After thorough research and discussions with various SEO agencies, you’ve chosen one to help make your website easier to find. Results are important, because that’s how you’ll recoup your investment.
Then the first two months go by, and there are still no visible results. Your rankings have remained more or less the same, and organic traffic hasn’t increased enough yet. When will you start seeing results from the SEO work you’ve done?
The most logical response when you don’t see results is to contact the marketing or SEO agency. You want to know why you aren’t seeing results, even though you’re paying for SEO services every month.
With most marketing channels, you can see results in just 1 to 2 months, after which you can adjust your strategy. You can stop using methods that don’t work or test a different strategy to achieve results. Unfortunately, that’s not the case with SEO. You’ve probably heard this before, but SEO is a long-term process and takes time.
SEO is more than just tweaking text or adding keywords to a page. It takes time to research your market and the keywords people use, and it takes time to perform analyses.
Think of a competitive analysis and a technical analysis. It also takes time to implement technical optimizations, improve the pages on your website, and create high-quality, relevant content. These are just a few examples of tasks that you or the agency will carry out.
It also takes time for Google to crawl your website, process the optimizations, and recognize you as an authority relative to your competitors. Google needs to capture and process the changes you make, compare the quality of your content and website to that of your competitors, and then re-rank the search results.
Add to that the countless algorithm changes and Core updates that are being rolled out, as well as the optimizations your competitors are implementing, and you’ll understand that you won’t see immediate results.
When you start working with an SEO agency or an SEO freelancer, managing expectations is very important. Every SEO agency has made a mistake at some point when it comes to managing expectations, which has led a client to end the project prematurely.
It makes sense that you want to know when you can expect results, but first and foremost, it’s important to ask yourself what “results” mean to you. This varies from company to company. For most companies and marketing agencies, results are defined as a specific percentage increase in the number of visitors and conversions, which allows you to recoup your investment.
Many companies focus on a single, fixed set of search terms, with the goal of achieving the number one ranking on Google for those terms. In doing so, they fail to consider the bigger picture of the company’s growth and conversions driven by SEO. In today’s Google search results, focusing on just a few search terms is outdated. Your target audience uses a much wider variety of search terms than they did just a few years ago.
Of course, there are still search terms with high search volume—and therefore high competition—but search terms consisting of multiple words are being used more and more often. If you base your SEO results solely on keyword rankings for high-volume search terms, you’ll miss out on the results for these important additional search terms.
Furthermore, search terms with high search volume don’t necessarily result in many conversions. There are plenty of examples where a website receives a huge number of visitors, but because those visitors aren’t yet ready to convert, no revenue is generated.
SEO results are, therefore, the results that allow you to recoup your investment in SEO. So think carefully about your business goals and align your SEO objectives with them.
SEO can take 3 to 12 months before significant results become visible. The time frame depends on factors such as competition, website quality, and the chosen strategy. Patience and consistency are crucial to success.
It can sometimes be difficult to trust an SEO agency, especially since it takes a long time to see results. Google has created a video with tips on hiring an SEO agency or SEO specialist, which includes an estimate of how long it takes to see SEO results (at 1:35).
According to Google, it will take 4 to 12 months before you start seeing results from an SEO campaign. Chances are you’d like things to move faster, but even Google acknowledges that SEO takes time.
A period ranging from 4 months to as long as a year may not sound very appealing. However, it’s not the case that every website will only see results after a year. There are various factors that influence how long it takes to achieve SEO results. These include:
In general, you should keep in mind that the first few months are focused on getting the SEO process up and running and implementing the initial optimizations. In most cases, it’s not uncommon for content creation to become part of the strategy only after 2 to 3 months.
An SEO project consists of various components, such as a technical analysis, a content analysis, an analysis of your competitors, and a lot of technical SEO work. To monitor what your SEO agency is working on or will be working on, it’s important to have insight into the plan and timeline for these activities.
In addition, you can work with your internal organization to ensure that the analyses and optimizations are carried out and implemented efficiently. There are several factors that influence how quickly results are achieved; we’ll go over these with you below.
This includes:
Writing and publishing high-quality content simply takes time. It also takes time for Google to recognize this content as high-quality and, through the publication of multiple pieces of content, to establish you as a topic authority within your industry.
Once the content has been published, you need to effectively promote it to your target audience. Whether or not you obtain high-quality backlinks to your content makes a difference in your search rankings.
To ensure that Google recognizes you as an authority, it’s not important to publish content as quickly and as frequently as possible. So you don’t need to hire an agency to write content for you every day. Instead, focus on quality.
Your content should be written and structured in such a way that it actually provides value to your visitors. By writing your content like an expert, you show Google that you’re an authority in your field.
It’s likely that your top competitors have also been working on SEO for quite some time. So it’s not easy to quickly outperform your competitors. That’s why you should take a close look at your competitors and, among other things, the quality of their content. Can you spot any areas where they’re falling short? If so, capitalize on those opportunities.
When you’re doing everything right in terms of SEO and your competitor is too, it can sometimes be difficult to achieve results. This can therefore have a major impact on how quickly you’ll see results.
It’s important to keep a close eye on your competitors and monitor how easily they can be found. Most keyword trackers include features that allow you to monitor your competitors as well, and we recommend that you do so.
The speed at which changes must be implemented has a major impact on the results. If, after a technical analysis is delivered, the key SEO issues are not addressed until three months later, this also affects how quickly results are achieved.
Major optimizations should ideally be implemented as soon as possible. Of course, this depends on internal and external capacity. For example, technical optimizations often require development capacity. Sometimes it may seem as though the impact of changes is minimal, but even small optimizations can make a big difference—especially when your competitors are also working to optimize their websites.
It’s important to remember that it takes time for Google to process the changes. This often takes at least a few weeks. Google will need to recrawl the pages on your website and then re-index them.
For many companies, the biggest obstacle to implementing SEO recommendations and optimizations is internal capacity. SEO works best when your entire company is involved in—or at least aware of—the SEO process. This allows everyone to contribute the necessary effort and resources, preventing a backlog of optimizations that would otherwise significantly slow down the pace of results.
Unfortunately, it is a fact that the available budget also affects how quickly SEO results are achieved. With a larger budget, you can dedicate more hours to SEO work, which will ensure that tasks and optimizations are completed more quickly.
It’s not that a larger budget guarantees higher rankings, but it does ensure that work is completed more quickly. This often means you’ll see results from your campaigns sooner.
Ultimately, setting the highest possible budget for an SEO project isn’t always the best solution. First and foremost, it’s important to identify your goals for the SEO project. Based on these goals and the margins you expect to generate from them, you can set a budget. This way, you’ll get more value out of your investment.
All in all, SEO results depend on many different factors, which means you won’t see immediate results. You’re dependent on external parties, your internal organization, and Google
It’s important to remember that SEO isn’t a one-time effort. You can’t just optimize your website once and then assume everything is set and optimized. SEO is an ongoing process that requires you to constantly go the extra mile to deliver the right user experience.
If you want to achieve good results, it’s important not to stop as soon as you see the first results. As soon as you do that, your competitors will catch up with you in no time.
With a passion for SEO and an unmatched drive for results, Jarik Oosting is the driving force behind SmartRanking. With over 15 years of experience in the field, he has built an extensive body of knowledge spanning technical SEO to complex site migrations. As the founder of SmartRanking, he has assembled a team of like-minded SEO specialists who help businesses achieve sustainable online growth.
His academic background in information science at the University of Groningen, with a specialization in natural language processing, gives him a unique perspective on the world of SEO. For Jarik, it’s not just about visibility in search engines, it’s about sharing knowledge and guiding businesses toward sustainable online success. That mission also led him to write a Dutch book about GEO.