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This is a very evergreen question of SEO on all time. How long does SEO take? Sometimes, it follows with: why it took so long to rank in Google search? Why it took so much effort? why does SEO need higher budget than paid? And.. another questions leads to another questions.

How Long Does SEO Take? Here is some answers you can give to your client:

1. Months. You can not expect SEO will take in 2 months to rank in Google search.
2. 6 months. This is the most common answer given by SEO agencies.
3. 9 months. Longer period, with more results.
4. 1 year. This is for maintaining the expected organic results, not only achieve the KPI organic traffic, but the client needs something else such as leads.

Why it took so long to rank in Google search?

There is so many ranking factors in Google Search, the popular one is page experience, since Google tells us in official statement. For not an SEO person, this is kind of technical website that you should follow, because it’s from Google and Google recommend it as one of the ranking factor.

Talking about ranking factor, at least, we need quite some times to get attention from user and Google, since we battle with million websites with same industry or niche industry like us in internet kingdom. You can ranking fast in page 1 Google using black hat techniques, but make sure you really understand how to do it so you don’t get a penalty from Google, or you can steal your competitors SEO strategy, completely.

One of my article in this blog can rank in page 1 in 3 months, but another articles from my client website, an insurance company, rank in 9 months, and still produce organic traffic even after 1 year. Both are what we want, I guess, not just for ranking in short time, but the content will still give you traffic and even leads, after 1 year! The question is, will it take too long for an article to be in page 1 Google?

Yes, it will need time to be on page 1. Even more, if you feel your website technicality is lousy here and there, it will need more time. User experience and Google experience will make your pages and website more difficult to get traffic and go to top 10 blue link in page 1. Check your search console to see what kind of improvement that you need to implement your page or website. Since SEO is organic, it will take time to get your desired position in Google search. Not just with the content, but the website it self.

Why SEO took so much effort?

When you are doing an SEO to client website, you should talk to the IT team, the developer website team, the designer team, the front end and back end team and the programmer team. If you really want to have a very strong successfully SEO campaign, try to talk to PR team, social media team, email marketing team, CEO, owners, etc. WHY?

This is because when you are into the SEO project, it’s not just about SEO only (technical, off page and on page), it will requires more teams to support the SEO campaign in order to be successful. So this is not just implementing article or new content everyday, or buying links from another related website, but it will need more than that.

There are so much teams involved in creating a website, from the designer until programmer team, you should talk and connect with them, to make the websites more SEO friendly. After that you should request more help from email marketing team to follow up leads, social media team to share your content on own social media assets, PR team to help you make the best backlinks related your new content, even you should talk to the owners about just upload a press release content. So this is a really hard work from bigger team than your SEO team.

Why does SEO need higher budget than paid?

This is so interesting area, when it comes to budgeting, some brand team, choose a lowest budget to get the highest result. I can understand this. But you can not do that for SEO. Like I said above, SEO not jut do with internal SEO team, but with another team; need more than a month to rank in page 1 Google search, need improvement to meet Google requirement, etc. So yeah, it will have bigger budget than paid (social ads) to get better organic result. Especially, if your website is hurt by sensitive issues such as corruption, too many complaints, spammy pages, etc., it will eat bigger budget than ‘regular’ SEO budget. Because this is a sensitive issue, you can explain the process slowly to your client, not just telling them the strategy, but you can discuss about SEO with them and talk like ‘not a SEO pro’ to them, so hopefully they will understand and tell you what the problem on their side.

That’s all what I think about the poplar question, how long does SEO take. Since I do SEO until now, my answer can be different from another SEO pros, but I hope, you can have good answers to your client for all the question. How do you think? Please comment below. You can see interesting article and tips here, SEO tips here, and Google Analytics articles here.