SEO Question: Once You Begin Using SEO, How Long Until You See Improvement In Your Search Engine Placement?
If I start SEO on my website, how long will it take before I start to see results?
Deeho Says:
SEO is a two part process, firstly your on-page SEO is carried out which will make your web content as good as possible to rank well in SERPs.
Once all your pages are optimized, part two of the SEO process is needed. This is link building, to increase your popularity online by building your trust and authority.
It’s quite normal to see significant improvements within a week or two of the on-page SEO being completed, but for competitive search terms that have more sites fighting to rank first, the criteria for top rankings are significantly higher.
To outrank these competitors you will need to have a large volume of high quality back-links pointing to the relevant pages of your site.
Link building is a long term process, and links need to be drip fed into your site. If you need 100 links to compete with your rivals, you can’t just add 101 links today because you will receive a penalty for over optimization instead of a ranking improvement.
Instead, we would drip feed around 5 – 10 links per month initially, scaling this up if required once your site begins to gain traction in SERPs.
Websites tend to gather in groups within SERPs, so for competitive keyword A, you might rank at around 100th in Google once your on-page SEO has been done, and within a normal range of fluctuation your site will stay there for a few months, moving between maybe 100th and 120th between each spider visit.
As your trust and authority grow, you will then jump to maybe 50th in SERPs and you will then remain there for a few months until you have gained enough trust and authority to make the next jump to maybe 20th.
You will then remain around the 20th spot for a few months until you have earned sufficient trust and authority to jump again, until you reach the top ten.
The time required depends on how competitive the keywords are that you are targeting and how many quality links your competitor sites have pointing at their pages.
We can provide an estimate using our SEO audit service which will show you what your competitors have done to rank well and what we need to do to your site for you to out rank them.
More Frequently Asked SEO Questions