How Long SEO Takes to Start Working & Show Results in 2023

When does SEO take effect? How long does it take for SEO to start working, kick in and show results from Google for a website.

And what should you consider as effects and results when you are looking to set a time frame for your website SEO?

How does the whole process go? Get all the answers right here.

How Long Does SEO Take to Work?

How much time will your SEO take to work for your website? This is the answer most would want to have before they start optimizing their websites.

Yes there is an industry consensus too on this.

The time actually varies and is not a fixed number of months.

But what is also important is to understand how does SEO work actually.

The time it takes tells us how it works.

Yes. SEO is important to your online success and this will help you look at the time frame with a better perspective to plan your success better.

How Long SEO Takes is about How it Works

SEO works as an organic technique which aims to build your search presence.

And organic means to build and make it grow in a steady way.

It works as a process and therefore it takes time. First the process takes time and secondly each step takes time to bring in the effect.

And then when the website is new it takes time for it to gain the trust of search engines. As the website starts gaining the trust your SEO starts taking effect, it starts working and starts showing results.

You may want to understand SEO better to understand its time frame of getting results.

Know SEO & How it Works

How Long SEO Takes to Start Working

The first thing is that you need to cover the basics then only you can expect to see SEO working for you.

This basically means few things.

All this can take the first month of your time.

This is the stage when your SEO starts working for your website.

If you are beginner and want to learn these steps then here is a guide for you.

How to Learn SEO

How Long Does it Take for SEO to Take Effect?

For your SEO to take effect means to see some activities in search console account.

Typically SEO starts to take effect as you can see all your pages indexed.

The second stage or step is when you start seeing some search impressions for your main and related keywords in search console data.

This takes another couple or few weeks’ time.

During this period you have also started to build backlinks.

When you are 3 to 4 weeks into your link building process you start seeing these links in search console links tab.

As and when few of your backlinks start showing they start to impact or push your search rankings.

You can see your keyword rankings improve.

What you also see is your keyword impressions increasing.

And your pages start to attract or target more keywords.

This is when and how your SEO starts to take effect.

One more thing.

Many people also ask this question.

How Long Does it Take for SEO to Kick In?

When your SEO starts to kick in for your website?

What this means is your SEO has started to bring improvements.

This also means that your optimization and initial link building has started to take effect.

This usually happens after you have spent 3 to 4 months in doing search engine optimization.

It rarely happens earlier until and unless you did some very good quality work. And this work is also supported by good quality content on your website.

This is how SEO works for a business.

How Long Does it Take to See SEO Results

The actual results which mean something for any website are rankings.

Although we all do SEO to get clicks and traffic from search engines.

But until your website starts ranking and improve its position towards reaching the first page it is not possible to get clicks for those keywords.

This is the result that we want from SEO.

For this you need to build enough backlinks for your website.

This can take 2 to 3 months at least.

Once you have built those links it may take few more weeks for those backlinks to give you the desired effect or results.

Once you are 3 to 4 months into link building then your keywords start reaching the first page of Google.

Or at least most of those keywords will be placed well on the second page and competing.

This is the stage when they start to get clicks.

So this is when your website SEO starts to show results.

So the average time to see results from SEO right from when you started doing search engine optimization is therefore 4 to 6 months at least.

However this is the stage when you start to see results.

Please take note of this fact.

As you continue doing SEO, writing more content or blogs, discovering and targeting more keywords and most importantly continue to build quality backlinks you start seeing your results increase and improve.

And depending upon the SEO work you do and the quality of it you can see many fold increase in your SEO results over the next few months to a year.

Factors that Affect the Time SEO Takes

Doing SEO also means taking note of some factors which take time to improve your website's search readiness and optimization levels.

Most of these factors are external.

And many times you do not have control over these factors.

These are the factors you need to consider.

SEO Process

The SEO process itself takes time.

There are two factors to understand here.

One is that as a process SEO takes time. By this time you would have understood that it is not a one step task.

You need to do the following tasks to SEO optimize your website.

All these steps take their own time.

How we do it becomes the beginners roadmap for SEO.

Getting your website and its pages indexed on Google takes some time, especially for a fresh website.

Crawling and Indexing is a process which takes time.

When you build links then it takes few days before it starts to appear in your search console.

It takes even more time or days for the new links to show some impact on your SEO.

Google will not trust your new website immediately, even if all your pages are properly indexed.

Moving up the SERP (search engine results pages) is one time taking process in itself.

Secondly, each steps takes its own time to complete and also to bring effect.

If your previous task is not complete or of good quality then your next task may not bring the desired effect or results.

Building Trust

Every website needs to build trust first.

Then only it starts to rank.

Search engines pay special attention to the trust factor.

Organic is Slow

As we said SEO is an organic digital marketing technique that aims to build visibility in search engines.

And earning the trust of search engines takes time.

Competition

Talking about moving up the SERP and the time it takes brings us to another factor.

Competition.

There are tens and hundreds of websites already appearing for every keyword.

Whatever your keyword there are already websites which are ranking in top 10, top 20, top 50 and so on.

They are your competitors.

To move up SERP means to beat these websites.

You do this with your SEO work.

Here your quality matters and also how much work you put in.

But what you do not or can foresee is what your competitors are doing to maintain or improve their positions and what they are planning to do.

You may be moving up but when your competitors who are already ahead start doing more or better then it becomes little more difficult and time taking to move past them.

Conclusion

Considering the above timeline the average time frame which most experts take and advice for SEO to work, take effect and show results is months to a year.

And during this time what you need to do is put your best quality work of optimization and link building.

Because this period and the work you do is also your base which can take your SEO results to great heights in the coming months.

If you are already into the result stage and it is taking much more time than it should then here are two resources to help you fasten the process.

How to improve keyword ranking

How to keywords rank fast