How Long Does SEO Take? When To Expect Results - A Small Business Guide

SEO is never an overnight successful rise to stardom in the Google rank of fame.  Truthfully, there is no exact answer in knowing how long it will take to get your website page to top of the keyword ladder as there are so many depending answers to this question.  To help you gain some insight to this question, here are a few guidelines one can consider when expecting results.

What type of results are you looking for?

Are you looking to increase your traffic in a quick turnaround time?  This can happen as soon as publishing a piece of relevant content such as an article, press release or blog post.  The increase of traffic might only be small, but the traffic is targeted.  If you had five unique visits to your site from a blog each day and five return customers from the same blog and you kept publishing new content every day then you could easily see how your number of visits can compound over a short and longer period of time.   When it comes to SEO on content release don’t underestimate the value of a small and slow growth of visits to your site – likened to a drip feed.

On the other hand if you want to rank your keywords on the first page of Google, then a different thought process and ethos is required.  There are some very strong contending external factors that influence and make things more complicated in the work of rising keywords to the top of Google.  Some factors to keep in mind are what are your competitors doing, how old is your website, how much work is needed on your site and business and what is your budget?

A new and very important factor coming to the fore of Google’s requirement for quality user experience is that of good quality content.  If you are keeping to the good side of Google, work hard at achieving your results through legitimate ways,  then you can expect to see some break through results within three months.    

It doesn’t stop there! SEO is on-going.

SEO today is a process of keeping your site within the eye of Google, and your clients, maintain position amongst your competitors and coming up with new and fresh content ideas that engage your new visitors and returning clients alike.  By continually adding relevant, new and quality pieces of content on a regular basis coupled with the important site promotion efforts of backlink building and social media contributions you have a very strong SEO strategy moving forwards. 

Also, part of the on-going SEO is your keyword analysis.  Keywords stale over time and new trends in your industry emerge that require you to relook at your phrases and adjust to the market trends. 

Getting to the crunch: How long will it actually take for my SEO to show results?

A good six month campaign may well get your website page to the top of Google for several keywords or phrases.  However, if you are short-sighted in your thinking and feel that your efforts have been enough and you stop, then your website will fall into neglect and your SEO campaign will be in vain as you will soon see your hard-earned positioning slip.

The best way forward with SEO is to look at it from the point of concentrating less on the time factor and more on the quality efforts you put in.  If you work on your website daily, just small amounts of effort are needed; you will see a noticeable increase in visitors which will increase your sales and revenue.

You need to give any SEO time and you need to put a lot of work into your SEO strategy – the reward is being a niche in your market and a force to get above.  

Article by Natalie Eastaugh