It can be hard to wait to see results, particularly when you invest a lot of time and money into optimizing your website. It is a practice in patience. When starting SEO you want to keep in mind that you won't see results overnight.

What's the Least Amount of Time to See SEO Results?

It varies. The time it takes to see results from SEO depends largely on the condition of your current site. If you have a URL that's 10 years old and have consistently posted good content, you might see results from SEO within weeks. For a new site, results can take up to 6 months.

SEO Snowball Effect

While a few months is the minimum, it can take much longer for SEO to show its full effect. SEO often has a snowball effect that goes something like this: you improve your website, people spend more time on it because they have an easier time finding what they need, Google sees that users are spending more time on your site and moves the site up in the rankings. When your site moves up in the rankings, even more people see it, spend even more time on it, and Google moves it up in the rankings again. As you can imagine, all this takes time.

Local SEO

To generate traffic locally, Google My Business is a great tool! By optimizing local searches using this tool, you may see some results a little sooner. By optimizing Google My Business pages along with the various other local listing directories like Bing Places, your business listings and relevant web pages begin appearing in more search results, which can lead to an uptick in web visit and, phone calls

Additional Activities to Boost Performance

While you're waiting to see improvements in your site's performance, there are plenty of things you can do to boost your digital marketing efforts, such as:

• Paid Advertising
• Social media
• Blogs
• Email marketing

What Does it Mean to See SEO Results?

How can you tell whether your site is getting results? Look at two factors: traffic and conversions (RFQs, contact forms, requests for case studies/whitepapers, etc.). It is also important to understand that SEO results are never linear. With algorithm changes, you may see fluctuations up or down. It doesn’t mean there is something wrong with your site, but just that Google is refining how they deliver results to searchers and/or fine-tuning their AI.

Learn more about what it means to see SEO results -- and how long it might take to see results for your site -- by contacting Ecreative today.