You may already be aware that if someone approaches you to help with your SEO and makes promises that they can get you on page one within a month, they are not exactly being honest with you. SEO is not a quick fix and only by looking at SEO as a long-term strategy and putting in consistent effort will be effective. Taking your time on SEO and strategising carefully and consistently is a proven way to get results that could significantly benefit your business. 

However, it’s only natural when planning to invest time and effort into something that you have some idea of how long it will take to see a return. While this is not an exact science, we can provide you with some insight and how long it takes to see the results and what impacts the SEO timeline.

Effort Brings Rewards

The speed at which you will see results for any SEO strategies are directly proportional to how much work you put into them. Investing heavily in terms of time and budget at the start can help bring faster results then a slower, more tentative approach. If your business sees SEO as a vital tool in its arsenal, which it should, then it’s best to expect to invest in it. 

Initial Steps

The first steps that you take within your SEO strategy will lay a foundation for your website’s visibility in the search engine rankings. 

Typically, these steps can be split into three key areas. These are detailed below to show you how SEO really works. 

1. Technical SEO – Improving the technical SEO of your website will help the web crawlers find and index relevant pages. Tasks include improving the speed of your site, optimising its structure and fixing any broken links. In terms of page speed and usability, technical tweaks can affect your site relatively quickly. However, it will not help your SEO if you do not focus on the next step, which is on-page SEO.
2. On-page SEO- Then, you will need to concentrate on strategies that optimise your individual webpages for specific keywords that are relevant to your audience. On-page SEO involves a great deal of keyword research. You will need to identify what terms your target market is likely to use, and create landing pages as well as optimising existing content to help guide them to the pages they will need to see. Planning a robust content strategy that includes hub and spoke content and  internal links to relevant pages allows for a seamless user experience that helps to inform and interest your audience. This can significantly improve your SEO. Typically, this is a longer part of the SEO process, with improvements taking 6 months or more to show an increase in traffic. 
3. Link building- Here, you will need to focus on acquiring backlinks from high-quality reputable websites. This can help to establish how authoritative and credible you are to the search bots. This is typically the final initial step in the strategic process. There is obviously a timescale involved in how quickly any backlinks are indexed which will impact your rankings. This can be variable dependent on how competitive your industry is.

So How Long DOES SEO Take To Kick In?

All things considered, if you can implement these initial steps within the course of a few months, you may start seeing results relatively quickly. Results can vary, however, and can include both better search engine rankings for the keywords you’ve targeted as well as increased traffic to your website.

In terms of how long it typically takes to get on the first page of search engine results, we can take some information from Ahrefs. Their study found that the majority of pages that rank in the top 10 are at least two years old, which emphasises how important long-term consistent effort in SEO is.

If you’re interested in learning more about what can impact your search rankings, or how to get help developing an SEO strategy for your business, we’re here to help.  After all, good SEO takes time and effort. If you’re too busy running your business to concentrate on your SEO why not let us do it for you?