So you want to know when you’ll be able to see the results of your SEO campaign. Unfortunately, there is no straightforward answer to this very important question.

SEO is about improving a website’s ranking but it is also about shortening the time needed to get to the top of search results. After all, you could wait for your website to move higher in search engine results pages on its own if time wouldn’t be important. When will your SEO campaign start showing results therefore matters. A lot!

Before actually launching an SEO campaign, most providers conduct a thorough analysis of the website and develop a strategy to improve its visibility. This can take a week or two, depending on the work needed to optimise the website itself. Only when they make sure that the website design is search engine friendly, they will develop a plan for the SEO campaign. Although this may seem a lot of time but you really don’t want to speed up this process because:

• firstly, you can’t expect improvement of your website’s ranking if the search engines can’t “read” it and

• secondly, there is no such thing as one-size-fits-all approach to SEO

After the actual launch of the SEO campaign, you won’t see any significant improvement in its ranking and traffic for at least three months. But it can also take longer. Now, a question occurs why is there such a difference in time needed to see the results of your SEO campaign?

Several factors play a role in the time needed to see the results of the SEO campaign but above all, it depends on strength of your competition for relevant keywords. It makes sense really if you think about it better. You can’t expect to catch up with websites that have been working on content and link building for years in just a few days. Not only they are ahead of you with SEO but major search engines such as Google also give advantage to relevance and consistency. In the eyes of search engines, a website that’s a decade old or older and has hundreds or thousands of backlinks deserves to be ranked higher than a website that was launched over a few months ago and has only a few backlinks.

What about SEO companies that promise fast results such as getting your website to No. 1 on Google within just one week? If you want to benefit from your online presence, you are highly recommended to stay away from various self-proclaimed SEO gurus promising too good to be true results. Because that is just what they are. Too good to be true because:

• firstly, no one can guarantee No. 1 position on Google not even the greatest SEO experts in the world because SEO simply doesn’t work that way. And

• secondly, yes, you may actually see a dramatic improvement of your website’s ranking in a very short period of time but there is a catch. Fast results never last long because they are typically based on creating hundreds or thousands of backlinks literally overnight. And search engines soon figure out that they have been manipulated. And when they do, you won’t only need SEO but penalty recovery as well.