Why is my SEO taking so long?

SEO is misunderstood

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is a service we offer all of our customers and is the most misunderstood services on the internet. Everyone’s after that silver bullet that will skyrocket them to position no.1. Details on our SEO services can be found here if you’re also finding it a little overwhelming and frustrating.

If you’re looking to invest in SEO or you’ve just started, you’re likely wondering when you’ll start seeing results.

This is one of the most common questions we hear from business owners, and it’s completely understandable. You’re investing time and money, so you want to know when you’ll see a return.

SEO results timeframe

In an ideal world, you’d receive a simple answer such as “three months” or “six months”. However, the reality is a little more nuanced.

SEO is more like growing a beautiful garden than clicking a button and seeing a bulb light up. You won’t see amazing results overnight, but there are plenty of signs of growth along the way.

Today, I will help break down what you can realistically expect from your SEO efforts. Together, we’ll look at typical timelines, early indicators of success and the factors that may speed up or slow down your results.

Whether you’re just starting out or curious if your current SEO strategy is delivering what you need, this guide will help you understand the path ahead.

A typical SEO timeline 

It’s true you can get results in as little as 24 hours, significant change on pages where there’s little to no competition and a speedy Google search console index will get results quick.

Usually though submitting a post like this one to Google will see it indexed within 24-48 hours. Any increases in pages where we are trying to increase authority usually take a little longer. Backlink authority takes even longer because those sites are completely outside of your control.

Measure visits and compare between 3 – 6 months and note any seasonal or topically changes that could influence your results. Christmas for instance will kill traffic in some industries but boost it in others and so if you’re doing SEO for say a plumber people on holidays don’t generally call to get their pipes fixed.

Factors that influence your timeline 

There’s lots of things that influence the timeline of Google giving you the love you deserve. What we all fail to see is that the Google Algorithm is constantly releasing updates and what worked yesterday won’t work today. For instance for most of late 2024 I ranked no. 1 for my search term “wagga web design” then in early 2025 something huge happened and I was dropped to 3 place and then 5 place. Nothing I could do on the site seemed to influence my ranking. Being patient is key and biting your lip when you see your competition sailing above you. Sometimes it’s even worth running some Google Ads or Socials.

Types of SEO results

There are loads of different metrics to monitor overall on any website from dwell time to bounce rates to click through rates. What SEO is targeting is Google and Bing traffic and attempting to rank higher and get more traffic rather than what actually matters on the site getting conversions. One metric that makes sense is how many users from your country visited a particular page that you’ve used as the “keyword hero” of your SEO strategy.

Early wins and signs of progress 

Celebrating the early wins is an important step in any SEO campaign. It can help to ease the worries of an impatient client. Some of the subtle early signs of progress include more visitors, increased user engagement, improved site speed, more frequent website crawling and increased brand searches. Early wins and success can bring a lot of motivation in the early parts of a campaign. What happens generally is that these early wins start getting less and less and customers bounce from SEO company to SEO company to get more results.

SEO timeline myths

We’ve all had that message in our inbox telling us that we can rank number one for our business regardless of the competition. We’ve also been asked to spend as little as $50 for their services. At the end of the day ranking for your business name is easy. Doing the checklists that SEO’s offer is also easy and if this was all there was to SEO then we’d all be millionaires and ranking number one. It’s not easy, it’s not a 5 steps process to rank number 1. On-site SEO can account for between 10-20% of your increase in authority and anyone that tells you otherwise is dodgy and doesn’t know what their talking about. Stop fiddling and engage with professionals that actually move the needle.

Maintaining long-term SEO success

Again this is partly false, how do you maintain something you have no control of. How do you stop your competitors from doing more SEO than you’re doing. You can’t, your ranking is entirely relative to your competitors. The more they do, the more you have to do. Then there’s Google and changes in their algorithm that may punish you or maybe you’ve damaged yourself by getting a penalty.

SEO Penalties

SEO penalties are the worst and fixing them can be time consuming and frustrating. Here’s a few examples of small penalties that won’t necessarily come through as a search alert message. Sneaky Google might just kill your rank and one day you wake up and your competitors are ranking higher than you. Nothing to do with you’re competitors SEO performance, purely Google.

Thinks to check for:

• Keyword density over stuffed (there’s some tools out there like this keyword density checker) try for a score of 1.5 or less. Also consider your menu titles as keywords
• Backlinks containing your keywords over optimised – This means you may of overdone it with your keywords in your backlinks. You can see all backlinks from Google Search Console under links. While some are ok try for no more than 20%. One major issue you may have is if you don’t have access to those backlinks to change.
• Duplicate Content – This can happen if you create multiple pages the same with only small changes that don’t add up to be enough uniqueness to not be a duplicate. A good tool to use to check just content on your site is SiteLiner.
• Negative Backlink attack – If you’re competitors are unethical they may pay for low quality sites to backlink to your site. If this happens you might think you can use the Google Search Console removal tool. Unfortunately from what I’ve seen this doesn’t work. How to recover might involve changing your domain which is worse case scenario.

Our SEO services are available if you’re also finding it a little overwhelming and frustrating. We service all areas of the Riverina but also now the Cairns region in the FNQ.

I also have a free guide which can be downloaded with some tips for those wanting to get their hands dirty.