Why SEO Takes Time
It is not uncommon for business owners to hire a digital marketing agency to handle their SEO strategy, only to be disappointed that they do not experience immediate results. Before going any further, it's important to note that it can take anywhere from three to six months for your SEO campaign to start achieving results. Depending on your industry, it can take up to twelve months before you see a boost in organic traffic and leads.
Search engines have over two hundred ranking factors. Big ranking factors, such as backlinks, cannot happen overnight. Backlinking, for example, takes time to build your credibility and reputation.
On average, it can take anywhere from three to six months to start seeing results from your SEO strategy. This can increase to up to twelve months. How long it takes to see results is determined by numerous factors relating to your website, how crawlable it is, your backlink profile, and the competitiveness of your target keywords.
SEO takes a long time, because the search engine algorithms are more complex than before, while the internet continues to grow at an exponential rate. More content is being published daily, which means more pages need to be crawled, indexed, and ranked. Ranking factors are constantly evolving and therefore, it can take a while before your website starts producing results.
The biggest reasons why appearing in organic results takes time includes:
If the search engines are unable to crawl and index your website, you are not going to be seeing results in the near future. These are the most important steps to ranking well in search engine results pages (SERPs). In order to start seeing results, the search engine bot or spider needs to be able to crawl your website, adding an index into the data base. If you are not seeing any results after a few months, troubleshoot any problems in the Google Search Console.
Things to consider includes:
Your backlinks play an important role in your ranking. Even though Google has advised that backlinks are not ranking factors, they still use backlinks to find your website, crawl your pages, and index your site in the data base. Your backlinks need to be high quality, coming from a relevant source, directing to the high quality content you published. When you have a strong backlink profile, you may see SEO results faster.
Backlinks show the search engine and users that your website can be trusted, making you a credible source of information, an authoritative figure in your industry.
How long SEO takes to work can also be determined by your domain. Older domains tend to do better than new domains. This is down to age. Older domains are established with a long history with search engines, along with an extensive backlink profile. Once your new domain has been around for a few months, there is no reason why you should not show up in search results.
Keywords are important to your SEO success. Keywords are the words or phrases used by your audience when searching for products, services, or information that you provide. Keyword competition does play a role in how long your SEO strategy will take to see results. Short tail keywords, those that contain one or two words, tend to be more competitive than the longer tailed keywords.
Targeting long tail keywords can be more beneficial to your SEO campaign, helping you get noticed by search engines and start enjoying results.
SEO can take anywhere up to six months to start seeing results. It is not an overnight success story and it requires time, updating, monitoring, and dedication. While you do not experience fast results with SEO, once in place and your ranking starts improving, it can be valuable to your brands online success.
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