A very common question I see on the internet is “How long does SEO take?”. While my mother would rightly say, “How long is a piece of string”, I wanted to go into some more detail here, because I think there are a good number of people who this article will help.
Ahrefs LinkedIn poll “How long does SEO take?”
This morning on LinkedIn I came across this poll by Ahrefs, asking the very same question, “How long does SEO take?”
And you can see there are some conflicting answers, even with 3 days left to vote.
The short answer is:
“It depends on your strategy and your starting point, plus of course what your goal is. There are some very basic things you can do that will improve SEO on an unoptimised site in 1-3 months. 3-6 months should be enough to help you see some strategic wins, but deeper strategies may take longer still.”
The common misconception about how long SEO takes
Typically and I’m broadly speaking from my own client experience, most smaller businesses think search engine optimisation (SEO) is something their website designer does for them. Once it’s done, it’s done.
Nobody explains to them that a brand new website, fully optimised and with the code still drying, is just the beginning.
What SEO means for your website
SEO is a continual process of improvement and covers different aspects:
Website optimisation - How well your website performs. Whether that's speed, making sure you are using metadata correctly, answering SERP queries with valuable content from your primary, or secondary pages and blogs, how strong your internal linking structure is, or your user experience when it comes to page structure and layout (or UX design). Then of course there is device optimisation. That is an entirely separate discussion!
SERP strategy - Your plan to select and dominate search engine result pages through content already on site, plus regular fresh additional content (blog posts, resources, case studies, etc)
Outreach strategy - Your plan to gain high-quality backlinks that elevate your Domain Authority and traffic over time.
Factors affecting how long SEO takes?
Starting point - Are you starting with a new website or one that is 5 or even 10 years old? How much content does it already have? How much original content can be updated, compared to overhauled, or deleted with 301 redirects to more relevant content pages?
Budget and people power - How much do you have to spend on this per month and how many hours does that provide for? Will you be updating your website in-house, or through a freelancer, or agency?
Goal - What do you want your website to do for you? Where do you want to appear in SERPs and how do you want to be known online? Or is your goal time-dependent based on a new product or service launch?
Strategy - Are you just looking at baseline optimisation, or do you need deeper strategies?
The difference in the length of time someone quotes you will be based entirely on the scope of your project.
Strategies that affect how long SEO takes
Let’s look at what we outlined above to understand which strategies will help answer how long SEO takes.
Website optimisation - if the changes are quite simple I would estimate 1-3 months after completion should be enough to see change. The significance of the change will depend on what you started with, but it might not be as big of a difference in traffic and lead generation as strategic SEO approaches in SERP and outreach.
SERP strategy - Fresh content takes time to research and produce. It can also take a while for Google bots to index it. Upon publication of a finished piece, I would expect to start seeing traffic and SERP ranking results in 3-6 months. Remember though… blog content can be updated later on, improving your reach further still, if that is you understand how to use keywords and create pillar content. Then there is also the power of topic clusters and content silos, which will take longer still to produce and may take 6 or more months to see the true power.
Outreach strategy - Outreach is time-consuming and depending on who you are trying to guest post with, or get featured on to gain that backlink mention, it could be weeks before you get something signed off. Based on link placement within the post and the buzz that piece creates, backlinking and outreach strategies can produce some pretty quick results (sometimes within days of publication). But these are short-lived and unquantifiable in result estimation and so the strategy is always ongoing.
Is one SEO option better than another?
No.
I’d say any online business needs a good mix of all 3 to gain awareness, even in a less saturated SERP space.
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