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How long does SEO take to work?

 

Earlier this week I got an email from Neil Patel,  who is without doubt one of the foremost authorities on digital media worldwide. And it answered a question that was on my mind right at that moment I received the mail. So, if you're wondering how long your SEO efforts will take to bear fruit, here is Neil's answer verbatim:

"With SEO a lot of people look at rankings. And ranking number one for a keyword really depends on a lot of factors. And it is much harder to control. But in general, if you are spending time and money on SEO you should see your traffic go up. At least your organic traffic, right? Well, you should. Let’s look at the data to see how long SEO really takes to see results.

We currently track over 100 million domains from an SEO perspective. Of those 100 million domains, a bit more than 1 million have given us direct access to their analytics. Of those 1 million sites, we know through our software that 42,391 are actively focusing on their SEO. And when I say actively focusing on their SEO, I mean they are continually pushing out new content on a monthly basis, focusing on optimising their code, growing their backlink count, optimising their load, etc. In other words, they are putting in energy to get more organic search traffic. So, let’s look at what happened to their traffic:

  • In the first 6 months, they saw an increase in organic search traffic by 11.4%.
  • In the second 6 months, they saw an increase of 9.58% over the first 6 months.
  • And in the second year, they saw an increase of 49.4% on average over the 1st year.
  • In year 3 they saw an increase of 30.7% over year 2.
  • And in year 4 they saw additional growth of 13.5% over year 3.

These results would indicate that SEO is a long term marketing activity that really bears fruit if you stick at it. The big increases in search traffic only really come in year two and beyond. However, if you persevere and get to the top of the rankings it is far easier and cheaper to maintain this ranking than it was to achieve it. On that basis alone SEO is well worth the time and effort needed to get to the top of the rankings."