The maturity of your website may impact how long it takes to begin receiving significant search engine traffic. Brand new domains can take 9-months to a year to start seeing results. If your site has a high Domain Authority, you will see keyword ranking sooner. A new piece of content will appear in the search results in month one, but rarely in the top 10 positions.
Pages improve in SERPs as backlinks are accumulated. Assuming a page has a few good backlinks coming in you can expect to see ranks at around 6-10 months. Pages will continue to grow stronger till about 18 months. It is a good idea to update and expand the content of a page after 8 months and again at 15 months. This shows search engines the content is still relevant to users. The true power of SEO can be seen after you have added a dozen deep content pages and have added 50-100 new quality backlinks. This typically can take 2-3 years as illustrated by the chart below.
SEO is an ongoing process and the results are not permanent. If you stop optimizing your site, rankings will eventually drop. The rate of decay depends on how strong the competition is for the keywords you’re targeting. If you want to maintain your position in the search results, you need to keep up with the latest SEO trends and practices.
If you’re patient and consistent with your SEO efforts, you will start seeing a steady increase in traffic and rankings over a few months. The good news is once you get to the top it is easier to stay there. Several clients have experienced significant revenue growth of 25-30% and even more when their SEO campaigns are sustained for several years.
