How Long Does SEO Take To Start Working?

It varies depending on the skill level of the company or person you are using and how much work you are paying for at a time.

Short Answer: For general service from a reputable company, it takes about 4-6 months before you start ‘feeling’ and ‘seeing’ the results.

Why Does It Take So Long?

SEO Omaha is a hard thing to figure out, it is very hard to do and there are very few people who know how to do it right. There is a reason there is only one #1 person in the first position sucking up all the glory, it’s because it takes a champion SEO person or company to beat the competition.

Month 1
Research and discovery, website audit, keyword strategy, and planning. If research and discovery can be done quickly, then technical changes may start being made to the website within the first month. In other cases, a thorough research and discovery phase can last more than one month.

Month 2
Begin technical SEO work, that is, making modifications to the website based on site audit results. In some cases, the website needs to be overhauled, and this itself can take months. Other SEO activities such as working on the link profile, SEO audit service, and building content can be done simultaneously the overhaul is happening. If you find yourself in this overhaul situation, you’ll be doing “SEO” but you still won’t be seeing any results at all, since the changes being made will only start to have an impact once they’re finished.

Month 4
Continued content creation, technical optimization of the website, and development of a healthy link profile (which may include cleaning up low-quality links). By this month you could expect to see a marked increase in rankings, traffic, and lead generation. It won’t be anywhere close to the improvements you should make 12 months into your SEO efforts, but it should be significant enough that you know SEO is working.

Month 6
If your traffic has reached 5,000 visitors per month or more by this point, you could benefit from adding conversion rate optimization to your efforts to improve how the traffic you’re receiving converts into leads and/or sales. From this point on, your activities may be consistently focused on content creation and promoting that content, or you may be doing things that are more creative. The specific activities can vary greatly depending on what type of company you are in and what kind of website you have.

– Excerpt taken from this great article at Forbes.com