When Does SEO Start to Work?

SEO professionals are often asked “How long will it take for me to see results?”  The answer varies, but is usually based upon two factors: how long a website has been online, and the current level of competition. There are of course many more elements that contribute to the results of an SEO campaign, including new vs. redesigned/reformatted websites, and the skill and experience of the SEO professional.

To realize when SEO starts working you must also be able to realize that when you are working with a relatively new domain, it is going to be difficult to gain or gage rankings for about three months.  Sometimes this will range closer to 6-9 months to see a significant rise in rankings.  When working to establish a time frame, set realistic expectations and recommendations.  You should also expect these projections to be updated post-launch as your site’s index and crawl patterns are established.

When redesigning a website, one should keep in mind that search engines will still use the old URLs for some of their searches and so many users will find themselves inundated with robots.txt files, 404 errors, etc.  However, if a site relies on home page rankings for top keywords then a redesign will not usually hurt any rankings too much.

New domains should have brand term rankings almost immediately after the initial crawling.  Benchmarking therefore is important to understand how post-redesign crawl behavior is working for a website.  You should be monitoring cherry keywords and measuring them with search engines to better understand how this is working and your rankings. 

Redesigned websites will almost always experience a slight drop (or perhaps a major one) in traffic even when using a SEO.  However, if you do well in maintaining high volume keywords then the dip will not always be based on the redesign but also seasonal dips in your branded traffic.  Perhaps the best way to monitory post-launch success is to use analytics that have been properly configured.  Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer are great tools for finding new and continued rankings.

Perhaps the worst thing for SEO success is lack of SEO implementation.  This can be dangerous because even the smallest problem can become a huge problem later down the line.  When you partner with an SEO provider you should remember the “fear of flying” analogy.  New sites should set their first goal to rank for potentially some local or other modified tail searches and brand.  Rankings should visibly rise within six months.

The first goal for redesigned websites is to maintain their current rankings for traffic.  After this you should expect to establish that your optimization is in place and then you should work to develop the trust of your customers in your new pages.


To learn more about SEO and how an SEO campaign can benefit your website, contact the SEO professionals at Active Web Group for a free SEO analysis of your website.