When you see ads that say “Guaranteed Page 1 Google in 15 Minutes!!!!! Not click ads!!!!!” you know to keep your hand on your wallet. Ads like that should carry mandatory notices “Danger. Thief at work.”
It takes time to improve search engine rankings because Google and other search engines don’t revisit and re-index your page instantly when a change is made. Google does keep speeding up their cycle. Currently they take about three weeks to completely re-index the average website.
And It typically takes several rounds of changes to get all the way there. It takes a while to get inbound links working for you. Plus the “sandbox effect” can delay the full effect of your SEO.
However, that doesn’t mean results can’t start appearing rapidly.
I’ve been tracking rankings for a new SEO client of ours. After the initial round of changes, many search terms had risen in the rankings after 17 days and further improved after a total of 26 days. We’ve seen similar results in other cases.
One reason is Google doesn’t re-index a whole site all at once; they may visit one page one day and another the next. As soon as they’ve visited a page, any rankings for that page are updated.
Another point is that if you are looking for a most immediate “bang for your buck” on search engine rankings, you strategize what changes are easiest to make with the biggest result.
That doesn’t change the fact that SEO is more of a marathon than a sprint. More than once we’ve seen it take a year to get a site to the top on nationally competitive search terms. Results usually come much faster for localized searches.
So you can get good results within days, but plan on many months work, if you are planning to get to the top of all your important search terms.
And that is something you should plan on.