How Long Does It Take for SEO Efforts to Show Results?
So, you’ve done your keyword search, incorporated the relevant terms, cleaned up your site structure and design, indexed your website with search engines and started posting content more regularly. Why is your website still not ranking highly?
Unfortunately, there is no SEO-shaped silver bullet. Good SEO takes time to implement and can take even longer to reap the reward. That’s not to say there aren’t quick-fixes that you can look to implement now to get your site rankings a little higher, but a consistent page-1 ranking on Google without paid advertisement can take months, even years depending on circumstance. It’s a frustrating answer, but just as you’ve invested in yourself, your business, or your employees with the expectation that the investment will one day pay itself back, the same logic must be applied to SEO.
You must also consider that SEO is not a one-time task; it’s an ongoing process. Like anything that grows, your websites SEO needs regular care to thrive. This means regularly updating your content, optimising keywords, and building high-quality backlinks. These ongoing efforts are crucial for maintaining and improving your rankings over time.
Ok, with all that out of the way… how long?
With some basic SEO work (keyword optimisation, website indexing, online business listings, fixing broken links, including a 404 page, image optimisation & alt-text, robust site structure and human-friendly design), you should expect to see your websites SEO rankings improve in around 3 – 6 months. However, this only gets you some of the way up. As we explore below – the more longer-term SEO work is what makes the difference and separates those that achieve a coveted page-1 listing, and those that do not.
Consistent SEO over the long term is what separates good from great.
it’s important for you to understand what aspects of SEO take the longest and require the most work. This will help you prioritise your SEO checklist, get the quick-wins out of the way and plan your longer term SEO strategy. Here are some key aspects that typically take the longest to show results:
Content Creation
Quality Content: Producing high-quality, relevant content that addresses users’ questions and meets their needs is critical to SEO. Research what your customers are frequently looking for online and produce content that helps them to find it. Search engines like to see a diverse use of media on websites, so keep your website fresh with blogs, videos and pictures that are relevant to a user’s needs.
Keyword Optimisation
Keyword Optimisation: Identifying and effectively incorporating the right keywords takes time. It’s not just about stuffing keywords into your content but using them naturally and strategically to match user intent. Contrary to popular belief, keyword search is not a set-and-forget task. Search terms change and become out of date – ensure your website doesn’t.
Building High-Quality Backlinks:
Quality Backlinks: Backlinks are a vote of confidence for your website. As such, search engines place great value on them. Acquiring backlinks from reputable websites is one of the most time-consuming aspects of SEO. It involves somehow getting content from your website linked on someone else’s website. Lower quality backlinks would be something like a business directory listing. Conversely, high-quality backlinks come from creating shareable content and then having someone else link your content on their site - for example, if this blog post was to be shared by a high-ranking website. Higher quality backlinks take considerably longer to achieve than lower quality.
Natural Growth: As the name suggests, natural backlinks are high-quality backlinks that occur organically as people discover and link to your content. These can also take a significant amount of time to accumulate as they depend on your site being more visible.
SEO is a long term commitment.
It’s cliché, but truly SEO is a marathon, and not a sprint. It’s about having a solid foundation of basic SEO, combined with frequent quality additions to your sites content, keyword terms, backlinks, and steadily building your presence over the long-term. The benefits come in time, but once they do your website will be getting more traffic and more conversions. Your brand will be more visible, recognisable and more credible.
If you have started your SEO journey, keep plugging away. If you haven’t, the best time to start is now. Chip away at it piece by piece. Over time you will be pleasantly surprised at the progress you have made.