It’s the million-dollar question. Most SEO experts say that you’ll have to wait 4-6 months before results begin trickling through.

But what sort of results are they referring to? I’m not sure exactly, but I believe it’s a blanket statement that applies to a general lift in rankings, impressions and clicks to your website.

Perhaps the best way to test this 4-6 month waiting-game theory, is to look at performance for a particular website over a 6 month period. So I put my own website through its paces by starting from scratch, and keeping notes along the way. 

Wix website

My experiment began in February 2019 with a Wix website that had very thin content. It functioned, but had zilch optimisation. Which resulted in a measly volume of traffic popping by for a looksie. I think it was only friends and family to be honest. There’s no reason why Google would be interested in it. 

Basic Search Engine Optimisation

I let things sit for a few months, just to see what happened. Nothing happened though. My site slept the entire time. I can’t blame it. It must have been pretty boring hanging out on page 3+ in Google Search Results.

Around May, I took control and used the SEO wizard found in the settings section in Wix. Within a week my results doubled! From Sweet F A, to Not Very Much. I spose it was a win?

Changing from Wix to WordPress 

Late in May, I began migrating my website across to WordPress. And it was an overnight Search success! Unfortunately, the success only lasted for one night. Things settled back down within 24 hours. But as I continued building the new site my results remained slightly better than in the Wix days.

SEO begins to work 

By July, I had a finished website with oodles of on page SEO and a bit of off page SEO in place. Eureka, the results began to go up. Now I felt like I was winning.

So 6 months on, how long does it take to see results from SEO? 

In reality, the Blue Bamboo website has only been using best practise search engine optimisation for 3 months. But based on the upwards trend that I am seeing it appears that the ‘4-6 month’ wait period has some truth to it.

What I can straight up tell you though, is that SEO is the sum of many tiny, little website enhancements. And it takes a lot of effort. It requires:

• Continuously making sure that all your links are working
• Regular checking that Google is able to crawl every page
• Always monitoring your choice of keywords and trying different options until you see a positive effect
• Forever thinking about other ways to drive traffic to your website
• Determination to grow the number of websites that link back to your own
• Then once you can do no more, looking at how to make even more mini tweaks to improve your conversion rates instead.

Testing and waiting. And waiting and watching for a lift in results

But there are big gains to be made once SEO kicks in. Especially as it can generate more leads and sales for your business. You might just have to wait around 4-6 months before enjoying the rewards though.

Best you start working on it today then.

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Blue Bamboo is a SEO company based in Tauranga, serving up search engine expertise, website copywriting, and content planning to ambitious business and busy marketing agencies. But that’s not all you get with Blue Bamboo. You’ll also benefit from a decade of project management experience, and an incredible knack for making complex things simple. And access to am amazing range of easy-to-follow plans that make business simple. If you want to be found, be interesting and be connected online, I’d love to hear from you. Liz Hughes | Blue Bamboo | www.bluebamboo.co.nz