How long does SEO take to work?

14 November 2022

Bipin Padhiar
SEO Specialist

SEO can take up to 6 months to start ‘working’. But it can also take much longer. In some cases it can be years. It depends on multiple factors which we’ll go through in a moment.

What factors affect how long SEO can take?

1. How competitive is your niche?

If your competitors are big, well-known brands, it can take a lot longer for you to rank on page 1 and start making sales than if your industry is a less competitive one.

For example, if you sell men’s sportswear and you want to rank on page 1, you’ll be competing with the likes of Asos, Nike and Sports Direct. There are 113 million results for ‘mens sportswear’, as you can see in this image.

analysing search engine results

2. How old your domain is

If your website is really new, Google is much more likely to take longer to rank it because it hasn’t crawled it before. It needs to access it, crawl it and index it to be able to rank it.

If Google knows there’s a trustworthy, longstanding e-commerce website and a very new website with no backlinks and broken pages, which one do you think it would rank?

The answer is the longstanding one.

The reason is that the longstanding one has built trust with its site visitors and Google over time. The other one hasn’t.

3. How many pages you have published and how good they are

If you have thousands of pages, don’t assume that’s automatically a good signal.

Ask yourself:

Are they broken?
Are there mass redirects slowing your site down?
Is the page malfunctioning on mobile?
Is there a lack of obvious, eye-catching call to action?
Are there pages that do not serve any purpose to your reader?

If you answer yes to any of these, it needs fixing.

4. How good your backlink profile is

If you’ve got thousands of dodgy backlinks (we’ve seen it happen!), your results will absolutely be hindered, compared to a website with a handful of quality external backlinks from authoritative and related sites.

5. How often Google indexes your website

If you want to rank on page 1, get traffic, and conversions, you need Google to crawl and index your website.

The idea is that Google will index your site, notice the changes and it will then rank you accordingly.

Google Search Console can show you when a page was last indexed. If you go to ‘URL Inspection’ and enter your URL, it will show you when it was last crawled. If it was a while ago, you can request it to be re-indexed.

6. how often google makes a change to the algorithm

Google makes an awful lot of changes and updates different parts of its algorithm throughout the year. It can make between 500 and 600 changes every year. But it can be more. When we say Google algorithm, we’re not trying to confuse you.
All we mean is that Google has a list of things it will check for when it indexes your website, from HTTP status to broken pages. When Google decides to tweak that list because it sees something as a more significant ranking factor, that might affect you.
For example, imagine Google suddenly deciding that the number of 404 pages, i.e., an ‘error’ page, on a given website is the most important ranking factor. The more broken pages you have, the worse you will rank.