How long does SEO really take?
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by the Digital PR agency Search Intelligence, which uses PR methods to grow a link portfolio and North Star Inbound, which is a recommended agency for penalty recovery. See their case studies linked in the newsletter.
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It has been 9 years since the untimely death of Dave Goldberg. Here’s what I wrote last year.
SGE will likely launch next week at Google IO, are you ready?
Every person you pose this question to will give you another response, and they are all correct, and at the same time, they are all wrong. That is because there is no correct answer to this question. After all, every website, business, and company will have a different result.
SEO is organic
SEO traffic is called organic traffic because there is a natural process to shaping the confluence of organic factors that equal search engine visibility. Search engine results are not human-categorized, and in fact, it’s nearly impossible for even a Googler to determine why one page might outrank another. Every Google search result is underpinned by twenty-five years of algorithms.
While Google might claim to have two hundred ranking factors, those “factors” are all working in real-time and processed by AI.
[SPONSORED by Search Intelligence]
Digital PR link building works, but only after you've done these things.
Are you only relying on Digital PR for links?
↳ It probably won't work.
Are you creating average content, with the hope that Digital PR will do the job anyway?
↳ It probably won't work.
Are you ignoring search intent, with the hope that Digital PR will boost the site anyway?
↳ It probably won't work.
To put an analogy against this, it’s like asking a doctor why you feel a particular symptom. There may be dozens of factors that the doctor could reference, but those are just educated guesses. The honest answer relies on both known and unknown data.
Flipping back to SEO, this question about how long SEO takes is valid and deserves a better response than a shrug of the shoulders and “I don’t know.” (Tangentially: “I don't know” should be more commonly answered instead of made up recommendations. )
I will, therefore, attempt to answer this question based on my own experience.
Technical fixes
First, if something is broken on a website, such as a missing title tag or an orphaned page, it could take just 24 hours before the impact of the fix is noticed. This, of course, is contingent on the authority of the website. On a more popular website, the website will be seen by Google’s crawlers within hours, while on a smaller site, it could take significantly longer. However, in both cases, the fix will be implemented shortly after Google finds it.
The timing for the impact will change if the problem has been around for an extended period. For example, when a page is accidentally deindexed, I have seen it take many months to be reindexed. This might be a bug on Google’s part, but you still end up without the indexed page.
(TIP: One of the best workarounds for this elephant memory of Google is to change the URL. This will immediately reset the URL history, and I have seen it work very quickly.)
New projects
When the SEO initiative involves a new page or product category, it might take a short time before the page is indexed. Still, the length of time before it begins to drive meaningful traffic, will hinge again on the domain's authority because this will impact both the crawl time and the level of credibility given to the new product.
The more significant part of this is how long it takes to get to the point where the page or section of the site is even launched, and this is where I find an interesting catch-22.
Authority sites are also large companies
Larger sites, which can quickly see an impact from SEO initiatives, take many months before they launch anything. Smaller sites, which see no immediate effect from an action, can launch very quickly.
One company I worked with was missing their primary industry keyword from their title tag. Despite my typical consulting focus on more significant product initiatives, this was an obvious win I thought could quickly snag some low-hanging fruit.
However, it took over five months before this change was made!
As this was a public company, many teams, including the legal team, needed to sign off on this approval before the change could be implemented.
Just getting these meetings calendared took weeks, and in each one, I made the same pitch for why this should be done and how it wouldn’t negatively impact the company.
After finally receiving a sign-off from every team, a front-end engineer launched the change in a couple of minutes. Within hours, the site was crawled, the title tag was picked up, and Google immediately updated the title in search results.
Fast results
Within 72 hours, the site ranked in the top 3 for this keyword, driving tens of thousands of visits and a significant revenue increase from this new traffic.
Returning to my original question, how long did SEO take in this case? The answer is both five months and 72 hours at the same time.
I was surprised at how difficult it was to make this change, but I am never surprised at how long it takes when I am building a product for SEO. In this case, I usually find that while companies might expect to unlock SEO within a month, their product and engineering teams lack the flexibility to absorb some new initiatives quickly.
In most cases, it will take at least a quarter before anything starts to be executed. Even when it does get executed, it is still subject to Google’s crawling and indexation.
Giving any timeline for how long SEO will take is always a matter of making an educated guess. Even when that educated guess is made, it will take longer than assumed because internal roadblocks and initiatives get in the way.
How long does SEO take?
When posed to you by a client or employer, the proper way to answer this question is that a search engine may recognize the SEO efforts within a concise amount of time. Still, the impact of that effort on traffic will rely on the website's authority. You can give a best guess based on the estimate.
However, the answer would be incomplete if you also didn’t properly set the stage on how challenging it may be to launch the recommended changes publicly. This is where you can pose your questions to get a timeline of how realistic it might be to see the projects launched.
The answer to these questions is the most significant factor in how long it takes to see SEO work.
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This is the exact playbook we ran for a dental client.
In a few short months, the results was:
$139,801 in revenue.
Old SEO playbook:
Create 1000s of pages and rank for millions of keywords.
Alienate users with mass-produced content.
Buy links, run link exchanges, scale your guest posting to boost your rankings so more people can check out the bad mass-produced pages.
New SEO playbook:
Create 100 pages that are best in class, help users solve their problems, honestly present various solutions, and position you as a great option.
Keep those pages up to date be refreshing content regularly.
Create original research and thought leadership content that builds your brand while attracting journalists who want to write about your content.
People who find your pages organically immediately feel served by the content and develop a positive association with your brand. They convert at a higher level or place you on a shortlist.
Get your New SEO Playbook.