“We can get you to position one, page one of Google for all your chosen keywords in only a month!!!”

…said no ‘reputable’ SEO agency ever!

We know optimising for search engines is seen as playing the long game when it comes to marketing online, but how long does it take to see the benefits of SEO…? 

How Long Do I Wait To See SEO Results?

So you’re working on your SEO? Just how long can you expect to wait to see some results?

There are so many variables at play when it comes to SEO, but for the sake of giving you an answer within the opening 30 seconds of this video…

You could expect to see some results of a ‘fully fledged’ SEO strategy within 6 months.

You may see results sooner than this of course, or for some competitive sectors, it might take longer.

SEO is all about being trusted by Google, and trust, as we know, can take some time.

Any rapid movements up the rankings through, such as black hat tactics like buying links, and Google will get suspicious, likely, penalising you in the long run.

SEO gives us the ability to set real foundations for our websites, and it’s one of those jobs that is never done. 

You know that task on your to-do list that says SEO, yeah you can give up any hope of ticking that one off any time soon!

SEO Quick Wins

Of course, this doesn’t mean you can’t make some quick wins on your website to improve its performance today. Updating Google My Business listings and website content is a great place to start in fact.

There’s no secret sauce for SEO. It takes time, planning, and careful re-adjustment to achieve and maintain rankings, ROI, and traffic.

Unfortunately, I can’t give you a straight answer to how long SEO takes to work.

But we can see what might help deliver us some results quicker? Fancy that?

Are you sitting comfortably, then I shall begin:

Keywords and Competitors

Okay, keep this quiet, but You can learn a lot by analysing your competitors, especially if they dominate the search results.

While we don’t condone stealing their secrets, you can learn valuable insights for your own SEO strategy such as keywords, page structure, and new practices to try.

Analysing your competitors will also help you target better keywords related to your industry. Emulating your competitors gives you insight into real strategies that get proven results, which means you aren’t starting completely from scratch.

Errors, Hosting Issues & Penalties

Before looking to improve your ranking, first fix the foundations.

SEO errors, unreliable website hosting, and Google penalties take longer amounts of time to recover from.

Depending on the number of 404 errors, broken links, 301 redirects, and inconsistent optimisation, resolving these errors can show positive results in as little as two weeks.

However, be aware Google doesn’t index all of the changes at once. You may see an increase quickly in some aspects, but not in all.

Backlinks

Trustworthy links from and to your website. We could talk about this all day, but make sure your links are providing you value! Check out one of my older videos to learn more about this.

Mobile First

It’s been the case for a while now, but some sites still haven’t caught up… Google switched to a mobile-first approach, meaning it will crawl mobile pages first when determining indexing and determining rank.

If you have a poor mobile experience, that will more than likely translate to your position in the SERPs.

Take the time to run your site through Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test, and work on the recommendations.

On-Page & Off-Page SEO

Now for the technical bit. If you’re hoping to see some truly sustainable results a little faster, always check your on-page optimisation.

By making improvements to your meta tags, header, anchor text, title, descriptions, and alt tags, you’ll often see results within a few days.

This is usually one of the first items we address when working with new clients.

Get this done quickly, and it could shorten the time it takes to produce results from SEO.

So that’s it, 5 things to get working on right now.

Keep in mind, when you update or make changes to any pages, you have to rely on Google to find those changes and recrawl the page.

This doesn’t happen overnight, and sometimes, takes a few crawls for the changes to register.

Every website is different. 

You simply can’t measure in hours, days, weeks, or months how long SEO will take to drive results. But in the meantime, you can optimise to give yourself the best platform for future success.

Good SEO takes time and effort, to make sure your strategy is fit for purpose.

But trust me, Get it right now and future you, will be grateful you did.