How long does SEO take?
This is according to ahrefs which created a poll and over 4,300 people responded. As we can see the duration is mostly about 3 to 6 months, but in reality, there is no definitive time frame, so as it depends.
Following we will discover a few factors on how long SEO takes to show results.
So, why does SEO take so long to show results?
SEO is NOT advertising, it is NOT paid. To be able to rank 1, you will need to prove your worth, as the marathon person who wins 1st, is the one with the best capabilities, support and training, it is the same with your website on the Google Marathon.
Quick note: google has two types of results. Paid and Organic. SEO is the Organic part.
Paid results are displayed above the Organic.
Let’s see a few criterias.
Factor Jung vs old Website / Homepage
Websites or Homepages which have started the race earlier have of course the advantage. Catching up, means some serious effort, but it is not impossible as the junger one may have more energy, but the older one tends to have more authority, as more backlinks, more pages, more content and already ranks for more keywords.
The big problem is, new and jung websites need to prove themselves. Google won’t straight away hand over all the power, therefor results would take longer to show for SEO.
There is SEO competition
As you are not alone in the world, there will be others which are also doing SEO and holding your site off from showing results.
Depending on your keywords and how many others are also using these keywords, this according to how much backlinks they have, would you some difficulties. If you have no competitors and are unique, the difficulty would be easy, but this would be almost impossible as there is always someone.
Feel free to check over your keywords at ahrefs “Keyword Difficulty Checker“.
On the other hand, it is a lot easier if you use keyword combinations, which would definitely have less competitors. We call these “Long Tail Keywords” in contrast to “Short Tail Keywords”.
Short tail keyword example: “SEO”.
A long tail example: “SEO for beginners” or “SEO for Startups”.
The investment Factor
The more time, money, resources and so on you can invest, the “quicker” you will see results.
For example, having or hiring more designers, developers, content creators, social media experts and so on would definitely be faster than the one man or woman show.
Not saying the obvious, but you need to realize that a Porsche has higher chances of winning a race against a Twingo. In addition, this also means delegating. You may be a digital strongman pulling your carriage, but you would still most probably loose against an army of a thousand.
Strategies and tactics
Having a plan and following up on it is already an enormous gain in your SEO Marathon.
You may also focus on a niche before tackling competitive areas (low competition topics). Once you have a foothold somewhere, you will have it easier to expand on it.
The implementation Factor
To catch up your marathon, which actually is more like a triathlon, you need to implement a lot and fast. A German Philosophers saying goes as, success has three letters: “Tun”, which means “doing” or “to do it”.
Often People just dream of success, but that is no how it comes. It is still faster with even just doing 1% a day.
The same goes with theory. Only learning – brings you nowhere. Theory helps, but execution is the only which directly does.
