How long does SEO take to work?

Every website owner’s dream is to make a new site and get visitors flooding in from organic searches. Yet, this scenario is far from being even remotely realistic. To the extent that without SEO, visitors may not ever come up.

How long does SEO take to work? On average, it takes at least six months for a page to rank high in search engine result pages (SERPs). In the past, SEO could take your page ranking first in less than two months. But today, competition and more complex technologies make getting on top pretty hard.

The current situation may seem astounding, even unfair. But in reality, when you combine all the reasons why SEO takes this much time, it makes perfect sense. Why does SEO take so long to be effective? Let’s find out why the current system could not be otherwise!

Why Does SEO Take So Long? Here Are 5 Reasons

1 – Building Domain Authority

One of the primary things that determine the time it takes to see SEO results is whether or not the SEO team is working on a new or an old domain.

Given that the domain hasn’t yet established any domain authority or earned any backlinks, a new domain will nearly always take longer to achieve success than an established one. An established domain, on the other hand, will almost always have some domain authority and some backlinks leading to it.

Therefore, rather than 6 months or more, a brand new domain could anticipate seeing benefits in 9 months or more.

2- Website history

Although in the first point we mentioned that an established domain’s SEO results take less time to appear than a new one, however, if this established domain has already been subjected to a penalty, a core algorithm upgrade, or an SEO activity that violates Google’s webmaster rules, you won’t notice the SEO efforts immediate results.

Instead, on a site that has lost exposure, a new SEO strategy will likely take longer than 12 months to achieve returns comparable to past performance.

3- Competition

The SEO industry is quite competitive these days. Over a billion websites competing for dominance. So, how long does SEO take to work when there are hundreds of other competitors attempting to do the same thing?

Well, it is debatable. For instance, in low-competition niches and search queries, results appear much faster than in competitive ones, due to low “keyword difficulty”.

Furthermore, identifying the keyword difficulty is only one aspect of competitiveness; there are many other things that your competitors may do to succeed. That is why analyzing your competitors, what they do, and how they do it can undoubtedly help you comprehend the gap and provide you with a starting point.

A solid SEO strategy would find a balance between targeting keywords with high search volumes but not so much competition that they are impossible to rank for. It will also contain a keyword gap analysis and a backlink gap analysis to see where you stand among competitors and what SEO actions are required to see real results.

4 – New Technologies

Rather than only providing users with the right content for their search queries, search engines recently prioritize the user experience (UX). That is, the more you integrate new and more user-friendly technologies into your website, making the users’ experience smoother and more enjoyable, the more search engines will recognize you.

However, adopting new technology on your website takes longer to be recognized and ranked. Why?

Because search engines, such as Google, must continually adapt to shifting trends and technologies. As a result, they go through multiple revisions before recalculating and selecting their new ranks. As soon as you introduce a new piece of technology, the same thing happens on every site.
SEO experts call the aftermath of any Google update “the Google Dance”, as Google tries to figure out where to place your web page in its index.

5- Relevant Valuable Content

To rank a page, search engines used to track how many times a desired keyword appeared on it. For the record, this is why the term “keyword” is still in use today. Most website owners, on the other hand, took advantage of this sorting process by filling their pages with only one keyword or variation (keyword stuffing). As a result, search engines have adjusted their techniques and are now penalizing sites that provide no valuable content.

These days, you need to have relevant valuable content to rank first. What does relevant valuable content mean?

• Containing related images, videos, or other multimedia content types
• Having a well-structured, cleanly coded web page
• Providing insightful knowledge about a topic
• Referencing to reputable, helpful sources
• Writing 100% original text that does not infringe any copyrighted material

However, to be able to create the right content, targeting the right keywords, trends, and user personas, you’ll need a long-term content marketing plan. You’ll also need continual high-quality content development in order for the search engines to validate it and rank it first.

Contact us now, and hire The SEO company in Jordan.

Photo by Myriam Jessier on Unsplash