When you first start with SEO, it's important to know that SEO takes time!
Google has built it's algorithm to promote websites that have built a level of 'authority' over time. it does not want to promote websites who have not proved they are worthy of their customer's traffic.
Some of the factors that determine 'authority' are:
- Age of the website
- The quality of the content
- The quality/quantity of backlinks pointing to that website
- The quality of the website itself (technically-speaking)
- Other signals (citations, social channels, reviews, etc)
These build up over time, so that's why SEO takes time.
But how long? That depends on three things:
How quickly you build authority based on the above - the quicker the better
The competitiveness of the SEO market you're targeting
Avoiding doing anything that Google doesn't like
Let's focus on number 2; the competitiveness of the SEO market. This means - simply - how many other websites are actively SEO'ing for the terms you want to rank for.
There's a general rule of thumb to play by here:
The more people search for a keyword => the more SEO competitive that keyword will be => the longer it will take to rank/the more authority you need to build for your website
(Bearing this in mind is why we always promote small businesses to write blogs! Blogs target less competitive keywords, as they target users who are looking for a question/very niche service/very niche piece of information.)
OK, so with the education piece over, let's provide you with some general timescales for SEO:
- If you write a good blog you can expect to start driving traffic to that blog within 1-2 months
- If you optimise you a product/service/homepage with a keyword that is low in competitiveness for your website*, then you can expect to rank within 3-6 months
- If you optimise you a product/service/homepage with a keyword that is medium in competitiveness for your website*, then you can expect to rank within 6-12 months
- If you optimise you a product/service/homepage with a keyword that is high in competitiveness for your website*, then you can expect to rank within 12+ months
*Use our difficulty metric to judge competitiveness for a keyword for your website. The higher the bar, the lower the competitiveness of that keyword for your website.
To make it super clear; the above are all based on previous experience/general SEO timescales but are dependent upon the quality and amount of SEO you do.
It also depends upon the quantity and level of SEO completed previously.
They are not guaranteed timescales, especially if you are not completing all of your SEO actions that the platform provides.
The more SEO you do - the more time and effort you put into it - the quicker and better you will perform.