How Long Does SEO Take? A Look Into SEO Timelines

SEO specialists will start by researching everything about your company.

They will look into your industry, how competitive it is, your specific niche, competitors and how they rank, as well as more granular topics like important industry keywords.

All this information will help to sculpt your SEO campaign. If you do SEO in-house, you might have less lengthy research to do since you know your company well. In that case, you can look to competitors and evaluate the market.

Upon taking you on as a client, your SEO company will look at the structure of your website, the content you have, and your overall user experience.

The best SEO companies will also do a thorough SEO or website audit. This process helps them see what you already have in terms of content, develop areas of opportunity, and create a game plan for a high-level SEO strategy.

For your content to rank in search engines, you must create pages that target keywords your audience searches online. For that reason, keyword research and planning is an extremely important part of the SEO process.

Keyword research helps SEO experts determine the scope of keywords that you need to target, how many, and what kind.

During the initial SEO steps, you have to consider the human side of SEO campaigns. Whether you work with an agency or not, communicating and collaborating on SEO are important steps that you should establish early on. 

For example, you might outline how you will communicate SEO timelines to stakeholders and keep teams (content, development, SEO) aligned.

You should also be setting realistic goals and communicating those across the board. Managing your internal expectations and working cross-functionally helps SEO go more smoothly.

Your SEO team will enter your site’s backend and make the necessary changes to ensure that you rank higher in search results.

The changes should correspond with your website audit. For example, if you already have fantastic alt tags for your images, there is no need to pull an alt-tag report and fix them. However, if the site’s meta descriptions are lacking, update them.

If your website is old, or you bought it from someone else, it may need a total SEO overhaul. This process could take months alone. You’ll typically find out from your SEO agency if your site requires a total overhaul within the first month.

Responsive design means that no matter what device a user views your website on, they have a great experience. If you have a website that isn’t responsive, when users view it on a smartphone or tablet, it won’t look the same it does on a desktop.

Buttons might get cut off, images might take up the whole screen, and the site will be more difficult to navigate. At this stage in the game, your marketing manager will ensure that your site is responsive since that affects your site rankings, too.

Before your SEO team can create and implement content, they’ll have to look at the long list of keywords they pulled during the first month and narrow it down to the keywords they want to target.

Different keywords lend themselves well to different kinds of content. For example, there are long-tail keywords and generic keywords.

Generic keywords typically include one or two words, and they describe a broad topic. These terms include “pizza,” “shoes,” or “dogs.” While generic keywords often have high search volume, many other companies in your industry target them. This means it’s often difficult to rank for them organically.

Long-tail keywords are often more targeted and contain three or more words. Specific to your niche, these keywords target an ultra-specific need.

They include phrases like “pepperoni and pineapple thin crust pizza,” “red high heel shoes with ankle straps,” or “sheepadoodle puppies in Pennsylvania.” Each of these keywords caters to a very specific need.

Though long-tail keywords have a lower monthly search volume, they attract more qualified leads to your site — people who are most likely to purchase your products or services. When it comes to keywords, high search volume and low competition is a winning combination.

As you can see, there is a lot that goes into selecting keywords before writing content. That’s why content creation takes a whole month, or more, depending on what your website needs.

One of the most important parts of an SEO campaign is the content creation. As you can see, it’s a process to determine exactly what keywords to target with your content, but after SEO strategists have the keywords down, it’s time for content creation.

Like keywords, there are different kinds of content, too. During the third month, your SEO agency will pair each keyword with specific content that would work best with each topic.

For example, there is long-form content, blog content, and general product and service content. At this point in your SEO campaign, your marketing manager will determine what content your site needs and create the right plan for your website.

Long-form content typically contains more than 2000 words and it is extremely important for SEO purposes. Long-form content is proven to earn higher organic traffic, more social shares, and more backlinks.

In prior years, businesses could write content stuffed full of keywords, but Google has gotten smarter since then. For your content to rank, your website must feature content that satisfies user intent, not just utilizes the keyword.

Blog content is more of a commitment since you must update it regularly. However, blogs are highly beneficial to SEO. That’s why most SEO companies will recommend that you have a blog implemented and provide your blog content at an extra charge.

General product and service content discusses your business, your story, and specs and descriptions of products and services. This content is critical if you want your specific product offerings to rank in Google — and if we were to guess, that’s one of your goals.

The sooner this content appears on your website, the better. As soon as your content goes live, Google can index and rank it in search engines.

Don’t expect to see your newly-posted content in search results within the first week, but you may start to see well-written content rank, at least somewhere in search results, after a month or two.

If you’re a local business, optimizing for local search can yield quicker visible results in local rankings. Your SEO strategy, from keywords to content, will also involve local optimizations to help you rank for your target demographic’s location. 

Some strategies that your SEO agency might focus on include setting up a Google Business Profile, optimizing for local keywords, and promoting name, address, and phone number (NAP) consistency.

All of these optimizations will make it easier for local audiences to find you in the SERPs as your site grows.

The continuous addition of content and features like link building are important during this month to keep the SEO momentum moving. Building authoritative links is important to your ranking because it shows Google that other high-authority websites trust your information enough to link to it.

In order to increase backlinks, your marketing manager may reach out to other companies in your industry and ask for them to link to your content.

Your SEO team will also be monitoring and improving technical features of your website. During this month, they will be evaluating factors like speed, performance, and layout to make sure your site is functioning well and consistently.

If your social media profiles weren’t already attached to your website, this is typically when your SEO agency will go back to do so. If you don’t have social media accounts that embrace your brand, your marketing manager might be able to suggest a great social media marketing agency to help you with this step.

An important part of an SEO company’s job is to report their findings back to you, the client — and some of the most important findings are analytics regarding your campaign.

Your SEO should be keeping track of your campaign throughout the process, but it’s around month five where you can really start to see a jump in traffic or conversions. Your SEO will use tools like Google Analytics to show you how your campaign is performing.

It’s a bonus if the agency you work with is a Google Premier Partner, like WebFX!

A/B testing is a tactic that marketers use to test different elements on your website. For example, if your SEO implemented a call-to-action (CTA) button, but wants to try a different version in a different color in order to determine which performs the best, they might perform an A/B test.

This test will allow them to see what variation of a specific element performs better and implement that version on your website.

Another test that marketers may use on your site is heatmap testing. This test shows how far users get down a certain page before leaving. It also shows where users click the most and can indicate whether you need more interactive elements above the fold.