Why Does SEO Take So Long?

SEO takes a relatively long time to show results because of the various different factors involved in how search engines rank pages as well as the high competition for organic traffic in general.

For a site to perform well with SEO, it must do many things, including:

  • 1. Publish high-quality, well-researched, authoritative content backed up by respective sources and experts in the field. It’s no longer sufficient to stuff keywords into an article and just wait it out.

  • 2. Publish content that offers a unique value. That unique value can be presenting completely new information or presenting old information in a way that’s more useful to the user. Simply talking about what hundreds of publications have already extensively covered is highly unlikely to rank anymore.

  • 3. Establish connections and gain word-of-mouth. The quality of your backlink profile (off-site SEO) is determined by when, where, and how other websites talk about your business. 

  • 4. Make sure the content has a good “foundation”. Your website needs to demonstrate best practices for accessibility and user-friendliness in order for Google and other search engines to actually want to send their audience to your site.

Even with implementing all of these best practices, you will still have to be patient. On average, Google takes anywhere from 4 weeks to 6 months to evaluate how highly any given page should rank on a given results page long-term, and what SERP features other than regular results it should rank for (featured snippets, people also ask questions, image pack, etc.).

Contact Fire&Spark for a free SEO discovery session.

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