SEO clients are usually interested in knowing what timescale they are looking at: is it going to take a couple of weeks, months or years to get their web property to the most prominent positions in Google?
Search engine optimization clients are usually interested in knowing what timescale they are looking at when they decide to pay for improving their search engine rankings. Is it going to take a couple of weeks, months or years to get their web property to the most prominent positions in Google or Bing? Is this a one-off task whose results last forever or you need to get ready for a sustained effort in order to remain well-ranked? These are important questions not just because they indicate how long owners need to wait for more traffic and, in consequence, business, but also because they have an impact on SEO budgets. Answers depend on a number of factors.
1. How saturated is your target market
Search engines operate by returning the most relevant information in response to keyword queries. You will certainly need much more patience if you are interested in ranking high for competitive, general phrases in industries that have a solid presence in the cyberspace (10 million competitive pages +). Two examples would be software development or web design. If you start from scratch, you might be looking at anything between 1-5 years of consistent SEO strategy and website expansion to see yourself in top 10. It can be considerably less (about 1 year) if your site has been around for some time and you only introduce improvements. For medium-interest keywords, where engines return less than a few million competitive pages, waiting times are shorter, but you still may need 2-4 months for a new website, about 1 month for an older property. With local search engine optimization and niche keywords (very rare) you can see results even faster.
2. How old is your domain name
Younger addresses face a much steeper climb to the top than those which have been around for some time, building connections, amassing inbound links, improving internal architecture and otherwise opening up to Google indexing. Just getting indexed (noticed) by the largest search engine can take about a month and requires you to submit the xml sitemap of your new property. Getting ranked consistently is another couple of months for a new domain as you need time to build relevance, support and trust on the web. Established addresses can stage an SEO turnaround much faster – in extreme cases overnight, but typically in about a month. Climbing to the top ten requires more patience.
3. How SEO ready is your site
Internal architecture of your website matters when it comes to ranking. If it does not sent the right kind of signals to Google bots, with internal linking, navigation, regularly updated content and other amendments, search engines are likely to overlook its assets. This might mean extra work on adjusting your content management system and other components critical for SEO. It takes time.
4. Search engines reward patience and authenticity
more time = broader basis / more trust / firmly established reputation on the web
Search engine rankings are calculated on a broad basis which is supposed to reflect your website's reputation in the Internet ecosystem. The key indicator of this trust is the number and quality of links that lead to your site; they are like votes in an ongoing election for the best candidate to a top search result for a particular keyword combination. Google, Yahoo or Bing ensure in their algorithms and regulations that there is no unfair leapfrogging in this contest (for example by buying links, copying content or spamming). Those who go up too quickly thanks to resorting to such sneaky practices can be penalized for mass optimizing by demoting to lower positions or being banned from the index for some time.