How Long Does SEO Take to Work?

Key Takeaways

so how long does it take to see seo results for a new website well that's a common question i get and i'm going to help you answer it today in fact i'll show you how long it took me to grow one of my niche websites traffic by 788 let's dive in [Music] so if you're new here my name is nathan gotch and i publish free seo training here on youtube so if you want better rankings and more traffic please subscribe to my channel and click the bell button to get notified when i publish new training so with that said how long does it take to get seo results for a new website leave a comment below letting me know how long you think it takes to rank so back in the day around 2011 2012 you could rank within 30 days and all you had to do was throw up a decent page hit it with some backlinks with exact match anchor text and you would rank now things are much different now seo has gotten much harder and that's a good thing because it makes the barrier to entry even harder in other words the more challenging a skill is to learn the more valuable it becomes and that's why doctors lawyers and elite professional athletes get paid big money it's because the barrier to entry is high so that's why learning seo is so valuable at this point so with that said in today's seo world it takes much longer to get results and the exact amount of time will vary based on several factors which i'm going to explain so according to a study by ahrefs only 5.7 of all newly published pages will get to google's top 10 within a year that means a whopping 95 of published pages get virtually no organic search traffic for at least a year now of course most pages published on the internet are not seo driven so that makes sense but the real question is how long does it take to rank if you actually know how to do seo well i can only share my experience from working on hundreds of seo campaigns since 2013. now i could of course just say it depends but that's not the answer you want the real answer will depend on your level of experience your ability to execute factors relating to your website and your industry's competition now let me give you a real life example so i've been slowly building a portfolio of online media assets in short my team and i are creating niche websites with the intention of creating additional revenue streams and with the possibility of selling these assets in the future as well so we launched one of our first websites on may 23 2018 and in one year of the website being live it reached 816 organic search visitors per month and after two years it reached 10 122 organic search visitors per month so keep in mind these numbers mean very little because it's always going to be industry dependent for example some industries aren't as competitive and you can drive lots of traffic while others are more competitive and it may take longer to make a dent but in my experience on average you can expect to start seeing seo results within the first year for a new website and you shouldn't expect huge results in the first year unless you're dedicating a substantial amount of time and effort into it so now the question is what's the fastest way to start seeing seo results for a new website well here's a simple seven step process to follow number one find low competition keywords now you don't need to hit home runs to win with seo you can do just fine with base hits so with the baseball analogy out of the way you need to target keywords that your website is actually capable of ranking for and new websites aren't able to rank for competitive keywords in most cases because they don't have enough website authority and authority in this case is defined as the quality and quantity of backlinks that a website has so the best way to find uncompetitive keywords is to use either sem rush or ahrefs so just enter your competitor's domain into either of the tools and then sort your keywords by keyword difficulty i recommend going after keywords with low keyword difficulty and with a minimum of 100 searches per month number two categorize your keywords based on clusters it's critical that you build topical relevance on your new website as fast as possible and the best way to do this is by creating clusters of content in short that means targeting keywords that are topically relevant to each other and i'll give you an example from gotcha seo gotcha seo has only targeted seo related keywords for years and that's likely the topic google classifies my site for so forgot seo to make a dent for other topics like youtube seo i'll need to use clusters and that's why my team created a cluster of blog post targeting how to get 4 000 watch hours on youtube how long does it take to get 4 000 watch hours on youtube and even vid iq versus tubebuddy and many more and the goal is to create topically relevant clusters of content that support each other and as a result the rankings will improve without needing many backlinks so number three build out your first cluster of content i have several videos on my channel showing you how to create seo content and i'll have links in the description below now the key to creating great seo content isn't about creating something better it's about creating something different while satisfying the search intent for that target key work number four optimize your content the right way now most people think of on-page seo as just placing some keywords and then you're good to go however there is much more to it than that that's why i created a dedicated video showing you my point on-page seo checklist and i'll have a link below this video that said you can also streamline your on-page seo efforts by using a tool like surfer so here's how my team's workflow looks when we create seo content first run the target keyword through surfer to find keyword variations and the target word count then create an seo content brief which describes the content angle word count target and keyword variations next assign the project to a rider after that run the draft through hemingway rider to improve the quality of the writing and then run the second draft through grammarly for another upgrade on quality and lastly run the content through surfer to make sure it's optimized well out of the gate and now the fifth step for getting seo results with the new website is to create an intelligent architecture for your cluster so once you've created and published all of your clusters you need to make sure you've linked them together and i recommend using exact match anchor text with all of your internal links now each page in the cluster should link to each other if it makes sense number six acquire backlinks so you can nail the first five steps of this process like a pro but you'll struggle without backlinks and that's because backlinks are the feel on the fire you need to improve your rankings now i have a dedicated video below showing you 19 link building techniques you can use for a new website which brings me to the final step in this process which is number seven to use phantom link building and i published this technique on my gotcha seo blog a few months ago but it's an amazing method for building backlinks to a new website in short you can build the authority of your website without hitting it directly with links so here's how it works only acquire the best backlinks you can on tier 1 and then drive backlinks to those tier 1 placements and i recommend keeping the quality of your links on each tier very very high and that's the big difference between phantom link building and traditional tier links is the quality of the links on each level with phantom link building you're building editorial links at each step of the process and to give you an example of how well this works check out gotch seo's rankings for paper raider and paper form i use this exact technique for both of these pages so to recap it takes at least one to two years to see seo results as long as you follow a proven process and you can cut that time in half depending on the amount of effort and investment you're putting into your seo campaign so if you enjoyed this video please like it and subscribe to my channel and hit the bell button because you'll get first access to any new training that i publish and all the resources i mentioned in the video are in the description box below thank you so much for watching and i'll see you in the next video