How Long Will It Take To Rank in SEO?

Search Engine Optimization is the best marketing tool for businesses medium-to-long term to grow. If your new to SEO in general, it’s important to understand the type of time and investment a solid SEO strategy takes. In this SEO 101 video, our CTO Jordan Snider walks through everything you need to know about how long it takes to start ranking on the 1st page of Google. Interested in checking out our SEO solutions? Check out our search engine optimization services here.

Have questions about SEO, or want to get started? Check out our SEO page and contact us for a free SEO Audit!

Video Transcription

Hey there, how’s it going? My name is Jordan, and welcome to another token, creative service SEO video. token creative service is an SEO focused marketing agency where we work with businesses of all shapes and sizes, them find the value in new marketing channels that they may not be using already today. So today’s video is going to be talking about something near and dear to my heart and something that I get asked by almost every single business owner that we work with. And that’s this, how long will it take to rank? When I start my SEO project is a brand new business of the world? How long is it gonna take for me to get on the first page of Google? So to answer that question, let me start off by saying that SEO is an organic process, as opposed to a paid channel, like let’s see PPC, which is a little bit more in the instant gratification side of things, Su was a little bit more of a slow burn.

So typically, when I work with a new business for the first time helping them explore the value of SEO, I typically give them a timeframe of no less than about six months, my team won’t work with a business for less than six months for an SEO project. And the reason for that is SEO, as I mentioned, can be a bit of a slow burn. And it’s an iterative, organic process that really does take time to evolve and develop month over month. And so we usually offer SEO packages that no less than six months, because it’s really hard to gauge a lot of value before them. What I’d like business owners to think, of course, though, is that ultimately, it’s going to depend on your niche and the type of industry that you’re in. And don’t forget, the more keywords or key phrases you’re trying to rank for, the harder things are going to be, the more keywords typically means the more type of content and more on page optimization you have to do. And that’s not everybody’s best idea to give themselves more work. But as you can imagine, adding more keywords means the more potential to rank. But of course, inversely. So you’re going to be doing a lot more work as a result of that. Okay, so you’re probably wondering by now, Why does it take so long? And that’s really good question. One of the first initial ideas that I give is that don’t forget that when you start a new project in that first month, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to start to see a lot of results in that first month. There’s a lot of onboarding and setup that’s typically involved with SEO. So to say that if you were to provide an agency with access to your website, there’s more than likely a month or two of changes that they can make on your website, just to fine tune it, and really try to make it perfect. For example, you’re going to be happy changing your URL structures, you’re gonna be having giving them access to your website, you’ll be setting up analytics goals, conversion rate tools, you know, there’s a big process when it comes to really onboarding. If you’ve got a website, let’s say in WordPress, something really common, that’s great, that means we’ll save time being being able to set out because there’s so many awesome plugins and services that make our jobs as an SEO service agency a little bit easier. But of course, that’s not going to be the case for everybody. And that’s okay, there’s 100 bid CMS out there. That might mean that there’s just a little bit more work involved from our side, to help make sure that your website is really up to snuff and ready to start seeing all of that traffic.

Don’t forget that the process of creating content, which is one of the foundational pillars of SEO can be really tedious, the time that it would take to put in an E book, a newsletter, all of these things take planning, you know, putting the content together, and then the execution. If you’re not really ready to invest in a lot of that content, if you’re not ready to put yourself out there, then it can be really difficult to gain traction with SEO, crawling speeds are another very important factor to think about as well. Don’t think that just because you publish a new page means that Google is going to see that right away. Google typically says that they’ll crawl your website every few weeks, once a month, it really just depends. And now we’re they’re all tools that any website owner can use inside of Google Search Console, to ask that their website be crawled sooner, it’s not always a guarantee. So if you’re putting content out there, you also can’t really expect for that to appear on Google right away. And don’t forget, at the end of the day, the heart of SEO is about becoming more authoritative, and building your reputation online. And certainly, just like a human or brand, building a reputation isn’t something that happens overnight. So you really got to be ready to invest. Domain Authority and domain reputation are our values that you might see used by typical SEO agency. And those are some numbers on a scale of zero to 100. That may represent how good you do with SEO, how likely you are to rank or how strong your backlink profile is, instead of put in perspective, when we work with a client on a point scale of zero to 100. And we’re typically lucky if we can get them up one or two points on that scale per month. So that you can imagine that that’s a that takes a long time to work through. And it’s really hard to manage that expectation because a lot of times our clients get impatient, and they want to know why they’re not ranking right away. But whether it’s their industry, or perhaps their competitors, it really depends on the type of business that you run and the type of industry that you’re in.

So I like to use a pretty solid example for one of our best and most successful SEO clients naturals direct their health and regulatory consulting company, which in my my account is a pretty niche business, you don’t really see a lot of those types of businesses out there. And so lucky for us, when they approached us about their SEO, it was really easy for us to help them rank, honestly, within the first three months. And granted, I can’t say that we could be that successful with everybody that we work with. They were in a niche industry. And so we found that the types of keywords and the types of businesses that they were targeting was really easy for us to get in front of, and there wasn’t a lot of competition. But to contrast that, think about a marketing agency, this market is filled with agencies all across every single city that you can come across. So naturally, for a team like mine, we’re looking at an SEO strategy on a multi year horizon, we know that there are huge million dollar billion dollar agencies that have been working on their SEO for years, far before our team perhaps even existed. And so you can imagine that that builds up a little bit of a gap. But at the end of the day, that those people have spent so long in their SEO, that we’ve got to fill that competitive gap before we can even start to compete with them on those first pages. And the same can really be said about any business or industry today. Ultimately, they’re businesses of all kind, and there’s hundreds and 1000s and millions of businesses out there already. So don’t think that you’re going to be the snowflake in every situation. But know that competitive industries, or more specifically, competitive keywords, are going to be the challenge that you face in developing your own SEO strategy.

Alright, so I get it. six to eight months sounds like a long time to start seeing your rankings. But know that SEO is the number one marketing tool, meaning to long term for your business. So don’t be scared away by not seeing that instant gratification that you might see with pay per click advertising. SEO is an investment. And at the end of that investment, you have rankings that stick with your business. And granted, algorithms may change and shift. As long as you’re staying on top of those. And working with a team that can help you, you really don’t have anything to worry about. Just to summarize, ultimately, it depends on a variety of factors. Don’t forget, there’s a lot of setup work involved, that depending on the keywords, the industry, the niche, and the competition of your market, all of these different things will ultimately impact how quickly you can start to rank. Be confident knowing that you’ll start to get extra traffic in the first few months. But that’s really rank on that first page of Google. It’s an investment, but stick with it. Because in the first page of Google, that’s always an investment we’re sticking with. Alright, thanks for watching our video today. I hope you learned a little bit about something about SEO. And if you ever any businesses you know are curious or have any questions, feel free to contact us the contact for myself and token Creative Services will be in the post or the descriptions below. You can check out our website AI token ceus.ca or email us at imagine I token cs.ca Thanks for watching.