Why Does SEO Take So Long To Show Results?

We all know the importance of SEO for a business to be successful, but what if you’ve implemented all the right strategies and approach and yet, days tick by with only little improvement? This leaves you with a lot of questions like are you taking the right SEO approach? Is there a problem with the site? What went wrong?

The truth is, SEO is a long term strategy, not a recipe for overnight results. See it as sowing a seed, and caring for it till the tree grows and bears fruits. It’s a long journey, but for the long term it will cost less than buying fruits directly off the shelf, and the amount of fruits you can get is limitless.

Needing to put in work for weeks or months before seeing your intended results is normal in SEO. This would also include the need for implementing improvement and optimization based on the ongoing data of your website along the way. This is where the saying SEO is a marathon, not a sprint comes from.

How Long Does SEO Usually Take?

According to Maile Ohye from Google, 

“In most cases, SEOs need four months to a year to help your business first implement improvements and then see potential benefit.”

However, there are no hard rules to this. It usually takes around 4 to 6 months before you start seeing results depending on the strategy and how strong your competitors are. Yours can be on the shorter side if you have an optimized website in terms of technical aspects with strong backlinks pointing to your site, and longer if there are many fixes that need to be implemented and backlinks to be built.

Why Does SEO Take So Long?

There are many factors involved in SEO, and the nature of SEO itself causes it to take a longer time before you can see the intended results. Different from other digital marketing like paid advertising which gives you instantaneous results, SEO might take a longer time in improving your website traffic and visibility. 

Generally, you will also need to put in more effort for SEO compared to other digital marketing methods as you will work on elements both on and off the website. This causes you to need more time to properly implement those optimizations.

5 Reasons Why SEO Take Longer Time To Work

Here are some breakdown on the reasons why SEO need a longer time to work:

1. Search Engines is Complex and always changing

Imagine a giant library with billions of books, each categorized and its content indexed. That’s essentially how search engines like Google function. There are no exact numbers but the estimated amount of indexed website pages by Google goes up to 60 billion pages in June 2024.

This huge amount of website crawled and indexed requires Google to constantly update their algorithm to improve efficiencies and provide the best search results to the users. This constantly changing algorithm means there is no magic formula to get your website ranked on top overnight, or at least if you’re using the right and ethical way.

An ongoing optimization is needed to ensure your website aligns with the latest search engine algorithm and guidelines, and ongoing research is needed to align your business goal with the trend of your target audience. 

2. Crawling, Indexing, and Building Authority Takes Time

With the amount of available websites and pages, it will take some time for search engines to crawl, understand, and index your site. Even so, Google will still have to screen through sites to decide which passed the requirement to be indexed, and you have to take into account that some sites aren’t crawlable automatically due to technical issues such as orphan pages or nonexistent sitemaps. 

Once your website is indexed though, is where the real work begins. Search engines will need to analyze your content, correlate its relevance to the users searches, and assess your website authority. Factors like high quality content, backlinks from reputable websites, and positive user experience all will contribute to building your website authority.

3. Tough Industry Competitors 

The search engine is like a huge, bustling marketplace. The more established businesses with a strong online presence occupy the entrance – the first search result page – where the crowd gathers. 

If you’re entering a highly competitive industry, it will take more effort to grab the attention of search engines and convince them that you are on the same level as those established businesses with high website authority.

With a well thought SEO strategy and consistent effort in creating content, you can gradually build your website authority and be on the same level as those businesses, or even greater. 

4. Need to Consistently Publish High Quality Content

Just creating a website with a lot of content is not enough. To truly succeed in SEO, you will need to consistently publish high quality content that caters to your audience’s needs. Think of informative blog posts, helpful guides and engaging content that addresses the users needs and provide real value. 

This is in line with the latest Google ranking requirement where they focus on the E-A-T ( Expertiness, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness ) aspect of the content. Consistently publishing high quality content over a period of time improves your website trust and credibility with search engines and users alike.

5. Technical Issues Fixes

Technical issues, even the minor one, might affect your website SEO efforts. This includes slow loading times, broken internal links, or issues with site responsiveness. Search engines prioritizes websites that can offer a smooth user experience, so rectifying those issues is crucial to ensure your effort was not in vain.

Identifying and fixing these issues, however, might be time consuming especially on huge websites or those with improper early stage development. Creating a good website if you haven’t done so, especially with emphasis on the UI UX, is crucial to ensure your website is able to be better optimized for any SEO efforts in the future. 

How Can I Get SEO Results Faster?

There are many ways to achieve results faster in SEO. Some of them are:

1. Focus on Low Competition Keywords

Low competitions keywords are where there are less strong and hard to beat competitors. These keywords are usually long tail keywords with less volume than short tail, but those keywords are where you can rank much easier than trying to wrestle the top spot out of established top rankers. 

Remember, focusing and achieving a high spot in lower volume and lower competition keywords gets you better results than putting all your focus solely on high volume high competition keywords right out of the gate, and struggling to achieve any.

2. Refresh Old Content

Notice some of your highly ranked content from before now are starting to lose their juice and slowly reducing their contribution to your website? You don’t have to delete those, but a content refresh might help.

Being able to rank before shows that the content is high quality, and the reasons it went down might be because the data in it was old or it’s no longer relevant with current situations. Updating those with fresher and more relevant data might be the nudge it needs to bump it back into the glory it was in before.

3. Proper Internal Linkage

Internal linkage isn’t only about helping search engine crawlers and users to navigate your site, it also helps improve and hasten up your SEO effort for quicker results. This is because they pass around the power from a high performing page on your site to a weaker performing page, boosting the strength of all of your pages.

This power, which is called link juice, is passed through links in your page such as hyperlink and anchor text. It acts exactly like how backlinks works, except it’s implemented on your domain for your domain. 

You can see link juice as water being poured on the topmost of the glass pyramid. As it overflows, it fills all the glasses a layer directly beneath it equally. This cycle continues until the juices run dry.

4. Keep Technical Issues at Its Lowest.

It’s understandable that your site might have some technical issues here and there, but keeping it all at bay might save you some extra effort and time. Fixing technical issues are some of the early steps in SEO, as it will affect the search engine crawler accessibility to your site. Issues like broken internal links, improper page redirections, missing H1 and H2 tags might hinder those crawlers from being able to fully access and understand the content of your site.

Keeping the technical aspects in good condition might not only give you a head start on your SEO efforts, it also will save you from an unnecessary headache a few years down the road. This would also save you from the possibilities of angry users bouncing off your website from frustration.

5. Get an SEO Specialist or Agency Help

SEO specialists are people who specialize in optimizing websites, catering them to align with criteria set by search engines in their ranking factors. They are technically an expert in doing the necessary research and optimization in getting your site ranked. An agency is where SEO specialists typically work in a team.

Hiring an SEO specialist might save you the time, headache and cost in the long run compared to trying and figuring it all out by yourself. Trying SEO by yourself leaves you at the risk of straying into the wrong path, like accidentally implementing blackhat SEO technique and causing your website to be penalized by Google.  

FAQ

1. What should I monitor for my SEO?

There are a few pieces of data you should track to gauge the success of your SEO campaign:

1. Traffics gained from search engine

Traffic increase is one of the aims of doing SEO. Tracking the traffic gain from the search engine is vital To know the success of your SEO campaign.

2. Performance of each keywords

One other key performance index for SEO is the performance of keywords. Keep track of the ranking of each keyword you’ve integrated into your campaign to gauge its success.

3. Users satisfaction

While user satisfaction is usually subjective for you to track accurately, you can get a hint of this through the bounce rate of your website. A lower bounce rate means the users would stay longer and interact with your website instead of leaving as soon as they entered.

2. How Can I Monitor My SEO Performance?

There are many tools and data you can use to track your SEO performance. 

1. Google Search Console : Used to track organic traffic and impressions from search engines
2. Google analytics : Used to track numbers of traffic and users from all sources
3. SERanking : Can be used to track individual keywords

3. What is the timeline for an SEO campaign?

The timeline for each campaign differs by the manager and agency. At Brandswift, our timeline are as follows:

1st month : 

• Discussion on content requirements
• Information gathering
• Keyword research

2nd month onwards : 

• SEO audit
• SEO implementation ( onpage, technical and offpage optimization )
• Website health check
• UI/UX improvement

Conclusion

SEO is a long term and continuous effort, but the rewards are worth the wait. With patience and the right strategy, you can get your site ranked among the top in the search result. This boost in online presence will help with your conversion rate and the brand trustworthiness for your business in the long run. Ready to improve your business’s online presence with SEO? There’s plenty of information available on our blog to help you get more in depth with SEO, and also some general guide on improving your website for users. The effort may be long and continuous, but the benefits make it a worthwhile investment for your business to thrive in this digital age.