How long should you expect SEO to take?

Anyone paying for SEO wants to know when it will show. There is no single answer, and Google does not offer one. What it does publish is a set of timeframes for the separate steps a change has to pass through. Put together, they explain why the honest answer is a range.

What Google says about the wait

Google’s SEO starter guide has a section headed “How long until I see impact in search results?” Its answer is that every change takes some time to be reflected, that some changes might take effect in a few hours and others could take several months, and that in general you will want to wait a few weeks before assessing whether the work helped.

That is a wide range, and Google gives no narrower one for SEO as a whole. It does give figures for individual steps.

• A new page or site being picked up. Search Console’s help says it can take a week or so for Google to start crawling and indexing a new page or site.
• A changed page being read again. Google says crawling can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. Asking more than once for the same page does not make it faster, and a request does not guarantee the page will appear in results.
• A move to new page addresses. For a medium-sized website, Google says it can take a few weeks or more for the new addresses to start showing, and that visibility may fluctuate during the move.
• Recovery after a ranking update. Google says some improvements take effect in a few days and others could take several months. If a few months pass with no effect, that could mean waiting until the next core update.
• Speed improvements. The speed figures Google collects from real visitors cover the previous 28 days, so a fix made today takes about four weeks to show in full.

Two waits, one after the other

These figures describe two different things, and they are easy to confuse. The first wait is for Google to notice: to crawl the page again and update what it has stored. That is the part measured in days and weeks, and you can watch it happen in Search Console.

The second wait is for the change to make a difference to where the page appears. Google says relevance is worked out from hundreds of factors, and it does not guarantee that any page will be crawled, indexed or shown. A corrected title can change how a result looks soon after the page is read again. A new set of service pages has to earn its place against pages that are already there, and that is the part that can run to months.

What makes it faster or slower

Google does not publish a formula, so what follows is reasoning from how it describes the process.

• What was wrong. If the site was blocking Google by mistake, removing the block is one change and its effect is direct. If nothing was broken and the pages need to become more useful than the ones above them, there is more to do and more to wait for.
• How new the site is. Google finds pages mainly through links from pages it already knows. A new domain with nothing pointing at it starts with less for Google to go on.
• Who else wants the same searches. A search for a trade in a small town and a search for a lawyer in the Melbourne CBD are different contests.
• How quickly changes get made. Advice that sits in a report for three months has not started its wait yet.

What you should be able to see along the way

A long wait is easier to accept when there is something to check at each stage. Search Console is free and shows most of it.

1. Within days to a few weeks of a fix: the Page indexing report shows the page as indexed, or the error against it clears.
2. Next: impressions in the Performance report. This is the number of times the site appeared in results, and it has to move before clicks can.
3. Then: average position and clicks for the searches you care about.
4. Last: enquiries and sales, measured in your own records.

If the first two have not moved after a reasonable time, that is worth a conversation with whoever is doing the work. Ask what was changed and when, and look for it in the reports. Google’s guidance on hiring an SEO suggests asking at the start what results they expect, in what timeframe, and how they measure success.

Be careful with a promised date

Google states that no one can guarantee a number one ranking, and tells businesses to be wary of anyone who claims to. A guaranteed date deserves the same caution, since Google itself only offers ranges. A provider can commit to the work they will do each month and to showing you what changed. They cannot commit Google to anything.

Where to start

The fixes with the most direct effect are the faults that stop Google reading the site. Our free website health check looks for several of those on any page in a few seconds. For the speed side, see Core Web Vitals, explained. Ongoing work, with search performance monitoring and reporting, is described on our SEO page.