How Long Does it Take to Rank a Site on Google

How long should it take before you get results from SEO?

I want to emphasize all the different factors and the many ways the results can be affected, as not many people understand. They think maybe there are two different paths, and if you do these ten things you get these results., that it is a straightforward process. But that is not how it works. I have been involved in many, many SEO projects, and every single one is at least a little different. They all have different opportunities, and they are all interlinked differently. So there are many ways things can be done, and timescales.

We cannot give one number or one kind of answer, like one to nine months. I have not seen one take nine months, but I can imagine it taking that long. Usually, if we are to narrow that down, I would say probably something more like three to six months or three to five months, is what I would expect for the average project. It depends on lots of different things. Here are some questions that need to be answered to assess this precisely. Where are you now? What does Google think of your site? Are you authoritative or do you have a brand new site? Those are very different places in the process. If you have a new site, it will take longer, but if you have already gotten a lot of authorities, if you have been around a while, if you have lots of trusted powerful links to your site, and your site is already pretty well-built, then it will not take as long. If a lot of the research has been done...

What kind of online assets do you have to leverage SEO? If you have a lot of YouTube videos, that is great, and will speed up the process. If you do not have any content whatsoever, that is going to take time because we have to build some of that content as we build the site out. What kind of competition do you face? If you are a law firm versus a lawyer in a major city, those are going to be two very different levels of competition. Are you going to a national site or a local site? If you are going after national keywords, national search phrases, it is just going to take longer. Those are going to be more competitive. If it is something that gets searched fifty times a month versus something that gets searched five hundred times a month. Generally speaking, it is going to be a big competition difference. So there are a lot of different angles to look at. Ultimately, I do not worry much about competition in the long term because anything can be ranked for it. I mean, I am not going to rank you number one for the term Microsoft, but anything that is not like a branded term can be ranked for it if you go after it right if you do the right things, and if you have the right amount of patience for it.

How aggressive do you want to be? Sometimes people ask this question, but it is like, “You have not decided what level of package you want to offer. If you are on the low-level package, it will take longer. If you are on the more aggressive package, it is faster.” That can make a big difference. The more aggressive packages are, in my opinion, sometimes a hundred or thousand times more powerful than the basic packages, which are still pretty powerful. So when you think about that, there is a wide variety of differences.

Are you willing to put a little bit of energy in the process or a lot of energy? I have had clients where I gave them things to do and boom, within a couple of days they just knocked out a lot of stuff. That same amount of work, some clients, over six months, they will do one-tenth of that work and it slows the process. If a client is not responsive and not doing the things that I ask them for, or if it takes a long time, that also slows things down. Period. This is outside my control. There is only so much I can get you to do without coming over and beating you over the head.

What kind of opportunities are out there for you? Are there easy opportunities that are profitable? A lot of markets and a lot of businesses have opportunities that we can target pretty quickly. That is why sometimes we can get good results in four to six weeks. It depends on. But some businesses, the opportunities out there are all competitive, and there are not nearly as many easy opportunities. So what kind of low-hanging fruit do you have?

How ambitious do you want to be? This works the opposite of what you would think. If you want to be ambitious, you would expect something longer. So if we are envisioning building a bigger house, it takes longer. So we are targeting more things. We have a big project in mind. We want to drive a lot of traffic. If you just want to target something very narrow, that is going to be a lot faster. It is going to be easier to rank for that. If your site is all about one narrow concept, Google sees that. They look at it, and they go, “This is very, very relevant to this one specific thing.” You are not going to rank for anything outside that. Now, if you expand that to more related concepts, ranking for that narrow thing is going to be more difficult because your site is no longer just about that narrow thing. This will make it take longer.

How easy is it to map out the concept of your site? How deep does the keyword research go? Sometimes when I am digging a research and it is a complicated market, there are a lot of different opportunities, a lot of different angles to look at it. This takes longer. There is more feedback back and forth. I have to look up more search phrases. Some things are simple and easy to understand. I had done the keyword research before, come in, looked at the research, and already know the gist of what we are going to map out. It does not take that long. In some markets, there are so many opportunities it takes a long time to map out what you are doing. It can take two months. Usually, it takes no more than that to figure out which is the “roadmap for what we want to build.”

I also want you to be aware of a hidden matrix that Google and the other search engines have that we just cannot possibly know, in general, and probably will never know. For example, you might not know of the searches, and when they put you up on the search phrase, how much you get clicked on. So, if you are number three for something, how much do you get clicked on in the search results versus the number two, the number four spot, and all the other spots? You cannot know. Google may tell you a little about it, but even then I am not sure how honest that is. I mean, you cannot know for sure. There are lots of other things that I am sure they do not share publicly that people just do not know. I am not claiming to know every little secret that Google has. Anyone who does—even if they were to work for Google—the amount of code that Google has built and the amount of information they process, even someone working for Google probably does not know everything, no matter how high up they are. Maybe a handful of people in their entire company.

These are all things you must try your best to answer. It affects the length of the project. When someone asks, and I do not give a specific answer, they might look at it as weakness when in fact it is just me being honest and straightforward when a lot of other companies would say, “We are going to give a specific number like three months, six months, or something like that.” In my opinion, if they are giving you a very specific answer on this question without having gone through the whole process of really looking at your site, analyzing it fully, picking a package, and picking all the different angles that you want to go for it, then in my opinion they do not have enough experience to understand all the different ways in which a project can be affected, slowed down, or sped up.

There are a couple of analogies that can help understanding—this one came from a client. If you build a house out of popsicle sticks, that will be faster than building a real house. You can do that with SEO. You can get faster results sometimes by building a house out of popsicle sticks. Now, it will not last as long, and you miss a lot of opportunities. I think that is a good analogy. You can get fast results, but that is not necessarily a good thing.

Say you have a stinky floor, or some smell coming from the floor in your house. You go in there; you hire a guy, and you say, “How long will it take to fix?” or, “How much will it cost to fix?” He is not going just to give you a number. He will say, “Well, I am going to have to pull the floor up and see what I find.” That is a little bit like what SEO is like. Until we go and we dig in there, we are not going to know all the little things that need to be done. We have an idea, and we know in some categories what we want to focus on, and what certain type of metrics or angles we want to attack, but the details can vary dramatically once you get in there.

It is also an iterative process. This means it is a repetitive process and goes back and forth. You does the same thing over and over again. Do, check, analyze, do, check, analyze; or plan, develop, test, plan, develop test. We do some SEO. We check and see what kind of results there are. We analyze that and then we do some more depending on what we found in our analysis. This gives you a foundation for SEO 101. “What are you going to do month 1, 2, 4?” “Generally speaking, I do have a plan. We have a plan for what we want to do, but we cannot tell you every detail of every plan. We are going to do this thing here, this thing here, this thing here, and create a hundred blind items of the actions that we are going to do because that is not practical.”

I am constantly trying to test new ideas, and I am constantly building software and tools that do new things. When I come up with something new three months into a project, and it is something that works for a client, I am going to use it on that client. I would not want to box myself into just picking that one thing. That can speed up a project.

There are also unique opportunities for your business and your market. The opportunities for a dentist versus a lawyer are very different. So understanding that—that is again why you cannot just give out one number.

Sometimes it is difficult to analyze fully improvements. I have had clients say, “We are not improving.” Then I dig into the numbers and say, “We are based upon these metrics, and we look at it as a whole.” This is difficult for several reasons. It depends on the market. Sometimes it is a lot easier to see than other times. If you added ten times the amount of search engine traffic, then that is obvious, but in some work it is just difficult. If improvements have been made, we cannot just look at this month versus the previous month because in the previous month, for example, there could be twice as much search volume for your major search phrases. There was a client of mine who, over a month, went from their year-high month to their year-low for their major search phrases. It was about five to ten times different. In that way, we had to look really at long-term data. That goes back to the current traffic.

Here is the general process for what we should see as the flow of improvements. First, you should see rankings improvement. Going from 70th to 15th in the Google Search Results does not give you any traffic, but eventually you should see an improvement in traffic and then in sales. That is the general way we go about it. Ultimately, I think that I am responsible for providing you with your traffic that is your target market. If I can make a big improvement there, then I consider my job well done. The sales that is a lot up to you. Yes, it is partially up to me as well. So that is something we work on together, but ultimately, I think I am judged on traffic. Short term, the rankings are helpful in understanding where we are at, but long term, we want to see the traffic.

Here is the other thing, there are things outside my control (or your SEO team’s control) that can go very wrong. If your site gets hacked, and you do not notice it, and they do weird things, that can plummet rankings. If you have trouble fixing that, Google might completely penalize you until you get it fixed. That would be something that could seriously set back a project. I have experienced a client undoing changes. The employee of a client thought she knew a lot more than she did. Went in, made a lot of changes to the site, and the traffic plummeted. It is something I cannot be held responsible for. Ultimately, there are these weird things that happen. I hope that some clients understand about that. Some people will still blame their SEO consultant. I think that is unreasonable, but it is what it is. Ultimately, that is what I am responsible for. I do my best to prevent that, but you cannot prevent everything. Also, you cannot stop negative SEO. You cannot stop someone from linking it to you. They point spam to your site. There are things you can do to mitigate the effects of it. It is difficult to do negative SEO well, but it is not impossible. There are other forms of negative SEO that are very hard to detect. That is something to keep in mind.

Here are some examples of strange things that happened. I had a client in an ultra-competitive market that was the super low budget. After three months, they were not seeing lots of results and were upset. I said, “Look. First of all, I did not promise results. Second of all, you are on a low package. Now, I do not even offer a package anywhere near that price. You are going after huge keywords that are highly competitive.” I could have done a better job of managing their expectations, but they would not listen to me. They would not listen to why it is like that. They made up their mind. Once they made up their mind, it was over. That was unfortunate for them, but that is just how it works sometimes.

I remember one client, at about three and a half months, freaking out because there were no visible improvements. They were nowhere to be found, but then from month four things started to come around. And at six months, they were on the first page for some really big competitive search phrases.

Sometimes there are roadblocks you have to go through. You do not know how many roadblocks there are until you try to go through them. I think that was the case here. We needed to kind of flip the switch or we needed to get to a certain point. There was no way to know that distance. The distance was further to kind of break through the barrier to see the improvements. Not only that but in this example, the client was unresponsive to doing a few simple things I asked. That slowed things down.

There was another example where, inside six months, we moved from zero (for a brand new site) to lots of super valuable traffic in a competitive niche. Part of this was because the client was extremely responsive. I gave him things to do, and he did them very quickly and well. He did not hesitate. Not only that, but the research portion of it went quickly because he understood what I was asking of him, and it was a market I understood well. So that process was short. That was great.

In another, almost the same thing happened where it was not quite a competitive niche but we got results in three to six weeks. After three months, they were number one for some really big terms. Number one through three for lots of terms like that. That has happened several times.

I don’t want you to think it cannot be fast, but it can also take time. There are so many factors involved in how long it takes to rank. Hopefully, this is helpful. Let me know if you have any questions or thoughts.

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