SEO Timelines
One of the great debates we have heard for years is how long search engine optimization takes to work. We’ve often seen SEO companies and other colleagues shake their heads and start muttering, “How long is a piece of string?” The answer, as elusive as ever, is that it depends. We’ll walk you through why below.
The timeline will depend on a new or old website
There is a common misconception that SEO takes anything from 12 weeks to 12 months to impact anything. However, the reality is often dependent on how old the website is and how long it has been functioning in its current state and under its current ownership. Most websites rank somewhere for their core keywords. But it might be on page 5 or 6 of Google.
Myths
- It will take three-six months to see any results. “It typically takes between 3–6 months for SEO to show results. That’s according to the 4,300 people who responded to our LinkedIn and Twitter poll.” See here.
- You must publish a new blog post every week.
- Links don’t matter. Or, links are the elixir of Google magic.
- Bad reviews on Google. We have tested four websites with bad reviews, and neither is adversely affected; all rank on the first page of Google! Think of companies with the worst customer service; they still rank in Google. How would you write an algorithm that takes into account bad reviews? Do you reduce a website’s score every time it gets a bad review? What about two? What about 1,000 bad reviews?
- If you add too many pages or make too many changes to the site in one go, Google will know, and it won’t work. Google’s index is 100,000,000 gigabytes in size. Do you think your one or two extra pages will make a difference? Your new pages are like a tiny spec on a single grain of sand on the largest beach in the world!
- Content has to be fresh to rank.
- Blogs are the only way of adding content once the main site is finished.
- You must concentrate on a few keywords.
The truth is, the process can be sped up
Google has visited most websites at least once in the last two weeks to identify page changes by comparing file sizes. See Google’s crawl capacity.
Google will crawl and index more and more of the website as it finds more pages that have been updated. However, from experience, this is not guaranteed.
Should a Webmaster submit a new sitemap or use other methods to encourage Google to visit the new and improved SEO-ed website? For more information, read Google crawling times.
Google can easily be encouraged to reindex your website with a click of a button through search consult.
Your website is now queued to be reindexed and RESCORED.
This can take seven days max.
The pages are rescored when they have been newly indexed and applied changes. When SEO is applied to your website in a broad sense, multiple pages have been altered so of course, page scores will naturally increase or decrease.
A lot of SEOs are talking about the delay it takes for Google to recalculate the score of your web pages and the web pages currently in the index for a keyword.
Often, when clients see their webpage go down in Google, it hasn’t fallen. It is just other website pages have gone above it or have a higher score.
The time for Google to recalculate a page’s on-site SEO new index score is no more than 7 days and can occur much quicker.
“Websites that do not change are not restored. If you rank #1 for a keyword is it a good idea to hold off changing the website.”
So, the time spent on-page optimisation, which can include several technical SEO improvements, is under two weeks.
The actual scope of the improvements in a website’s entire Google rankings across multiple keywords would depend on the ratio between the number of pages optimised and the number of pages unchanged.
Different reaction times for off-page optimisation
Where the confusion about timescales comes in is the difference in the time it takes for Google to react to on-site changes and optimisation and off-page optimisation.
Off-page optimisation is often referred to as backlinks, but it can include other elements like reviews and social media ranking signals.
Building backlinks to a website means that the time to see improvements is longer as the strength of these new links (or link juice) is taken into account is longer.
The reason why is Google has to index these new websites with the newly placed backlink, identify that the links points correctly and legitimately to the client’s website and then recalibrate its algorithmic score for the website pages.
Google then needs to factor in the link strength of the backlinking websites. When multiple backlinks have been created for a client’s website, again, all of these new sites have to be indexed, the new backlink scored and added to the domain’s overall algorithmic score.
You might not see results today, but three months down the line
Google’s algorithmic scoring for backlinks is nowhere near as fast as its on-page optimisation scoring, as there are more sites to index and calculate. There were 1.13 billion websites as of February 2023.
Sitewide technical changes, high ratios of pages optimised and other SEO improvements to the content and code of the website can have fast and near instance effects on the traffic gained from a higher position within Google’s ranking.
The idea of is backlinks then are drip fed into this equation, further increasing and strengthening the score of each individual page and hence increasing it Google ranking.
The time it takes for Google to recognise all of the new backlinks created, add them into its algorithm, and then rescore the domain and the individual pages seems to take anywhere between two weeks and eight weeks. Why so SLOW? We don’t know exactly.
Competitors are working just as hard
A client’s competitors are not sitting on their hands. All of these websites are no doubt doing their own SEO and backlink building. This dampens the improvements of the initial SEO work. The hope is that the cumulative SEO improvements, both on-page and off-page, are superior to competitors’ so that slowly, the website supersedes their websites and ranks #1 in Google.
Newly launched projects are different
Where the website is brand-new, Google is particularly kind. They have admitted to giving new websites, i.e. websites they have not indexed before, an artificial boost within search results.
So, new websites can see their rankings improve within 21 days of being presented to Google. Excellent!
However, after these three weeks the website invariably begins to slip down the rankings and then practically disappear.
The next stage of the project, where further SEO work is done and more content is added to the SEO mix, means that the website slowly begins to transition from nowhere to page 3 or 4.
