How Long Does it Take for SEO to Show Real Results? 

SEO results

Companies have long devoted extensive resources and revenue in the effort to generate leads through SEO. When successful, it can transform the reach of your company, gaining you immense traffic that converts into sales. But SEO is a complex marketing strategy that takes time to develop. Through technical SEO, content creation, and backlink accumulation, your website can move up in the rankings and start gaining the results you want to see. 

If businesses are investing in SEO, their number one question is usually: “How long will it take for me to see results?” Unfortunately, there’s no definitive answer. It takes time and strategy-building to develop the success you want to see in your company, but let’s talk about what contributes to SEO and how long it takes to be successful.

SEO is Constantly Changing 

First, we need to talk about the tricky part of SEO: it never stops changing. The Google algorithm is constantly updating, meaning a website’s ranking will fluctuate over time. Take this example:

Traditionally, marketing companies target a small group of keywords with the goal of increasing traffic to a website. However, there’s not one keyword that will guarantee success. That’s because it’s easy to become lost in the competition, meaning a website won’t always reach the audience it’s trying to influence. But recently, natural language search (like Siri and Google Assistant) has caused an increase in searches that are phrased with questions instead of individual keywords. The objective then should not be to rank for a few top keywords, but rather to focus on questions and long-tail keywords.

With changes like this and so many more in SEO, you need a marketing company that keeps up with SEO developments and adjusts its strategies accordingly, doing its best to maintain your ranking.

How Are You Measuring SEO Success? 

When a company starts your website’s SEO campaign, it’s important to be transparent about the type of growth you desire. Are you focused on website traffic, or is your number one goal to rank in a particular city? Companies will measure success in different ways, which makes it hard to pinpoint the effectiveness of your SEO strategy. However, we suggest using goals and KPIs to stay on the same page with your marketing agency. 

Goals: The end outcome you are trying to achieve. Typically, a company will be striving to increase its revenue over time.
KPIs: These are the metrics that measure the success of your goals. This could be growth in traffic, rankings, conversion rates, and/or sales.

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Where Do You Start with SEO?

After finding out how you will measure your website’s SEO results, a marketing company will consider your website history and standing position. Then, they’ll begin building content and starting keyword research. Over the first 6 months, it’s important to focus on creating keyword-rich content and building a substantial backlink profile. It is also important to ensure a website maintains all the points of technical SEO including consistent crawling and indexing, high site speed, duplicate content, data markups, and tracking behavior metrics. These are the tactics that we emphasize when starting a new SEO campaign for our clients. 

How Long Does it Actually Take to See Results? 

So let’s get down to the real question: How long does it actually take to see results from an SEO campaign? Generally, you’ll start seeing results at 4-6 months. SEO is a long-term marketing tactic, which means that it takes time to build. The reality is that it may take 6-12 months before you see any significant results and a year or more to see the results you want.

The majority of companies underestimate the time and cost that SEO takes. They want to see a payoff within a few months. If that doesn’t happen, they may conclude that their SEO campaign isn’t working and cancel it. If you invest in SEO, it’s important that you gear your mindset and budget towards a 6-12 month plan. Otherwise, it’s just not worth your investment. 


Keep this in mind. Don’t prioritize speed over sustainability: A well-developed SEO strategy is a worthwhile investment that can work wonders for your company and produce a major ROI. This happens over a long period of time with well-developed strategies; it won’t happen overnight.

SEO results

Such n Such Media Cares About Your Success

If you want to partner with a company that cares about your financial success, Such n Such Media is your team. Through years of refining SEO strategies and learning the best methods, we’re confident we’ll gain the success you want to see. We take into account all the factors below, creating a strategy tailored to your goals and objectives to make the most success for your website.

  • Website content
  • How long the website has been around
  • Previous SEO strategies
  • Link profile
  • Competition 
  • Resources available
  • SEO friendly design 
  • On and off page SEO strategies 

When you’re ready to discuss SEO with a marketing company that will treat you with respect and transparency, contact Such n Such Media for a free consultation. We would love to learn more about your business and how we can help you succeed.

Such n Such Media | Marketing Agency