As an SEO expert, one of the most commonly asked questions by businesses men and women who I have worked for over the years is “how long does SEO take to work?” Are you a businessman or woman? Do you own a website and you are thinking of incorporating SEO to generate more leads? If yes, then the question of how long SEO takes to generate results should be on your mind as well. One thing is common amongst business people and that thing is time. Because they don’t have lots of time on their side, they try to make the most of what little time they have. So, even though investment is good, and it takes too much time to produce results—it may not still be profitable to a businessman. Hence, in today’s taking a look at how long it takes SEO to working term SEO agency.
How long does SEO take to work?
The short and simple answer is, it takes around 6 months before you’ll be able to see appreciable results but then it could take longer (up to a year) and that’s because the duration it takes depends on several factors.
Factors that determine how long it’ll take SEO to start producing results include:
- Your website’s age and authority.
- Your website’s backlink profile.
- SEO-friendly architecture, design, and structure.
- Content strategy.
- Competitors and keywords.
- On-page and off-page SEO strategies.
- Hosting issues, errors, and penalties.
The above-listed factors can be seen as the top factors that influence the time frame it’ll take before SEO starts working for your website.
So let’s assume everything is good on your website, you have no hosting issues nor penalties, it takes 6 months before you’ll be able to see results. Now, most websites answering this question just tell you 6 months but you don’t get to know what happens within those 6 months. In this blog post, however, I’ll be giving you details of what SEO does to your website from 1st Month to the 6th Month where you can start seeing results.
1st Month:
For the first month, things like Keyword strategy, research and discovery, website audit, and planning will be done. Research and discovery usually take time but if it can be achieved quickly then technical changes will be made on your website within that first month although there are cases where thorough research and discovery takes more than a month to achieve.
2nd Month:
Technical SEO work begins which includes making modifications to your website based on the website’s audit results. There are cases where your website can be overhauled and if that should happen, it can take months. Other SEO activities like building content for your website and working on your link profile will be done while the overhaul is being carried out (if need be). If your website happens to be overhauled, it doesn’t mean that SEO activities will be stopped, rather they’ll continue. The only difference is you’ll start seeing results only after all the changes have been made.
3rd Month:
In the third month, the focus will be shifted to content creation. In this month, blogging, whitepapers, articles, FAQs, company information, etc., becomes paramount. Ideally, this should have started immediately after strategy and planning but sometimes your budget could restrict what should be done at once, that’s why technical overhaul precedes them. By the end of this month, you should start seeing improvements in rankings and it can be translated into sales or leads then that’s even better but isn’t always the case.
4th Month:
Content creation continues the development of a healthy link profile and technical optimization of your website. In the 4th month, you are expected to see an increase in traffic, rankings, and lead generation. Although the results achieved in the 4th aren’t close to what you’ll get after 12 months, they are there to prove that the strategy works.
5th Month:
By this time, social media management will be incorporated into the plan if you haven’t already done that to boost your content which in turn drives traffic to your website. Doing this leads to a healthy, natural link profile that can generate leads. Content creation continues and you can also choose to engage in media or PR outreach. Much more traffics is bound to come in the 5th Month which will convert to more leads.
6th Month:
At the 6th month, if your traffic can reach 5000 visitors per month or more you can now start benefitting from adding conversion rate optimization to improve how well the traffics you receive is being converted into leads and/or sales. At this point, most of the activities will be focused on content creation and promotion of the content created.
Once you start getting results from the 6th month, it doesn’t mean you should stop, why? Because SEO grows with time as you must have noticed and the results you’ll achieve in 6 months are far less when compared to what you’ll achieve in 12 months. SEO isn’t easy, it takes time and practice. If you don’t have the time for it then you need a long-term SEO agency.