In digital marketing strategy, one of the most important processes is SEO, which ensures your business’s success in today’s digital landscape. And when it comes to SEO, there is no shortcut that works; you have to wait to see the result of your SEO efforts.
Thus, in the world of SEO, one question that we often get asked is How long does it take for SEO to start working.
Well, every SEO strategy is different, but, typically, it may take 4 to 6 months to start seeing the results. Here, with the result, we mean the improved ranking, increase in traffic, and growth in sales. The exact timeframe may vary as there are several variables that play a major role in this process.
If you want to know the factors that affect the SEO time frame in detail, read this guide.
Why Does SEO Take So Long?
We all know that SEO is a long-term process that requires ongoing maintenance and optimization to see sustainable results. In this long-term process, you need to consider so many SEO elements to ensure giving your website its best chance.
However, Google prioritizes pages with the most relevant and authentic information with the best possible user-friendly experience. Therefore, search engines consider the following factors of a site to determine its ranking position, which usually takes time. So, these are-
- The age and history of your website. Generally, a new site takes a longer time to get visibility than an established one.
- Errors, hosting issues, and penalties
- SEO-friendly design, structure, and architecture
- Page reliability (authority, relevance, and trust). It implies how relevant your page is to a user’s search.
- The reliability and trustworthiness of your site’s information
- Keywords and competitors analysis
- Content marketing strategy and content quality
- On-page, off-page SEO, and Technical SEO strategies
- If your keywords are used in a valid context
- Relevant and optimized images used on your site
- Total page losing time
- How many backlinks do you have on your page
These are some of the basic reasons that help determine where you should rank in the search engine result pages.
Remember, there are tons of ranking factors that need to be implemented and optimized accurately to make your site rank on top. You’ll find a lot of SEO service provider companies that will help your site in this process and make the journey smoother.
For example, an SEO service provider company in Bangladesh that provides the best SEO services to ensure a long-lasting outcome and revenue for your business.
How Long Does it Take for SEO to Start Working?
SEO should start showing its results like increase in traffic, leads, and conversions within 4 to 6 months. A study by Databox shares that the majority of changes in SEO take 3 to 6 months to begin showing the results.
But to measure the accurate time frame, at first you need to determine what actual SEO success looks like.
You can measure the results in a clear way by breaking down your SEO campaign goals and KPIs. for example,
- Goals= The final outcome over 6 months or 12 months that you want to achieve.
- KPIs= Metrics such as ranking, visibility, growth in traffic, impressions, click-through rate, etc. that demonstrate progress towards your goals.
So, to get the answer, you should focus on the time length that your site takes to achieve its core KPIs. Additionally, the following SEO timeline will make it more clear for you to understand how long does it take for SEO to start working.
Month 1
In general, the first month is spent doing research, site audit, and keyword planning. The process starts by researching everything about your brand or niche and gathering all the necessary information. Then, the SEO agency moves to do a thorough website audit to see the current condition of your site and plan the keywords.
Month 2
Well, here it is essential for you to know that all the above processes always don’t take an entire month to get finished. Depending on the site’s condition they may be finished before then and the SEO company will start working on the 2nd month’s projects which are technical aspects like website modification and building a responsive design.
Month 3
In this stage, the SEO experts start focusing on keyword planning, content creation, blogging, and expanding the companies products and information. A lot of steps need to be considered in selecting keywords and creating content; thus, it takes an entire month or even more.
Month 4
In this month, you’ll see some increase in ranking as well as traffic and lead generation. It won’t be as great as the 12th month’s result, but you can at least know that your SEO efforts are working. However, your SEO is not over here; the agency will continue to implement content and fix your site’s technical issues.
Month 5
By month 5, you will see some extra sales rolling around with more and more traffic. Your SEO agency will start incorporating social media implementation in this stage to make your SEO effort more effective.
This will help to lead a healthy and natural link profile towards your site. However, they will continue with the creation and publishing of unique content. Not only this, but they also use the content for PR or media outreach to engage more potential traffic.
Additionally, your SEO agency will start keeping track of your campaign’s analytics from this month. This way, you can see how your campaign is performing.
Month 6
Typically, at this point, your SEO campaign should start producing real results like increased traffic, conversion rate, and generating more and more leads. Therefore, you should focus on actively creating content and promoting them in a more creative way.
Other than this, your SEO company will work on A/B testing and heat map testing. Through the AB test, they can determine which variation of a particular element performs better and apply that version to your website.
Lastly, from the heat map test, the SEO experts see how far your users get down before leaving your page and where they click most. It’s a great way to find out whether you need any other interactive elements or not.
How Do I Know If My SEO Is Working
Fortunately, there are some excellent tools like keyword research tools, on-page SEO tools, link building Tools, technical SEO tools, and so on. These can help you find out your ranking position, new opportunities, and areas where you need to improve.
While using these tools, you need to keep your eyes on the metrics and track them to see how your SEO is working. The metrics are impressions, clicks, organic traffic, no of ranking pages, backlinks, DA, PA, conversions, a referral from other websites, brand mentions, etc. This will help you understand your site’s SEO performance.
Last Thoughts
So, How long does it take for SEO to start working?
We hope you get the answer. Since each site is different, you can’t actually judge or measure the SEO efforts and determine the time frame. You just need to put your SEO plan in the right way and wait to see the long-term successful results.
As you can see, SEO is not a one-time deal; if it is done properly with best practices, it can ensure sustainable growth for your site. That is why, you need to take all the SEO factors into consideration, make strategies and develop a plan of action.
