The honest answer to this is: it depends.
Firstly, what you do you mean by SEO, are you talking about building links, optimising the content, changing the absolute positioning of on page content, social media content, article writing, blogging (the list goes on).
It also depends on a number of other factors, such as how long has your domain been there, what has it ranked for in the past, the strength of the sites linking to you etc.
When is it time to PANIC!?
You’ve done everything you can think of, you’ve done everything right and yet your site is still sat there at position 400. At this point there is a tendency to think you are being punished by Google and to throw everything at it, making so many changes you can’t track back.
Don’t worry, don’t overreact, simply sit pretty and wait and see – things will start to happen, you will get movement. Just hold your horses to begin with.
How to deal with a client or your boss when SEO takes some time to take effect
There are scenarios that every SEO expert dreads and invariably runs into:
- Rankings don’t change
- Rankings go down
I’ve had several occasions when rankings have just completely dropped off, the changes I’ve made have been for the best and for whatever reason Google doesn’t like them and decides to drop the rankings for a while. This is part of SEO, deal with it.
This isn’t something that someone paying for SEO is going to like to hear, especially if they are an entrepreneur. The very nature entrepreneurialism is one of constantly doing something – they keep moving forwards at all cost, the idea that they can’t do something to make a difference is not something that they are going to accept lightly.
Make some estimates about how long it’s going to take, they’ll look at you as though you’re completely insane, however if you’re not far off then they’ll trust your opinion even more next time. The last time I submitted a reconsideration request to Google I told the client it would take around 8 days for their rankings to come back (they actually started coming back in 6 days). After that the client admitted that he’d thought I was making it all up, now we have a much better relationship.
How long should I leave it before I make another change?
When I started doing SEO we used to say it could take up to three months to have an effect, it was probably right, although I can’t really remember anything taking that long.
Nowadays you will see some movement in around a week – although if it’s not a big site then I’d suggest leaving it two weeks, although there are still times when I’d be prepared to wait a month before I make any additional changes to a site – generally things like URL redirects and major site changes will have this kind of an effect – just don’t panic and start doing things that are rash!
Help with SEO
At 2am we’ve experienced it all, we’ve sat it out and had great results other times we’ve sat it out and sat it out and had nothing happen, however we’ve always used this to learn more about the search market and nowadays we’ve got a fairly good idea of how long things will take, if you need some advice just let us know and we’ll be happy to help!