How long does it take to see results from content and SEO?

If you’re investing in (or considering investing in) content marketing and SEO, one of the first questions you’ll ask us is, “how long until I can expect to see results?”. We’ll always be honest in our response and never make promises to you that we can’t fulfil. So, the answer is that SEO is a long-term strategy that requires consistent effort, but the payoff can see your online presence and overall digital performance significantly improve.

With SEO, we are often at the behest of search engines and their algorithms, but in this blog, we’ll explain what you can typically expect from your strategy and some advice on how to speed up the process and see meaningful results.

What is the average timeline for seeing SEO results?

Firstly, it’s important to understand that there are not often quick-wins in SEO. Set your expectations early to avoid disappointment and keep in mind that your efforts will be a long-term strategy.

Here’s a rough guide to the timelines we typically see when working with clients on their SEO:

• Early success – within the first couple of months of making concerted efforts to improve and optimise your content, you may see minor changes such as increased impressions or clicks as quickly as within 1-2 months. Keep going! Last year, we began working with a client that had previously not optimised their web pages or published regular blogs for their audience. We audited their site, providing keyword and competitor analysis and provided them with a content strategy. This investment quickly paid off and we saw their new blogs swiftly becoming their highest viewed pages within weeks of starting the project.
• Medium-term gains – with consistent efforts, you may begin to see a noticeable growth in traffic and page rankings within as little as 3-6 months. Just this week, we spoke with a client who had taken our advice to improve their product pages. Their category pages featured no header or footer content, giving search engines very little to go on when deciding what the page should rank for.They began a process of slowly working through each category page, adding as little as 200-300 descriptive words, explaining what the page was for. They quickly saw those pages become the highest performing on the site, and subsequently instructed us to work on updating all of their product and category pages.
• Long-term success – we expect our clients to see sustained increases in their organic traffic and conversions after 6-12 months of consistent investment in high quality content and SEO efforts. We work with several clients who have seen significant success from investing in regular blogs, case studies, landing pages, and link-building efforts. In this digital age, our advice is to build a marketing budget that reflects the essential need for SEO and content as an ongoing strategy for success.When considering the timelines you can expect for seeing results from your SEO investment, it’s worth keeping in mind that results can vary depending on your industry, competition, and the consistency of your efforts.

Factors that impact SEO performance timelines

If you’ve read our previous blogs (Form vs. Function, High-Quality Content, 5 Tips for a Successful Content Strategy ), you’ll know that there can be many influencing factors in the rankings of your website in search engine results. Here’s a summary of the most pertinent factors below:

• Website authority – your website authority can depend heavily on its age. Typically, older websites have had more time to establish authority, and newer websites can take longer to gain traction as they build their reputation online. We often find that clients launching new websites will see an initial drop in their authority as they wait patiently to be crawled and indexed. This is nothing to worry about, and there are other tactics we can employ – such as Google Ads – to help boost your visibility in the meantime.
• Competition – the saturation of the market you are in will have an impact on your ranking. Typically, the higher the competition, the more time it will take to outrank your competitors. Take a new consumer lighting seller for example – their competition will be the likes of B&Q, Dunelm, M&S, Next, etc. As you can imagine, these sites have huge success online, and smaller, newer businesses will struggle to match their efforts and authority scores. Our advice? Find your niche.
• Content quality – the quality of your content will have a huge impact on your site’s performance. Begin with an in-depth strategy and a strong understanding of your keyword research and search engine algorithms will be your best friend here. Read our blog on understanding Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines to help you.
• Technical SEO – search engine optimisation is not influenced solely by frontend content. Technical SEO addresses elements such as page speed, broken links, site structure, security and device optimisation. All of these factors can hinder your progress, so it’s important to have a good understanding of what could be getting in the way of your content efforts before you begin. We can help you with a comprehensive audit and ongoing support to fix any issues. Get in touch if this is something you want to discuss.
• Consistency – we can’t stress this one enough! Regularly updating your website with fresh, relevant, and helpful content can really speed up your results.

Why does SEO take time (when you want to see instant results!)

As we’ve discussed in earlier sections of this blog, SEO is really a modern-day science of the search engine algorithms. The complex way that they assess your site and its content to identify an appropriate ranking that serves its users and provides valuable and helpful information to the audience includes:

• Crawling and indexing your content – it can often take weeks for Google to fully understand and rank your new pages (and even then, it’s not guaranteed). Help it out and tick off as many of their guidelines as you can.
• Evaluate engagement – Google will use a number of factors to evaluate engagement levels on your website. The more people engage with your content, the more likely Google is to deem it relevant and helpful. Key metrics such as click-through rates and time spent on a page will help to determine the relevance of your content.
• Competitor comparisons – the online world is a competitive landscape where users have access to information at their fingertips. We often find ourselves explaining to clients that if it was just a bricks and mortar store, a visitor might only consider what you’re offering, however, the digital landscape lets users quickly and easily compare your products and services to a competitor’s. This competition can mean that it takes time to build your website’s authority score.

It’s important to remember that unlike tactics such as Google Ads, SEO is an organic process. However, the good news is that the benefits are long-lasting. Once you’ve established yourself as an expert in your field, you will continue to build on that authority and reap the benefits.

How to accelerate SEO and content results

Although we want to constantly reiterate that SEO is an organic process that doesn’t often have quick-wins, there are some strategies you can use to speed things up:

• Optimise for low-competition keywords – start with keywords that have a lower search volume and keyword difficulty.
• Focus on high-quality content – create in-depth, engaging content that answers your audience’s questions. Start with FAQs and People Also Asked.
• Build backlinks – secure links from credible, industry-relevant websites.
• Improve technical SEO – make sure your pages load quickly, you have a mobile-friendly design, and you have an informed site structure.
• Use analytics – refine your strategy by monitoring what works and most importantly, what doesn’t.

We can’t guarantee instant results, but our extensive experience tells us that if you start with these tips, you’ll be heading in the right direction!

What are the long-term benefits of SEO?

If you’ve made it this far, we know you understand the importance of a strong SEO and content strategy. SEO is one of the most important investments you can make in your website because the impact will continue to grow over time. We often liken our clients who do not invest in a marketing strategy to promote their websites as a shop that has opened with no signage and just assumes the customers will arrive on their own.

We understand that launching a website can be a costly investment, but it’s really just the start of the process of succeeding online. Through the implementation of an SEO strategy, you can:

• Increase visibility – higher rankings in search engines will get you more organic traffic.
• Credibility – appearing at the top of search results will build trust with your audience, not to mention give you a step-up on your competitors.
• Cost-effective growth – unlike paid tactics such as Google Ads, you won’t pay each time your content goes up the rankings of search engines. You can make incremental changes to your website over time and with the right implementation, you’ll continue to reap the rewards without ongoing ad spend. (However, we often advise a combination of PPC and SEO for best results, if it’s right for you.)

How to get started with SEO & Content

We spend much of our time helping our clients to understand the best strategies to achieve their objectives. Our proven process for SEO and content looks like this:

1. Comprehensive audit – keyword research, competitor analysis, content review and optimisation.
2. Content strategy – a detailed guide to your next 12 months of publishing SEO-focused content.
3. Monthly implementation – a monthly retainer to suit your budget and objectives. We’ll take the results of stage one and two, and we’ll create engaging, SEO-focused content to drive organic traffic to your website.
4. Reporting – we’ll regularly update you on the progress and success of your investment. We firmly believe that when you succeed, we succeed, so we’ll work to constantly refine your strategy for success.