When you start working on your SEO efforts you or your boss may want to know how long your efforts are going to take to see the results they want. One thing that hasn’t changed since the early days of the search engines, is that SEO takes time work. Today that amount of time varies depending how many competitors you might have and how well those competitors are doing their SEO currently.

The most common answer SEOs give to this question is “6 months” or approximately around that time. The reason SEOs give that answer is because this is the amount of time it takes to build content, ensure tracking is working correctly, get the content indexed in a search engine, and have a search engines numerous algorithm components process the content. There are also factors such as an engine slowly applying the full value of a ranking factor over a long period of time.

In 2017 a Google search engineer, Maile Ohye, made a video about hiring an SEO. In that video she states that it can take anywhere from 4 months to a full year to start seeing the results of an SEO campaign.

Each campaign is different and each part of a campaign’s impact will take varying amounts of time. If you’re trying to outrank Amazon on millions of search results, then it may take a much longer amount of time.

Due to the nature of search engines not revealing exact specifics this is a very difficult thing to measure. Most SEOs will likely recommend short-term objectives (or ‘low hanging fruit’) and long-term goals.