How Long Does SEO Take? – Technologist

If you’re considering investing in SEO, chances are you want to understand how long SEO takes to pay off. It usually takes at least 6 months to see meaningful results, but there are things you can do to speed up the process. Here’s what we recommend to set your website up for success.

What Impacts How Long SEO Takes to Work? 

When you think of SEO, you probably start by thinking about keywords and backlinks. Those are both important factors in your website’s performance, but they are far from the only thing that can impact your website and how long your SEO takes to work.

Previous Ranking Pages

If your website has been around for a while and already ranks for a few keywords, you’re in a great place to continue that success! Because of the existing ranking pages, search engines already see your website as a trustworthy and helpful resource for searchers. As you add content and expand your website, this previous success can give your new pages a leg up.

Content Posting Frequency

The more frequently you post, the better your chances are of gaining new rankings. While there’s no benefit to going overboard – search engines might get suspicious if you suddenly go from one post a month to 18 posts a day – posting a few blogs a week can help you rank faster than a few blogs a month.

Technical SEO

From page structure to load speed, the technical details of your website play a big role in how long your SEO takes to work. Regardless of how amazing your content is, if it doesn’t load quickly enough to keep searchers from clicking away, search engines won’t prioritize it. Before diving into a targeted keyword strategy, it’s important to lay a solid technical foundation.

Competitiveness

If you are operating in a tiny niche with few competitors, you will likely see results sooner than a big fish in a bigger pond. Targeting highly competitive keywords takes more strategy and time, but the high value can be worth the effort. The amount of time needed to make real progress will be influenced by what other people in your industry are doing with their own strategies.

How To Speed Up SEO Results

Wherever you are in your SEO journey, there are things you can do to reduce how long SEO takes. From strategies to partnerships, here are some of our top tips to start seeing your pages rank faster.

Become or Work With Experts

If you’re new to the SEO landscape, it can take up to a year to really learn SEO. This can play a big role in how long it takes for SEO to pay off on your website. If you have the time to study SEO, this is time well spent, but if you want to get things moving quickly, it may be worthwhile to partner with people who are already SEO experts.

Utilize Link Building

One of the factors that search engines use to evaluate a website’s authority is how many backlinks it has. Once you have some valuable, authoritative content on your website, link building services are a great way to quickly build credibility with search engines.

Post Blogs Regularly

Posting blogs regularly provides two main benefits: first, you’re building up a regular cadence that can improve your trustworthiness, and second, you’re putting out more individual pieces of content that each have a good chance of ranking. Ideally, we recommend posting a few times each week to build a natural, reliable cadence.