SEO is a marathon, not a sprint. Instead of obsessing over short-term results, you need to look at it as an investment that will pay off for years to come.
That said, the first few months of an SEO strategy are critical to creating a solid foundation that you can layer on over time. Let's take a look at how long SEO results take to achieve and what the key moments in an SEO timeline are.
In general, most brands start to see significant results in organic traffic and lead generation about 6-12 months after optimizing a website for SEO. This is only a guideline. In reality, it depends on many factors including:
Take note of these tips to speed up the process as much as possible:
The first 6 months of a new campaign are essential to see results from your SEO strategy.
In the first month of an SEO campaign, you should focus on research and discovery. The goal will be to better understand your target audience's pain points, your company's unique selling proposition within your industry, and your competitors' SEO strengths and weaknesses.
There are two major tasks that should be performed during this first month:
Now, you can start with optimizing your website and content. These are the main tasks for the second month:
In month 3, focus mainly on restructuring the content on your website to maximize its potential. For example, you can create pillar pages and topic clusters or merge several articles into one to avoid keywords competing with each other.
The other major task of the month should be to start link building campaigns, establishing relationships with quality sites in your sector and collaboration opportunities, for example, through guest posting.
Now, you should start producing and publishing high-quality content related to the keywords you want to position for. Your content must meet these objectives:
In addition, you should also focus on identifying and fixing any broken links so that your authority isn't affected.
At this point, your new or optimized content will start to be detected by Google and inbound links will pass more and more authority to your domain.
The main tasks for the month will be the following:
You may already be starting to see results from your SEO campaign, but remember that each case is different and it may still take several months.
From month 6 onwards, since the initial work is already done, focus on creating a continuous cycle of content planning and production, on-page optimization, and link building. By repeating these tasks, you will be consistently updating your SEO strategy.
Since it is likely that you will already have a significant amount of traffic, you can also start to consider launching A/B tests to further improve the user experience on your site.