give you a great analy­sis of your web­site’s cur­rent posi­tions. You can explore how your key­word rank­ings are chang­ing over time, be noti­fied when a new web­site is link­ing to your web­site, and even explore con­tent strate­gies and find ideas for new top­ics and key­words you can follow.

Google Ana­lyt­ics and Google Search Con­sole, on the oth­er hand, can give you raw data on how users behave on your web­site. You can eval­u­ate the CTR of your web pages, see changes in traf­fic, and even track conversions.

All these tools can help you under­stand the SEO per­for­mance of your web­site bet­ter; how­ev­er, you also need to know what met­rics you should keep an eye on.

Here are the key met­rics you should def­i­nite­ly keep an eye on:

• Impres­sions. An impres­sion is when a user “sees” your web­site, con­tent, or ad cam­paign in the SERP of the search engine but with­out tak­ing any oth­er action.
• Clicks. A click is when the user actu­al­ly clicks on the result in the SERP or on the link, ad cam­paign, etc.
• A click-through rate (CTR) is the num­ber of clicks your web­page receives divid­ed by the num­ber of times the same web­page has been seen (impres­sions). So CTR=clicks/impressions
• Organ­ic Traf­fic is the traf­fic that comes to your web­site from a search engine after a user inputs a search query.
• Back­links are the num­ber of links from oth­er web­sites that link to a page or resource locat­ed on your website.
• Con­ver­sions are the num­ber of actions a user takes once they land on your web­site. Con­ver­sions can be click­ing a link, adding a prod­uct to the cart, buy­ing a prod­uct, fill­ing out a form, and more.

Final Thoughts

Remem­ber, cus­tomers come first. Search engines like Google want to give the best results to their users for their search queries.

They often exper­i­ment with the rank­ings and see how users react to them. They’ll look at things like:

• How long did they stay on a par­tic­u­lar website?
• How quick­ly they exit the website?
• Did they end up pur­chas­ing a ser­vice or a product?

Remem­ber SEO is a marathon — not a sprint.

Serve your cus­tomers first, and Google will love you for it.