The answer will vary greatly depending on how much has already been done with your website. In general, for new websites without much content (web pages) or citations (links from other websites, social media), it’s more of an infant web property. Therefore you’ll need time to start proving yourself for traditional and AI search engines to cite your website as a relevant and valid source of information for their users.
If your site has been around for years, has been in the press, connected to social media accounts with visibility and lots of shares and tagged posts – this puts you in a different bracket of visibility. You’ve largely done most of the initial trust building per se, with the search engines. Now your main goal is to maintain your relevancy and visibility by continuing to 1) yield great citations, 2) update existing content, and 3) create new content when it’s necessary.
In an attempt create some realistic expectations (which vary greatly based on industry, and business type/size), here’s some VERY high level generalizations.
How fast does SEO work for new websites?
For “infant websites” as mentioned above, you should expect to have more of your website’s pages indexed within the search engines, traditional and AI. You can check for the pages Google is indexing on your site, for example, by running a search for “site:<yourdomain>”. This executes a search that will only display pages matching the domain you enter in the search. For some of these pages you may even start generating organic visibility and new viewers. After a 3-6 month timeframe you should start seeing numerous phrases pointing back to your site, in the organic search results. This will generate visitors you otherwise wouldn’t have had.
What will SEO do to my site if it’s already ranking?
For sites with an existing presence, you’ll see more than a few benefits. Because SEO Leads focuses on conversion and leads, we primarily look at Google Analytics, and analyze the “traffic sources” and “events” modules. We determine which sources are producing the highest volume of new visitors, and how those are translating to the actions we track on your site – for example, form submissions, leads, purchases, phone calls, or more. If you have existing rankings you’ll notice those improve. When looking at search ranking we focus on the phrases / topics which are already creating a large flow of new organic visitors. By putting more focus (through citations and content) into what is already working, and for example bump a #4-5 ranking up to a #1 to #3, we could exponentially increase the volume of visitors you’re getting who are interested in that phrase.
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Learn more about our process:
Why are citations necessary for SEO?
What is a good citation for SEO?
How does SEO work for AI search tools?