Firstly, a professional SEO agency will tell you that there is no such thing as an “SEO campaign”; there is only a permanent effort made in this direction. This is because you can never consider that you’ve won this race. It’s all relative to the competition you have and this detail can complicate things.

If you want to know how long it takes for you to enjoy certain results from the strategy that the SEO agency you work with has proposed, the truth is that there is no certainty from this point of view. Why? Because aside from all the details that are covered by your site’s optimization process, you must take into account the competition’s SEO efforts. This is why the answer can be at best an optimistic estimation or an educated guess from the SEO agency or specialist you work with.

In order to get a rough idea of the period it takes to reach specific results, any respectable SEO agency will analyze 3 important factors that contribute to the success of a project like this: the competition, the external link strategy, and the content.

The Competition

If you have a new product or a new type of service, chances are you won’t have to face strong competition, but if you are part of the rest 99.9 percent of the businesses, the competition you face will be proportional to the demand that your type of products and services have.

It’s clear that the more websites are competing for the first positions, the harder it will be for you to get there, and the period needed for reaching satisfying results will lengthen. On top of that, you need to know that the progress will be slower as you approach the top positions of the SERP. Thus, almost every SEO agency will get you from the 34^th position to the 9^th, but only the best specialists can manage to secure you a spot in the top 3 positions on the most important keywords in your field.

In addition to the many competitors you have to surpass in order to reach the top in SERP, you must also take into account their specialists’ level of competence. If you pick an SEO agency with proven results in most fields of activity (especially in SEO – they must rank among the first on their specific keywords), then the chances of you reaching the top position in Google within a year are far from slim.

Link Strategy

External links are an important part of SEO efforts from the very beginning of this activity, and Google still regards all the “echoes” of your site as important stuff. From this standpoint, the number of links adds weight to your site, but it’s not the only thing that matters. An SEO agency will also tell you about the relevance and quality of links. It implies that a huge number of low-quality links not only can be useless but might also harm your site’s growth.

A performance-oriented SEO agency will have a link strategy that ensures a natural growth of your site, and not even this type of complex strategy will be able to offer a precise answer on the period needed to reach the first spot in SERP.

The Content

The user experience is a hot topic lately and one of the details that can improve this indicator is the content of your site. That being said, any SEO agency that’s not afraid of tough projects will tell you that only high-quality content can positively influence your site’s rankings. This includes video, photo or text content, and it needs to be fresh, relevant, and always easy to understand.

Posting new content constantly will not only improve the user experience on your site and determine people to access it more frequently, but it will also make the search engine scan your site with a better frequency. This will further accelerate the impact of your SEO efforts.

Unfortunately, a large number of clients lack the necessary patience to enjoy remarkable results, but explaining all the key details of this field and offering realistic hopes still lies in the hands of the SEO agency or specialist.

Tom Gardner