Skip to content

How long does SEO take and will you see the results?

You have a website, you enter keywords in the Google search engine that contain products or services offered by your company, hit enter and… BIG NOTHING – you don’t find your website in the search engine results, and what’s worse, your competition appears. Hmm… what next?

Two ways to show your products or services in Google search results

Google Ads – immediate and clearly visible effect, but displayed only during the promotional campaign,
– SEO – an effect that you have to wait for, but the obtained results are longer than the duration of a standard Google Ads promotional campaign. In the long run, it is the cheapest method of acquiring customers from the search engine.

How long does SEO take – can I check the waiting time?

Yes and no. Paraphrase-Online.com, a group of SEO experts providing data from the Google world, analyzed search engine traffic on the basis of 23 most important industries and over 250,000 key phrases. The results of the analysis are presented in a simple table. However, although the report deals with specific numbers, it all depends on individual calculations and many variables.

What are the general conclusions of the Paraphrase-Online.com report?

No surprises, the main principle of SEO, mentioned above, has been confirmed: you have to wait for traffic from the search engine! In order for the product to be visible, it must be worked on.

Fun fact: The main problem of SEO agencies is explaining to customers who expect organic results that SEO is a process, not an immediate action.

How long does SEO take?

Various analyzes can be found on the web, depending on the industry, website, selected keywords, competition, etc. And why is this happening? Imagine you are offering a “Miami Car Service” service. What if you still offer the same service in New York. Will the customer entering the phrase “car service + given town” see your website in the same position in the search engine? No.

On the basis of numerous campaigns carried out by Paraphrase-Online.com, we join the claim that in order to position the keyword we need a minimum of:
2-3 months for less popular phrases,
4-8 months for moderately popular phrases,
over 9 months for very popular phrases.

How is the positioning process shaped depending on the industry?

The shortest time for the effects, i.e. entering the TOP10, is in the Business and Law and Politics categories – just over 2 months, and the longest in the Style & Fashion category – it takes over 5 months for the result to appear in the top 10. The average for all categories is 105 days.

It is also worth paying attention to the Career or Hobby category. Both, despite the fact that you had to wait over 4 months for the effects, the positions obtained remain in the TOP10 for about 2.5 years!

Important: Our results show us arithmetic means for given categories, which were calculated on the basis of several thousand keywords. If we look at the deviation column, we will see that in all categories, positioned sites wait much longer or much shorter for effects than the third column shows.

Let’s also look at the Sports category. The average transition from TOP50 to TOP10 of search results takes a minimum time of about 3 months, however, the high value of the standard deviation – 566 days indicates that these differences between individual phrases may differ radically from each other.

Table showing the number of days in TOP10
Table: Prepared by the Paraphrase-Online.com Team

What affects standard deviations?

The waiting time for the effects of positioning may be shortened or extended by several factors which, depending on the category of the website being positioned, are more or less important. How long seo lasts consists of, among others:

– the number and position of competition,
– industry in which the company operates,
– modernity of the website – in terms of technical and content optimization,
– having good-quality content,
– changes in the Google algorithm,
– knowledge and experience of SEO specialists,
– budget,
– speed of introducing optimization changes.

How can we accelerate the appearance of positioning results?

The basic activity that must be performed before positioning an existing website is an SEO audit. On its basis, detected errors can be eliminated and the indicated shortcomings can be filled.

What is important for a properly conducted phrase positioning process:

– qualified and experienced positioners, constantly improving their qualifications and being up to date with introduced changes in algorithms,
– technical optimization of the website,
– the quality of the content and its uniqueness,
– elimination of indexing errors,
– adapting the website code to the requirements of search engines,
– internal linking,
– proper selection of keywords,
– valuable links coming from external websites,
– getting to know the target market and direct competition,
– an appropriate budget for the implementation of SEO activities,
– patience.

Published inGoogle AdsParaphrasingPositioningPositioning of websitesRephrase ToolWebsite Positioning