It’ll take at least 6 months to see the effects of your SEO. While you may see some results sooner than this, it’s also possible that it could take over a year to see results. This is why you shouldn’t prioritize speed over sustainability. Doing so will cause Google to become suspicious that you’re using black hat tactics. However, there are various considerations that’ll play an important role in how well you do here.
Your Website’s Authority and Age
Google claims domain age isn’t a huge factor. They say that once your domain has been around for a few months you’ll start showing up in the search results but there are a lot of recent case studies that show this isn’t true. This is mainly due to the fact that older websites have more backlinks so it looks more trustworthy and authoritative to the search engines – something that occurs with time. Furthermore, older domains also have a lot more content that gets clicked on because people recognize the brand’s name.
Link Building
This takes a lot of time but it’s an essential part of Google’s algorithm. You don’t want to engage in any black link tactics but instead invest your time in creating high-quality, engaging content that can be cross-promoted on social media. To save yourself some time you should look into other ways in which you can repurpose your content.
This is another area in which older websites have an advantage because they already have an extensive backlink profile. Paid links aren’t the answer here as Google considers them deceptive. Focus instead on obtaining high-quality, reputable links.
Errors, Hosting Issues, and Penalties
These things take a long time to recover from but it’s worth your time to fix these things. Of course, you don’t want to do so too fast or Google may grow suspicious. Typically it’ll take a few crawls for these updates to take effect though.
SEO-Friendly Design, Structure, and Architecture
You’ll find that when these factors are improperly handled they’ll drag down your page’s ranking. This is why it’s important to ensure that your website’s structure is properly optimized and that you have the proper mobile optimization (a.k.a. responsive design). Since Google has undertaken a mobile-first initiative this will help ensure that you’re crawled first – something that’ll also help you rank higher.
Keyword Targeting and Competitor Analysis
Take some time to look at who’s dominating the SERPs. While you can’t steal their secrets, you can gain some valuable insight here. Fortunately, there are a lot of tools that’ll help you analyze your competition. This is important because these are the sites that will help you figure out when you’ll be able to see the results of your SEO efforts.
Your Content Strategy
To quickly see at least an 8% increase in website traffic you need to spend a lot of time creating and implementing an effective content strategy. Without authoritative content, you won’t be able to impress Google when it evaluates your pages. To see what they’re looking for, check out their Quality Rater Guidelines. You also need to be dedicated to staying on top of their algorithm updates and developments. It’ll take you several months to see the full results here.
On-Page and Off-Page SEO
To quickly see sustainable results from your SEO you should take a look at your on-page optimization (e.g. meta tags, header, anchor text, title, descriptions, alt tags). This should be the first thing you address so that it won’t take you a long time to produce your desired results.
Unfortunately, your off-page optimization (e.g. blog commenting, high-end directories, citations, guest blogging, social media sharing) will take a bit longer because you don’t want to look like you’re spamming.
How Long All of This Takes
There isn’t a definitive answer for how long it’ll take for these things to take effect since search engines and their requirements are always changing. You’ll also have a lot of nuances to deal with here but SEO really isn’t difficult to learn. Results will take you some time though. If you don’t have the time or patience for this then leave it in the hands of the professionals at the Local SEO Company in Tampa, FL.