How Long Does SEO Take to Work?

We’re often asked the question – “how long does SEO take to work?“. The truth is, it’s a question that can’t easily be answered.

Factors such as site structure and content, keyword selection, inbound link profile, strength of competition, current ranking position, domain age, etc, all play their part in determining how quickly a website will climb the Google “charts”.

Generally we advise clients that it can take at least 6 months to see upward movement in ranking and for competitive search phrases we set the expectation at 12 months+.

However, sometimes we get a very pleasant surprise. The graph below shows the ranking for 1 of our clients most important keywords.

In the last 48 hours it has moved up 277 positions to #7 in Google!

Now this isn’t a high volume, high competition keyword but it is one that will bring highly targeted traffic to the clients website and deliver a massive return on investment.

Ok, so it jumped dramatically over a 2 day period but we hear you asking – “how long did this SEO take to work?

The answer is just 1 week.

We targeted the right keyword, applied a little bit of onsite SEO love, a couple of high quality backlinks and BOOM, we hit page 1 of Google.

This post might seem self promotional but the intention is to demonstrate that SEO services do still work, you can get fast results, and nothing else beats it for long term ROI.