How long does it take to see results when it comes to SEO? This is a question that every search marketer will be asked early on in their career.
Unfortunately, the answer to this question is unsatisfactory at best. Nobody knows for sure.
In my own experience with seowriter.co.nz however, it takes about three months for a brand new website to start seeing results from SEO.
Jump to the 6-month results for seowriter.co.nz.
2020 Update:
Jump to the 12-month results for seowriter.co.nz.
SEO results take time
One thing is agreed on, and that is the fact that SEO is a long game. As you can imagine, it takes Google’s spiders a decent amount of time to crawl the internet. Even lodging a manual crawl request in Google Search Console “can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks”.
Most SEOs would tell you to expect results over months, depending on your industry and niche. Of course the results will also depend on what areas of SEO you are focussing on, how old your site is, and a good many other SEO factors.
Six months of SEO results from seowriter.co.nz
Saying ‘nobody knows exactly’ doesn’t help much though does it? So to provide some sort of tangible answer, I’ll show you the first six months of results from my own website seowriter.co.nz.
Why my own website? Well, it’s one of the few websites I’ve had complete control over from the very beginning. When I work on clients’ websites, they’re often a few years old already. I don’t always know what they’ve done in the past, and I don’t always know what other marketing efforts are taking place at the same time. These factors, among others, cloud the data when looking at results.
Using my own website as an example was the purest way I could demonstrate the value of SEO.
While these results will be highly specific to my own website, industry, abilities, and location, it still provides a good example of what SEO results you can expect in your first 6 months after building a website. This assumes of course, that best practice SEO is being applied from the get go.
Three things to keep in mind when viewing these SEO results:
- SEO-related keywords are some of the most competitive, as you are competing with other SEO experts on their own turf. Your own niche may very well be capable of faster results.
- I was adding new content to the site at a rate of at least one page/month. Being able to generate good regular content on your site is a huge part of SEO, especially for a brand new website.
- No other marketing was taking place during this time period. For those looking to move a bit faster, PPC, social media, and other forms of marketing can all help to boost website visibility (provided you have the budget for it).
We’ll start by looking at impressions over time.
What is an impression?
An impression is counted when someone views a Google search page featuring your website. They don’t have to click it, and Google can’t tell if the user actually read it. No matter which page of results it shows up on, if someone loads a Google search results page with your website on it, it counts as an impression.
Impressions are a great way to measure the overall visibility of your website in Google search results. The more times your domain shows up in results, the higher your chances of a potential customer clicking through to your website. It’s also a good metric to monitor SEO performance for a brand new website. At these early stages, it’s likely the only metric that will change noticeably in the first six months.
Six months of impressions for seowriter.co.nz
This graph shows the number of impressions seowriter.co.nz received in Google search results six months after establishing the site. There are two interesting pieces of information to take away from this graph.
1. It took about three months for the domain to start getting daily impressions.
This is a good indication of how long it can take for Google to notice a brand new website, and determine where to place it in search rankings.
2. Once it got started, impressions quickly started to ramp up.
This is a good example of how Google can change the rank of a webpage over shorter periods of time.
How impressions work with rankings
The impressions your website receives are closely monitored. If someone clicks on your website, Google will take notice of what they do next. If that person were to close your website straight away, Google may interpret that as a negative signal. You haven’t answered the search query for this user, and so Google may lower your rank for that keyword.
If a user sees your website in the search results, clicks your link, and then stays browsing your website for a long time, Google will likely see that as an extremely positive signal. Therefore, the more impressions you get, the more data Google has to work with when ranking your website.
This may mean that in markets bigger than New Zealand, Google likely has more data available, and may shift your website faster as a result. Well implemented SEO on a website with great content can cause your traffic to snowball.
Six months of clicks through to seowriter.co.nz
Now impressions are one thing, but clicks are what count. What’s the point of showing up in search results if nobody clicks through to your website?
Increasing organic traffic is the whole point of SEO.
The reason I started with impressions is because that is the metric that you’ll notice improving first. Clicks are much harder to get, and take much longer to improve on as a result. That being said, here’s the last six months of clicks through to seowriter.co.nz overlaid with the impressions.
As you can see, clicks are still a work in progress… but they are in progress. It’s hard to pull any meaningful insights from the small amount of data here, but it seems to me that the frequency of clicks is increasing over time.
The more impressions I get daily, the higher the chances of a click that day. The more clicks I get, the more data Google has to determine where to rank my website. The idea is to create a positive feedback loop between my website, and Google’s algorithm.
Definitely something to watch over the next six months.
Update: 12 months of impressions for seowriter.co.nz
Aside from Google Search Console changing the colour of impressions from turquoise to purple, the last six months have also seen an increase of impressions for seowriter.co.nz.
The trajectory of Google Search impressions is clear. While the COVID-19 pandemic seems to have slowed this upwards trend, the average level of impressions is still much higher than it was six months ago.
As I stated earlier on when I first published this post, there are three things to keep in mind when looking at these results:
- SEO-related keywords are some of the most competitive, as you are competing with other SEO experts on their own turf. Your own niche may very well be capable of faster results.
- I continued adding new content to the site at a rate of at least one page/month. Being able to generate good regular content on your site is a huge part of SEO, especially for a brand new website.
- No other marketing was taking place during this time period. For those looking to move a bit faster, PPC, social media, and other forms of marketing can all help to boost website visibility (provided you have the budget for it).
12 months of clicks through to seowriter.co.nz
Six months ago I hypothesised that the frequency of clicks through to seowriter.co.nz was increasing. This is much easier to see in the 12 months of data we see here. I now average at least one click through from Google Search results every day. It may not sound like a lot but remember, there’s no other marketing going on.
So what are people clicking on in search results to come to my website? I’ll go into more detail in a future post about Google rankings, but for now, I’ll just post some statistics to give you an idea.
Twelve months of SEO results from seowriter.co.nz
One year after my website went live:
- It ranks #1 in New Zealand for three brand-related terms (eg. seo writer auckland).
- It ranks on page one of Google Search results for 10 different keywords.
- My blog on ‘What is SEO? The Three Pillars of Search Marketing’ has generated about half of my total Google Search traffic.
SEO must be implemented from the beginning
While the SEO results for seowriter.co.nz are very individual, I still believe that it is a good example of what to expect with a brand new website. You can bet that if zero SEO was applied to the site, the data lines for impressions and clicks would remain flat.
If anything, I hope this article has displayed the importance of implementing SEO on a brand new website. Don’t wait until the website is ‘ready’, or until you need a boost in traffic. SEO should begin before you even purchase the domain.
Got a website that needs more traffic? Thinking about building a new one?