How Long Does SEO Take?

One of the most frequently asked questions we get from new clients is “How long will it be before we’ll see results?”. Of course this can vary massively depending on a number of factors. Below you’ll find out some of the activities and how fast we would expect to see results from these.

Fast Results

Fast results are only likely to happen if you have something majorly wrong with your website before any work has been completed. If there’s a technical or on page issue stopping Google from accessing your website you may be able to get some quick results from fixing these. How much difference these will make will depend on other factors such as the rest of your website and the competition. If you do have these kinds of issues we’d expect you to start seeing some results in one to two months.

Medium Term Results

We often see these “Medium Term” strategies being called “Quick Wins”, which in terms of the longer strategies may be true, but you’re still looking at around at least 3 months to start seeing improvements to your search visibility.

These medium term results will usually focus on “long tail” keywords, which are low volume, (usually) low competition keywords. This means that it’s easier to start ranking for these keywords. The reason why it can take time for these strategies to start working is that it takes time for the pages to be indexed and as you’re focusing on low volume keywords you need to be focusing on multiple keywords in order to see meaningful improvements in results.

Long Term Results

You may hear some SEOs saying that it takes 6-12 months to start seeing a return from your SEO and this is what we’re looking at when we say long term results. This is how long it’s likely to take for you to start seeing meaningful results. This will often look at the long term strategy of your website and look at how the more competitive, high reward keywords can be targeted.

Of course it will depend on your own situation and your available resources as to how long it will take to start seeing results. When you start working with someone on your SEO it will be likely that they look at these three areas at the beginning of your campaign so you can start seeing some incremental results as soon as possible whilst also setting out the long term goals and strategy of the campaign.