How Long Does SEO Take to Show Results?

Why does SEO take so long?
SEO isn’t advertising. You can’t pay your way into Google’s organic results.

Google has two types of results: organic and paid
To rank #1 for a keyword, you need to demonstrate to Google that you’re the best, most relevant, and most helpful result. This means surpassing the other pages on multiple fronts:

Relevance: Is your page aligned with what searchers are looking for?
User experience: Is your page user-friendly and readable?
Quality: Is your content helpful, interesting, insightful, or entertaining?
Originality: Is your content unique and provides original information, reporting, research, or analysis?
Expertise: Is your content created by someone who is knowledgeable or at least have experience in the thing they’re writing about?
Doing all of this well takes a lot of time and resources.

Factors that affect how long SEO takes
How long SEO takes depends on multiple factors. Here are some to consider:

1. Your website’s history
By virtue of their age, older websites tend to have more pages, content, backlinks, and website authority. As a result, they rank for more keywords.

On the other hand, newer websites need more effort and resources to get off the ground. Google’s John Mueller has even said that it could take up to a year for Google to figure out where to rank new sites. (This is likely what SEOs believe to be the “Google sandbox”.)

2. Your resources
It’s true for anything in life, and it’s true for SEO too. The more resources (time, effort, money) you can invest in SEO, the faster your results will be.

For example, you could hire more content writers to create high-quality content for you. Or you could invest in SEO tools and make your work easier, faster, and more efficient. You could also create a link building team to actively build links for you. The possibilities are endless.

3. Your competition
SEO doesn’t exist in a bubble. Your competitors are probably doing SEO too. If the keywords you’re targeting are highly competitive, then it’s going to take you a longer time to rank.

For example, we would love to rank for the keyword “seo.” But the top-ranking pages have tens of thousands of links (which are a ranking factor):

The SERP Overview for the keyword "SEO"
In fact, the Keyword Difficulty (KD) score for this keyword is a whopping 97:

KD score for "seo"
If we want to compete, it’ll take us lots of time. On the other hand, it’s much easier to rank for “seo vs sem.” It has a lower KD of 37:

Keyword difficulty for "seo vs sem"
So, we targeted the keyword and now rank #1:

Good news: there’s no need to resign yourself to the fate of “slow SEO results.” There are quick wins that can help you rank higher and get more organic traffic.

1. Target low-competition keywords
Not all keywords are equally competitive. So, you can likely get results faster if you focus on the ones that are low competition.

Here’s how to find low-competition keywords:

Enter your target keyword in Keywords Explorer
Go to the Matching terms report
Set the Keyword Difficulty (KD) filter to a maximum of 20

Eyeball the list and pick out those that are relevant for your site.

Alternatively, you can also look for keywords where a website with a low DR ranks in the top 10. Domain Rating (DR) is our website authority metric. So, even if a keyword is competitive, a website ranking with a low DR signals that it’s a potentially challegeable keyword.

To do this, set the Lowest DR filter to 20 (or a number you’re comfortable with) and choose in top 5 (to make it even more fail-safe).

Lowest DR filter in Keywords Explorer
This will show you all the keywords that have a website ranking in the top 5 with a maximum DR of 20. For example, even though this keyword has a KD of 85, a website with DR12 still managed to rank in position #3:

A website with DR12 is ranking for a keyword with a KD of 85
It’s impressive, but also means you could potentially rank for this keyword, too.

Further reading
How to Find Low-Competition Keywords for SEO
2. Optimize for featured snippets
Featured snippets are quick answers in Google search results pulled from a page ranking in the top 10. If you ‘win’ them, you can jump right to the top of Google search results.

Here’s how to find featured snippet opportunities:

Enter your domain into Site Explorer
Go to the Organic keywords report
Set the Position filter to 2-10
Use the SERP features filter to find keywords that trigger featured snippets “where target doesn’t rank”
Positions filter 2-10, SERP features filter for featured snippets where target doesn't rank in Ahrefs' Site Explorer
Look through the list to see if there are opportunities where you can grab the snippet.

For example, the featured snippet for the keyword “relevant content” is a definition: