Wondering when you'll see results from your SEO efforts? Here's how to figure that out, and speed things up, with insights from lots of SEO experts
If there’s one question I’m asked more than any other, it’s this:
“How long does SEO take before I see results?”
It’s a totally fair question. If you’re a smart business owner, you’re careful about where you invest your marketing budget. You want to know when you’ll see results and what they’ll look like.
Here’s the tricky thing—there are only two honest ways to answer this question in one sentence:
- “Sometime between one month and never.”
- “It depends!”
Neither of these are very satisfying answers, but don’t worry—there is a method to get a more accurate prediction of how long SEO will take. To get to the bottom of the question, we have to ask some other questions about your particular circumstances.
Most of the advice in this blog is from my own experience helping clients grow their organic traffic over the last 12 years. But to back it up, I reached out to a bunch of other SEO experts like me for their input.
You’ll find all of that below, with some concrete steps on what you can start doing now to speed up the SEO process. Let’s go.
(BTW, if you want a deep dive on my take big explainer on SEO:
Why “how long” is the wrong question
Here comes the disclaimer. If you are if you are worrying about “how long it’s going to take,” you are likely getting yourself worked up over nothing.
SEO is not like other marketing channels, where you flip on an ad and can watch the views and clicks in real time. SEO is a long-term strategy, with long-term returns on that investment. So if you’re hoping for a strategy that will bring in results tomorrow, you’re barking up the wrong tree.
“It’s not the early 2000s anymore,” says digital analyst Francis Angelo Reyes. “There are no more sneaky methods to cheat your way onto the front page.”
Indeed, things are far more competitive now than they were back in the Jurassic era of SEO. Google has refined their algorithm, putting the kibosh on all of those dodgy black-hat strategies people used to rush SEO results.
Slow and steady really is the only way.
Remember this, as well—when you work hard to improve your SEO, you are going to reap more benefits than just organic traffic.
Just ask B2B freelance writer Samantha Rosenfeld, who has experience working on SEO strategies at global agencies:
“When you practice good SEO, you’ll also learn more about your audience and what kind of content they find valuable,” she says. “You’ll develop a clearer voice and messaging, you’ll establish trust, you’ll educate your audience, and you’ll make your website more user friendly.”
If you really press an SEO expert to give you a timeline, most will say around 3 to 6 months, according to research from my friends over at Databox.
In my opinion, that’s an accurate estimate for most websites, but it’s still a big time gap. Businesses that dedicate themselves to SEO will see success much faster than that.
How fast SEO works is largely dependent on what is going on with your website right now, and how much work you plan to put in every day to improve your SEO chances.
So now, we get to the meat of it. I’m going to show you two things in the rest of this article:
- The factors you need to consider to get a more precise idea of how long SEO will take.
- The things you can start doing TODAY to make SEO work faster for you.
Ready? Let’s go
7 questions that will tell you how long SEO is going to take
1. How healthy is your website?
Whenever I am working with a new client, the very first thing I do is look at how user-friendly their website is.
- How quickly does it load?
- How easy is it to find my way around?
- Do things jump around and move when I try to click them?
- Do I end up on any broken pages or get lost in pages that look the same?
Below I’ve listed out some of the most common culprits when it comes to technical SEO issues, but if you want more information on exactly what Google is looking for and how to fix technical issues, check out this write-up on Google’s core web vitals:
- Site speed issues. Users don’t like a slow website, and neither does Google. You can test your site speed here through Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool—the slower things take to load, the longer it will take to get your SEO moving. One way to ensure proper loading times is by selecting an optimized host that keeps your site running smoothly.
- Indexing issues. Something is preventing Google from indexing your website—in other words, Google isn’t really aware of your website or ranking it. The first step is to set up Google Search Console, or use a professional SEO (personally I use Semrush) to diagnose the problem.
- User experience issues. Google wants to rank websites that have positive User Experience. This includes things like a logical structure to the site, thoughtful imagery and design, clear language, a good navigation bar… the list goes on. Fixing these issues is a bit more nuanced, but can be addressed during the content strategy process.
Tech issues can be frustrating, and they may take some time to fix (especially if your website wasn’t designed with SEO in mind). But the good news is, fixing these tech issues is a surefire way to speed up the SEO process.
Quick fixes are rare in the world of SEO, so count it as a blessing once it’s fixed!
2. How mature is your website?
SEO is a game of authority—Google gives preference to websites that can prove they have staying power. This means that older websites typically have an easier time ranking, simply because they’ve been around longer to establish some authority.
But a big disclaimer: Age alone isn’t going to cut it! You may have had a website for 10 years, but if you haven’t been actively working on SEO in that time, it won’t make much of a difference.
On the flip side, the younger a website is, the longer it will take to create content, gain backlinks, and generally become seen as authoritative in the eyes of Google and other search engines.
In other words, younger websites will have slower SEO results.
If you’re wondering how authoritative your website is right now, you can use a tool like Ahrefs (paid and superior) or Ubersuggest (free but less accurate) to look it up. But be wary—Domain Authority is a notoriously difficult thing to measure, even by the best SEO tools out there. So take it all with a grain of salt.
That being said, the authority of your domain will have a big impact on how long SEO will take to start showing results.
“If you have an existing site with a good Domain Authority (DA of around 40+), it’s possible to rank for medium-difficulty search terms within a few months,” says Nelson Jordan, co-founder at Closer App. “If you’re starting from scratch, like many of the startups we work with, it will be more like three months before they see any real traffic (say around 50 visits per month), but then we tend to see a big uptick around months four and five.”
The good news is, your domain authority will snowball over time. The more authority you create by putting out SEO-targeted content and going after backlinks, the faster your authority will climb.
3. Are you targeting the right keywords?
Targeting the right keywords is one of the trickiest parts of content marketing. Even when using the most sophisticated tools, it can sometimes feel like guesswork when identifying the right keywords for any given piece of content.
There are three things to consider whenever running your own keyword research:
Volume: How many searches per month does this keyword have?
Difficulty: How competitive is this keyword?
Intention: Does the intention behind the keyword align with your business?
To succeed at content marketing, you need to target a blend of keywords that strike a balance between these three factors. Otherwise, you’ll run into problems:
High volume often means high competition, so you could end up spending a lot of time waiting around for results to show up.
Low competition is usually a good thing, but if a keyword only has a few hundred searches per month, it will be hard to accumulate much traffic from it.
Targeting keywords with the wrong intent can bring in a lot of unwanted traffic to your website, which will only complicate your content marketing efforts.
So how do you get the right keywords?
Your first goal should be to find keywords that have high volume, low competition, and clear, relevant intent—these are your unicorns. These can be hard to find—and it’s a big part of what I look for when I’m doing keyword research for my clients.
After you’ve identified the unicorns, go after the keywords that have clear intent and low competition, even if they have lower volume. These can help you bring the most valuable visitors to your site, and potentially earn you some quick(er) wins.
Once you’ve found all of those, you can still go after competitive and/or high-volume keywords, as long as you’re willing to be patient and make use of backlinks, site improvements, social media, and all of the other things you can do to drive traffic to increase your site’s authority.
4. How strong is your backlink profile?
We know that a website’s age is an important factor in how quickly SEO will work, but it’s not really just about the age of the website—it’s about those precious backlinks.
Backlinks, if you need a refresher, are links that point from other websites to your website. And as long as they come from a reputable, relevant website, they’re a good thing for your SEO. The more strong backlinks you have pointing to your site, the faster the needle will move.
But it’s not easy to get backlinks, for a few reasons:
Google is constantly changing its rules around what constitutes good and bad backlinking.
There are lots of dodgy people out there who have destroyed people’s trust in backlinks.
Getting backlinks requires planning and strategy. There is no quick fix.
Fortunately, if you’re running a content strategy, you can build backlink acquisition into the strategy itself. There are several content strategies that will get you backlinks. In fact, I wrote a whole article about how to do just that:
Like many other items on this list, the more backlinks you get to your website, the faster SEO will move. Listen to this take from freelance B2B copywriter Akinduyo Eniola, of Gurus Coach:
“In March 2021, I decided to do a rebrand for the website of a side project of mine. Within two months, I brought the traffic from 27 visitors per month to over 500 visitors a month, and it’s still growing. This speed was possible because my site has accrued links already, and I also doubled down on content and links for the site.”
Not a bad turnaround. So if you really want to move SEO along, you must be focused on getting high-quality backlinks. You will get some links naturally just by producing content, but it will take a lot longer unless you build link acquisition into your content strategy.
5. What does your content calendar look like?
And in some cases, more content is better. However, content marketing has evolved, and now it’s a lot less about speed of publication, and more about consistency of how frequently you publish.
We know long-form content is usually the best for SEO purposes. We also know creating a unique, effective, informative piece of long-form content takes, well, a long time!
So it’s understandable if you can’t churn out 15 – 20 content pieces in a month. It’s not worth even trying for such a large number if you don’t have the budget or people-power to create high-quality content at that rate.
But what does still matter is consistency. Perhaps you only have the ability to publish one long-form piece of content a month. As long as you do it every month, without any major gaps, you’ll be in good shape.
Big gaps in your content marketing schedule, however, will slow things down significantly. Remember that SEO and content marketing have momentum. You have to keep the ball moving, or else you lose all of your progress. If Google sees you’ve gone a month or two without putting any new fresh content on your website, it will crawl your site less frequently—meaning SEO is going to take a lot longer.
That’s why I strongly encourage everyone to use a content calendar. In fact, I put together a free content calendar template—something I’ve been refining for over 10 years. You can get your copy below, and check out this guide on how to use a content calendar effectively.
6. What are your competitors doing?
In the world of SEO, not all industries and business types are created equal. Competition is a huge part of the game, and for some folks, the climb to the top of the Google searches will be longer simply because there are so many others in their niche or industry who are also working hard on SEO.
Competitor research and analysis is an important part of my content strategies for this reason. I can give my clients a clear picture of what their competitors are currently doing in terms of content creation and SEO optimization. Beyond that, I can find gaps where their competitors are coming up short, and use some clever SEO tactics to speed things up.
If you want to do some of your own competitor analysis, the best thing to do is run your competitors’ websites through a tool like SEMRush or AHREFS. These will allow you to see how strong their domain is, what their backlink profile is like, and how many keywords they are ranking for. (Bonus: It will also give you a good idea of what keywords you might want to target as well!)
If you want to do some more keyword hunting, you can watch how I do it with some of my Keyword Speedrun videos. Here’s the full playlist I’ll keep updating.
You also will want to visit your competitors’ website and look at their content production habits. Do they have a blog? If so, how frequently are they posting, and are the posts optimized for search?
If your competitors have a robust content strategy, and they’re already ranking for some of the top keywords, and they’ve accrued lots of backlinks, it’s going to be a bigger challenge to get your own SEO moving.
7. How else are you promoting your content?
Aside from optimizing your content for search, what else are you doing to promote it?
You may be thinking, “SEO is supposed to bring in traffic on its own. So is a robust promotion schedule really something I need?”
It’s true that eventually, if done well, SEO will bring in traffic on its own. But sharing the content on other platforms is one of the best ways to speed things up.
The more you share your content, the more likely that other people are likely to share it as well. And when they do this, your odds of getting backlinks to your content, and more traffic to your website, goes up exponentially. And with more backlinks and more people coming to the website on their own, Google will sooner see your website as valuable, authoritative, and worth ranking.
But a word of warning: When we talk about content promotion in 2021, we don’t mean simply sharing a link to your blog article on Twitter or LinkedIn and moving on. A strong content strategy will go well beyond that, sharing specific parts of the article with different audiences on different platforms.
For example, you might share an infographic from the article on Instagram, and a video explanation of the article on LinkedIn with a long write up. Then perhaps you’ll reach out to your partners or affiliates you work with, and ask them to share the content with their audience in some way. I’ll be sharing more tips on how to do content promotion the right way, so be sure to sign up for my mailing list to receive that info when it’s ready.
Strong content promotion is a lot of work, but the more creative you get at sharing, and the more work you put into getting your content in front of people who will enjoy it, the faster your SEO will move.
SEO takes time, but it doesn’t take forever (a final warning)
Hopefully by now you have a good understanding of why the question, “How long does SEO take?” is so hard to answer. But don’t lose hope—investing in SEO is one of the best ways to grow your business in the long-term, and even if the odds are stacked against you, eventually it will start to pay off if you keep at it.
In fact, Brendan Hufford of SEO for the Rest of Us brings up a good point about the flip-side of the “how long” issue. He notes that in some cases, “Bad SEO agencies perpetuate the idea that ‘SEO takes time’ to buy themselves time or get themselves on long-running retainers.”
That’s something to keep in mind. Retainer contracts with SEO experts are often a good thing (it’s what pays my bills, after all). But it’s only worth hiring an SEO pro if that person is frequently suggesting new strategies and helping you maintain content production.
If you find yourself working with an SEO agency or expert who is constantly pushing back the deadline of when SEO will start working—with no legitimate explanation as to why it’s taking so long—it may be time to look elsewhere.
It’s not easy to predict exactly how long SEO will take, but once you know what the factors are, you can get a much more accurate reading.
If you want to boost your SEO performance, or just speed things up, let’s get in touch. Fill out the form below, and I’ll get back to you with some advice.
