How Long Does SEO Take to Work for New and Established Sites?

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In this week’s Surge Session, we’re going to talk about SEO and what expectations you should have when it comes to SEO. Depending on whether your website is new or well-established, it could take months for you to rank on Google and start seeing organic traffic. We also discuss how long you need to implement an SEO strategy until it pays off. Our Director of Marketing, Joseph Hassun, is joined by Marketing Specialist, Ohad Yarel.

Setting Realistic SEO Expectations for Your Marketing Campaigns


The first topic we want to get to is how long does it actually take to start ranking on Google? So we know that two years ago things were a little bit easier. There weren’t so many algorithm changes. Nowadays, with the competitive nature of SEO and technology online, we’re seeing it has become harder, if not a lot harder, to start ranking organically.

So, what are some of the expectations that someone with a fresh brand new website, new brand, and is trying to rank on Google, should have? First of all, have patience. Realistically speaking it would take no less than one year of constant ongoing SEO work to really build authority to a brand new website.

In Google’s eyes, you need to build your website as a credible source of information and that takes time. Anywhere between 12 to 18 months is a realistic expectation for a site that’s just starting out.

If you have an established site, you’re looking at anywhere between 10,000 to 20,000 monthly visitors. A site that is starting off is under 10,000 visitors a month.

It takes time to build authority in Google’s eyes, to really make your website stand out in a sea of information as your website being the most credible, as having the most useful information to the user for that specific search query. That involves building links from other websites which requires outreach. It involves creating high-quality content that is better than your competitors and truly answers the search queries.

SEO for New Websites: How Long Does it Take to Get Organic Traffic


Aside from the fact that there’s going to be a lot of time-consuming executions that need to be taking place, we also know that there are factors that come into play, like the competition, especially now that Google has become more saturated.

Again, you’re at the mercy of Google’s crawl at that point. How long is it going to take for that new piece of content that you just published, not just to rank, but just to get indexed? That’s another factor of why it takes so long.

Let’s say you have a brand new website and you want to rank for a specific keyword. That keyword needs to be a question that you know your target audience asks all the time.

Now, let’s say you wrote the best piece of content that you can imagine. It has graphs, images, and answers the question from any direction, it is the most comprehensive piece of content that you could create. Then you published it on your website. Your website is brand new at this point. What do you think the next step should be to get it to rank? Because it won’t.

Let’s be perfectly honest and set that expectation. You can write the most incredible content and you put it on a brand new website, it is not going to rank. So, how do you make it to rank?

Well, one thing that you can do is you could try to push some backlinks to that piece of content, which is a time-consuming process. You need to outreach, you need to find the right blogger that has access to the right sites that has relevant content that can then push backlinks to it.

So that’s what we would do if we published a piece of content that we thought was great. We would definitely try to acquire some backlinks.

Another easy way to just get some backlinks is to share it on social. You can use other free sources like to get some no-follow backlinks. So pretty much try to compliment it. Try to spread the word. Tell your friends about this amazing piece of content and have them share it. Try anything you can do to try to increase that click-through to that content.

Spreading the word and getting other websites to link to that content is exactly what you should do. 100%. Before you do that, however, make sure that technically the site is set up properly, that Google can crawl it, that it’s not blocked somehow, that it’s index, and that you submitted a sitemap.

Just tick off all of those technical checklists out of your way before you really put in the effort into spreading the word because it won’t be worth much if it can’t even be indexed.

How Long Does it Take to Rank in Google for Established Websites?


Again, if you are a brand new site, you are looking at 10 to 12 months to see any results from an SEO strategy. For a more established site that has a lot of brand recognition and is getting a lot of organic branded clicks, you can probably see growth anywhere between 6 to 8 months.

A lot of clients that we encounter have unrealistic expectations when it comes to SEO. And we believe it’s because there are other agencies in this industry that are setting those false expectations, which happens all the time.

What we do here is when we get a new client, we set that expectation right at the beginning. SEO is a long term strategy and if you’re not going to commit for at least a year, then perhaps paid traffic is something you will feel more comfortable with.

Even though we recommend, especially for a new site, a dual strategy. To get that traffic right away, to get that revenue right away, you set up a good paid strategy while you’re working to build that organic traffic.

We have a lot of difficulties with clients because of their previous and past experience with other SEO agencies. But again, if you’re not willing to invest 12 to 18 months, you might need to look for different avenues to try to generate more business, because you’re just not going to see any type of result for at least that amount of time.

SEO is a very smart investment because it will continually grow once you set it up. But if you can’t or won’t put that investment and time towards SEO, then perhaps it isn’t the path for you.

Do you have any questions about SEO? Want to learn more about the topics we covered in this Surge Session?

Contact us. We’re here to help.