It’s a question that is on the minds of many business owners and marketers – HOW LONG DOES SEO TAKE? There are so many factors involved with how long it takes for SEO to work, but one thing we can say for sure is that SEO will take time. We don’t want you to be discouraged by this though because there are several steps you can take to speed up your website’s ranking in Google.

SEO is a highly competitive field across the world, with billions of websites and countless people and website owners competing to rank on the world’s number one search engine. There are a few questions that we need to factor in, such as. How long have you had your website? How good is your website? How good is the content you have on your website? And how relevant is your content to your target audience?

In this blog post, we’ll share some insight with you on how long search engine optimization takes and how to speed up the process!

4 Steps to help you speed up the SEO process

In order to get your website ranked as quickly as possible, here are some basic things you need to do:

1) First of all, it starts with keyword research. This is a vital step to find out what keywords are bringing traffic to your competitors and what you should target.

A great tool that can help you with keyword research is Google’s Keyword Tool, which lists the number of searches per month and how many websites rank for each term.

You should also use tools like SEMRush or Ahrefs to gather more information about how competitive the targeted keywords are, their search volumes and who is currently ranking for these keywords.

Here’s a short video explaining how to do keyword research

2) Make sure your site content is high quality and unique. Search engines like Google want their users to find only the best content, so you need to make sure your website is as good as it can be.

Use tools such as CopyScape or Siteliner to make sure you’re not violating copyright laws or that you are not duplicating content on your website.

Make your content original and use images and videos to make it more attractive and engaging.

You should also use keywords in your content as often as possible, but don’t overdo it by stuffing the sentences with them.

3) On page optimisation  is another vital part of SEO. This includes making the most out of your title tags, meta descriptions and keyword density to make sure you’re ranking higher in Google’s search results pages. But the more in depth aspects like mobile responsiveness and site speed optimisations are a must as page speed is an important ranking factor in Google. We know that this can be time consuming but there are a lot of tools you can use to improve these aspects, Yoast is a great option.

4) Once that’s done, get yourself some backlinks – this way Google will know your site is a quality one and start ranking it higher!

Semrush or Ahrefs are great tools you can use to find backlink opportunities for your website. You can also ask for a link exchange on social media pages.

We live in era of instant gratification. If you want to be rewarded by the financial gain of SEO you need to be prepared to stick with it for the long run. A good SEO campaign is ongoing, and consistency is the key to success! Unfortunately, growing your online authority does not happen overnight. It takes well thought out, authentic content that is not copied. It needs to be captivating and relevant to your target audience to bring in as much traffic to your website as possible. We need everything from backlinks, landing pages, blogs, and an array of pertinent information in order to see tangible results.

SEO takes time to have an effect on how well your website ranks in Google’s SERPs (search engine result pages). However, there are many steps you can take to shorten the length of this process.

Using well written content to create high-quality blog posts rather than shorter articles or web copy that seems like filler material just to build up word count is advantageous. The more informative and useful your content is, the better chance it has to be ranked higher.

Posting a single blog post or creating a landing page for your website is not going to yield success overnight or change your Google ranking immediately to number 1. You are competing against people who have put years of work into growing their authority online to rank first. It is however a key building block and another link in the SEO chain. We can think of starting the SEO journey as planting an SEO seed that needs to be constantly nurtured in order for it to become a large and healthy fruit baring tree.

Once you have completed the basics you can move on to the more technical aspects of SEO.  Technical elements such as site speed and mobile responsiveness can be improved with some of the many tools available on the market today. But creating and optimising content focussed around your users is a great way to start!

We hope these tips have helped answer how long search engine optimization takes for you! If not, feel free to reach out anytime with any questions or comments at hello@srsbsns.co.za