A Complete SEO Blueprint with a 6 Month Timeline

Website and business owners are interested to know the actual impact of SEO on their website's performance and the timeframe to see the results. It is a burning question and one that does not have a straight answer.
Experienced digital marketers understand the fact that SEO is not a ‘get instant results’ scheme and it takes a considerable amount of time to see your rankings go up. That is one reason why people who don’t know the robust benefits of SEO are often not interested in putting their time and effort into search engine optimization of their websites.
This guide is for all those who are interested in knowing the actual factors that impact SEO, the time that it takes to see the results, and the resources that you need to employ in order to get those results.
Let’s first talk about ‘measuring SEO success’ and find out what exactly is considered SEO success.

SEO success can only be measured in terms of goals and KPIs. Success is different for everyone because every website has different standing and varying milestones. The ultimate goal is definitely to rank in top SERP positions but short-term objectives can vary.
Your objective can be to increase organic traffic to your website, boosting visibility, or increasing your rankings. So, if you are achieving your set objectives, you can rest assured that you are achieving ‘SEO success’.

Why is SEO a time taking process?

SEO is a prolonged and involved process and requires time involvement to be successful. Planning, implementing, and monitoring SEO activities, such as keyword research and evaluating search engine results all take time. Communication with other team members also takes up a lot of time.
Moreover, if you exhaust yourself with other non-SEO related tasks and then try and take on SEO, you will quickly see that it’s overwhelming and time-consuming. It usually takes a long time to optimize a website and the results may not be so immediate.
Is it time-consuming? Yes, it is! SEO success depends on factors such as your content, keywords, design, and site speed, and a plethora of other factors that we are going to briefly discuss later in this blog. It also is important to understand how Google’s algorithms work.
During the days gone by, SEO was simple and all you had to do was find keywords and stuff them on your web pages. Moreover, you could easily get away with getting bundles of backlinks pretty easily and actually rank high on search engines.
However, as the time elapsed, search engines realized that people were misusing SEO and employing malpractices to rank high. This was destroying user experience and people weren’t actually getting what they were looking for in the search results.
Search engine giants like Google realized the need to update their system and incorporated frequent changes in their algorithms, focusing on user experience and centered around natural language search.
It is getting harder and harder to figure out what helps in ranking and what doesn’t and search engines keep adding newer factors that boost organic ranking as well. That is why it takes a lot of time to get hold of what actually works and it is precisely the reason why achieving SEO success is not an overnight phenomenon anymore.

What are the three core areas of SEO?

We can divide our SEO strategy into three separate domains. Based on these three areas, we can figure out how much time it actually takes for SEO to bring results.

Technical SEO

Fixing technical bugs and issues is an integral part of SEO. The reason is that even a small technical issue can make the search engine bots or visitors to abandon your website. You have to constantly run SEO audits in order to figure out these technical bugs and then fix them as soon as possible. Some of the most common technical issues that websites face are:

• Page speed
• Duplicate content
• Canonicalization
• Structured data
• XML sitemaps
• Hreflang

Content

One of the top-ranking factors as you might already know is website content. Search engine algorithms prioritize quality content that’s written based on the user’s intent and is adding value by answering users’ queries.
Low-quality content will get you nowhere and it would take a lot more time to see improvement in your ranking if any. That is why you need to make certain that you are constantly creating and publishing high-quality content.
SEO experts in Dubai and around the world suggest that you should follow a posting schedule for new content and follow it strictly. It has two benefits. One is that search engines understand that you are posting high-quality content regularly and they eventually start ranking you higher. Secondly, your readers know that you are putting out valuable content so they start visiting your website frequently.

Backlinks

Getting backlinks is still one of the core aspects of off-page SEO. Why do you actually need backlinks? It is to increase the authority of your website and to let search engines know that high weighing websites are linked to yours. It is a form of recommendation which works wonders when it comes to building credibility and authority.
However, it is not at all the number of backlinks that you need to focus on. Contrary to the popular belief, it’s not the number of backlinks that matter but quality. If you get a few backlinks from a relevant and high-quality website, you will get much more benefits as compared to getting a lot of backlinks from an irrelevant, low-quality website.
You should always keep in mind that it is the ‘link quality’ that matters the most. Considering these factors, it’s okay to keep getting quality backlinks at a steady pace and you’ll start seeing the results soon enough.

What are the factors that determine the timeframe of getting SEO results?

SEO is a dynamic process and is different for each website, depending upon a website’s current status, competition, etc. Let’s talk about these factors in detail.

Website’s history

The history of a website has a large impact on its SEO ranking. This is especially true when it comes to a site’s link popularity. If a site was popular in the past but lost its popularity, this will affect traffic and rankings as well.
If we want to jump deeper, we will have to talk about micro factors in terms of websites history such as the date your domain or site was registered, the content of every page and blog post, the types of web hosting it's been on, to what type of SEO you're doing right now.
Not going into details and to understand the procedure, websites having some sort of domain authority would take less time to rank as compared to a completely new website with no backlinks and no authority.
However, as aforementioned, this doesn’t mean that older websites would always lead the way. The reason is that algorithmic changes, search engine penalties, and other factors can influence any website’s ranking without giving any heads up so one can never be sure.

Competition in the niche

It is quite understandable that competition is directly correlated to the time it takes to rank your website in top positions. This is because the more the competition, the more people trying to get to the top positions, and eventually it gets harder to rank high. You’ll have to put in a lot more effort in terms of SEO to rank if the competition is intense.
That is why SEO companies in Dubai and around the world suggest that you need to identify the competition thoroughly before setting SEO objectives and milestones and also the process that you are going to follow will vary depending on your field and competition.

Keyword targeting

Keyword research is a central aspect of Search Engine Optimization. It is the first step of planning a successful SEO campaign for your online business. The selected keywords can potentially bring visitors to your website and over time, help you achieve better rankings on the search engine results pages.
It is of utmost importance that you find the correct keywords to target otherwise all your SEO efforts can go in vain. Thankfully, there are tools that can help you with keyword research. Some SEO agencies and experts advocate not using tools because their results vary and not all tools are accurate.
Whichever way you use, the key is to identify the correct keywords based on key indicators such as search volume, popularity, length, and others.
There are a few tools that have proven to be closest to being accurate and are widely being used by SEO service providers in Dubai and around the world. These tools include SEMRush, AHREFs, UberSuggest, and others.
Lastly, you should keep in mind that stuffing keywords in your content is not going to help. You will have to strategically sprinkle keywords throughout your content in a way that doesn’t break the flow and the content, looks, and reads naturally.
Keyword stuffing will actually harm your SEO and you will have to bear the consequences in terms of lowered ranking and decreased visibility.

Website structure and design

The role of website structure and design for search engine optimization (SEO) is often overlooked. Most think that SEO only involves creating and optimizing the content, but this couldn't be farther from the truth. While it's true that content is king and comprises around 70-80% of SEO, it is still important to have a strong foundation to build upon.
Your website structure and design will have a huge impact on your SEO efforts as well as the website’s user experience. In relation to your site, structure refers to the architecture of your website, i.e., how you organize the navigation and information architecture, while design refers to everything else about your site that makes up the visual/aesthetic elements including the logo, color scheme, typography, images, etc.
Complicated website design makes it difficult for users to navigate and broken links can definitely put off anyone browsing through the website. If such things are happening constantly that means your website design is not at all user-friendly and consequently not SEO friendly.
Make sure to rectify these issues and always check the mobile responsiveness of the website. These steps would definitely help you rank better.

SEO budget

Budget is another factor that determines the timeframe and progress so you would have to define a budget that you can easily allocate to improving search engine optimization of your website. Your budget would indeed be the driving force to forecast the growth trajectory.

As aforementioned, this question does not have a straightforward answer and it is not possible to give a definite number in terms of months or years. The reason is that no two websites are the same and there are a lot of factors in play. You would have to first define where you’re starting from. What’s your website’s current standing.
To give you some perspective, it takes around six to twelve months to start seeing the results of SEO efforts. However, this is the general timeframe and it might vary depending on the factors such as the website’s current status, competition, region, etc.
If we want to divide the trajectory on a monthly basis, it will look something like this.

1st month

The first month would cover the research part. It would involve website audit, finding out technical bugs, keyword mapping, and strategizing.

2nd month

In the second month, you would make technical fixes and modifications depending on the results of the audit report. It would also involve building link profiles and writing high-quality content for your website. This is all part of SEO but you will not see results upfront and so you should continue fixing the website.

3rd month

By the third month, you would start pushing out a lot of content including blogs, FAQs, guest posts, etc. By the end of this month, you would start seeing a gradual increase in your ranking on search engines. The reason is that technical fixes will have made your website user-friendly and your off-page activities such as guest posting will start bringing extra traffic.

4th month

By the fourth month, with continuous optimization, your website would start getting increased traffic and the ranking would start increasing to a noticeable extent. Although the results would not be as good as you are expecting after twelve months mark but you would see your website appearing in SERPs. According to Google, you would be able to see quantifiable progress by the end of the fourth month.

5th month

By the 5th month, you should have incorporated social media into your overall SEO strategy and also PR activities. This would allow you to bring direct organic traffic to your websites from different social media platforms along with continuous on-page and off-page SEO activities.

6th month

By the end of the 6th month, you would see an increased number of people visiting your website and increased visibility. The results would be apparent and you’ll be able to see what has worked and what hasn’t. You should concentrate on creating valuable and engaging content both on-page and off-page. Your strategy would vary depending on your niche but make sure you follow a consistent strategy.
This is a generic SEO trajectory and your progress can vary depending on the aforementioned factors. So, you should continue putting in the effort and not get disheartened if it is taking a bit more time to see the results.
This is it for today’s blog. I hope you enjoyed reading it. Do share your feedback in the comments section and if you have any queries, reach out to me and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.
If you have a business website that you are trying to rank, reach out to Prism Digital, the best SEO agency in Dubai and our SEO experts would help you create tailored strategies that would skyrocket your ranking on the search engines and give your website the visibility it needs. Thank you and Goodbye.