How long does SEO take to bring traffic to a Website?

The first thing you have to understand is that for a brand-new website, SEO is very hard and that's because there are other websites out there that have been doing this for a long time. Due to how long they've been out there, this has made the websites authoritative and that has earned them the ranking they have on Google.

So, if you have a brand-new website and you're trying to come in and you're trying to rank for a keyword that you know hundreds or thousands of people have been trying to get ranked for years, it is hundred percent unrealistic of you to think that you can launch a site that can go ahead and rank for that keyword right away. It's just not how it works; SEO is somehow hard for brand-new websites.

For a new website, it could take a couple of months or years before you start ranking for a really big keyword. However, if your new website is on a local niche, that's a different story; in that case you could be looking at ranking for some of those keywords within the nine to twelve months range depending on the keyword difficulty. These keywords have different levels of difficulty, and this is based on the following factors among all the websites that are trying to rank for a particular keyword. These factors include; website’s domain authority, content quality, as well as number of backlinks to the homepage and to other individual pages trying to rank for that particular keyword.

So, those are all things that you need to think about while setting up your website or blog. If you have a more established website, SEO can take a lot less time so that's really good news. In some cases, if there's a website that has been around for like say five to ten years and above, which has never been optimized correctly for keywords; but have a lot of backlinks and great contents, it will rank naturally. Keywords aren't just in the right place in that case, that's what we call a money site. For such a site, once SEO company come in and optimize the website correctly with the right keywords, it will start ranking for those keywords in few months. That's really a best-case scenario.

For a website that's been around for three or four years and have got some great content maybe ranking because they're doing some content marketing, social media marketing, running AdWords and things like that. This kind of website can rank gradually in 4 to 6 months and start seeing more traffic once the pages become well optimized for the right keywords.

SEO definitely still works for our own traffic with over 400 percent year-over-year but there's a lot that goes into it.

In conclusion, how long does SEO actually take?

For a brand-new website, you're not really going to see any great gains that you're going to be really excited with until 9 to 12 months of consistent workflow. You'll start seeing traffic even though that does not mean you're going to see your return on investment at that time.

If your website has been around for a few years and the sites already got great credibility and your ranking kind of closed for a few keywords, you can see results quicker between 4 to 12-month range when you start applying the right SEO strategy. You could see results in at the 12^th month depending on the competition and how big your service packages are.

 If you have a penalty on the website or something kind of holding the site down, you're not going to see a return until that issue is taken care of. In most cases, SEO is really a 9 to 12-month thing but the returns are totally worth it for the business and the people who stick with it end up being some of the dominant players online. It's the best investment that I've ever made for our company and for our longest-term clients they've gotten huge returns, it’s definitely something I will recommend you do.

That's it for how long SEO takes, hope you learnt something. If you have any questions about specifically how long SEO takes make sure to ask it in the comments and I'll be happy to answer. Have a great day.