How long does SEO take?
A lot longer than you think
Unlike other direct response advertising channels, SEO takes a substantial amount of time to build to a crescendo where it finally starts to matter. Anyone who has ever tried anything remotely related to SEO knows this and too many have quit their investments early without seeing any results.
Asking how long this effort will take is a very fair question, but unfortuantely one that will never generate a straight answer. The reason why there is no clear answer is becuase it is dependent on many different variables each subject to their own delays.
It is somewhat similar to asking how long it takes to get to Mahattan from Washington DC by plane.
For each leg of the journey there is an average expected duration, the time to pack, the drive to the airport, time to traverse TSA, taxi time to the runway, flight time, taxi time to the gate, baggage unloading, and the drive to Manhattan; however as anyone who has ever made this trip knows, averages only work for other people.
From my experience an SEO effort has many similarities. There is certainly an average time that it might take to develop a strategy, implement a CMS, design pages, write content, publish, get crawled by search engines, be visible on search engines, and lastly see conversions on the site. Again, these are just averages with each step subject to their own bottlenecks and surprises.
In my career, I have rarely seen this entire process for a brand new effort take anything less than 18 months to see meaningful ROI on a substantial investment. Yes, individual content can be published and drive traffic very quickly, but when it is a full product-led SEO effort this will take a lot longer.
Even when I have joined in a project with a plan and strategy, there have been surprises that still hold back the final releases for many months. This is always inevitable and why it’s important to keep your eyes on the goal. Quitting before the product ships because “there is no ROI from this effort” is a failure in prioritization, not an SEO failure.
When you need a precise time frame for how long they payback migh be for an SEO investment, I typically use two years as that number. Yes, it might seem like a long time, but competitors building the same effort are subject to the same laws of reality. It certainly could take faster if everything works perfectly like for examples no key employees quit and there’s no urgent product needs that take priority, but from a budget standpoint it isn’t prudent to count on miracles.
The good news is that unlike every other marketing channel, the payback period on SEO and especially product-led SEO can extend for many years. I use five years as my amoritization period for driving revenue from an SEO effort, however many of the projects I helped ship a decade ago are still driving revenue. Again, it’s prudent to be conservative, however the reality might be far better than the assumption.
If you have shipped a major SEO product, I would love to hear how long it took to go from whiteboard to profit!