How Long Does SEO Take To Show Results?
You want to know how long SEO takes before you start seeing results. Why wouldn’t you? You pay good money to an SEO services firm and you expect to see the return on your investment. Every good business owner or marketing director will want to know how long it takes SEO activities to show a positive ROI.
How Long Before ROI on SEO Services?
The short answer is 3 to 6 months. The longer answer is it depends on what industry you are in, what keywords you are targeting and what kind of shape your current website is. Let’s dive in…
Your site may only need a bit of sprucing up. It may need a major overhaul. This could mean a few days or an entire year for the website to be redesigned.
The truth is that SEO services to have a full effect your current website will need to be optimized. The reality is that not every website is up to par with modern best practice web standards. Therefore, the amount of work needed to get the full benefit of search engine optimization may take longer than others might.
With that said, the typical website that is currently in operation and has not had any technical issues or is suffering from the 90’s web syndrome will start to see the first “results” in three to six months. That’s when you’ll begin to see rankings start to climb and web traffic begins to increase.
Let’s see why “it depends” is the most common answer given by SEO Consultants.
SEO Services Take Three to Six Months To Start With …Usually
Not too long ago it used to be that everybody would type in just “shoes” to find a shoe website. Can you imagine how many different companies sell shoes online? If we type “shoes” into google we get roughly 5.19 billion results, meaning 5.19 billion web pages that have something to do with the word “shoes” and Google does a great job filtering through all of this and serving the results in .62 seconds, amazing.
The first page of Google only displays 5 to 9 organic results depending on your location, how many ads they are for the keywords and your own search behavior.
Showing up on the first page and on top of the first page gives you a competitive advantage, it is the equivalent of having a highway leading directly to your shoe store for every single person who types in “shoes”.
You see, search engine optimization revolves around getting your site to appear higher in search engine results pages when people search for various keywords that relate to your products and services, precisely at the time when they are primed to purchase.
It used to be that only a few keywords needed to be optimized to get a site to rank. Today, that just isn’t enough. An SEO agency has to focus on a number of keywords to get a site to rank due to the evolving nature of the consumer’s online behavior. The best example is that people used to type in “type of restaurant” + “location”, today people type in “food near me”. Same goes with product keywords, people don’t type in shoes anymore they type in long tail searches. Here is an example.
Good luck optimizing for base keywords.
How Long SEO Can Take Depends on Keyword Competition.
You see, most high-volume SEO keywords – the ones that people search for the most for any given service or product – usually have a lot of competition. Other sites already rank for them or maybe trying to. Obviously, the heavier the competition, the longer it will take to start ranking.
So, how long it will take depends a lot on your site and the keywords that an SEO services company is trying to rank your site for. Just because Website A starts seeing results in 6 weeks doesn’t mean Website B will.
Sometimes it may take longer depending on your product category, if you are selling soccer shoes and you’re competing with Nike, Amazon, Zappos, and Adidas, it may take some time to outrank them all, it’s certainly possible with consistent and long-term investment in quality white hat SEO.
Winning at search can make you the market leader in your product or service category and lead to a long-term competitive advantage.
Let’s move on.
Think Of SEO Services As Having A Snowball Effect
Just like any other investment, SEO services has something of a snowball effect, like compounding interest.
If you invest in, say, an investment fund, it usually takes some time before you start to notice interest add up to very much at all. Similarly, you’ll need to invest for a few months before you start to notice SEO services having an effect on your rankings, traffic and therefore conversions.
Depending on the potential for growth, it may take a year or two before the heavy lifting is done and your site goes into a maintenance mode to keep rankings up. However, many SEO services firms will tell you that clients leave before their potential is fully realized just because they didn’t get overnight results.
If you’re looking for instant sales then PPC may be the better option for you. However, just like with investing, the longer you give it the more the dividends begin to compound. Those first gains take a few months to really register, but the gains realized after the first few months will be even more substantial.
