We’re often asked the question, and it’s a question with so many variables that it’s quite hard to answer, if we’re honest.
But because we’re actually quite nice and we’re all about giving our customer base a solid knowledge of what we do, we’ve put together three scenarios that explain how long local SEO might take with different factors at play.
Scenario 1: Website Slapped with a Manual Penalty
Secured a new client.
Brilliant.
Oh, wait…the site has been slapped to death with a Manual Penalty by Google because they have a questionable link profile, which means they won’t even be appearing for search terms that include the business name.
The level of work on our end very much depends on the state of the site, but let’s assume it’s the worst of the worst. Running with the idea that it probably couldn’t be any worse, the work needed to reverse this would range from anywhere from a few days to a full working week.
But that’s just the elements we can control. Google is like a person who’s been unlucky in love – it takes a while to rebuild their trust and this process might well take 2-3 months, however the differences will start to become apparent within 4-6 weeks.
Scenario 2: A Brand New Website
You’ve landed a brand new business that doesn’t have a website or local listings on Google, Bing or Yahoo.
A clean slate.
But how long will it take to get going?
Let’s take the example of a fairly competitive sector in a busy area: let’s say opticians in Northampton. There are pros and cons to brand new websites; i.e. there will be no penalties or suspicious links to remove, but it would mean starting from scratch.
We estimate that within a competitive environment, it might take 2-3 months to see significant rankings when starting from zero. Of course for a less competitive sector we can achieve this within a much quicker time frame, even starting to see competitive rankings with the first 3-4 weeks.
The force of the competition around a start-up is obviously a huge factor in how quickly a site can begin to see competitive rankings. However, when you go down the dapa route we can realistically suggest that any start-up can be competitive in any sector within 6 months.
Scenario 3: Clients Who Have Seen No Improvements at Another Company
We’ve had a fair few client’s coming to us and telling us that they have been with: ‘so and so for this many months, and we’ve seen no changes’. So how would we remedy this and how long will it take?
Assessing what the previous company has been doing and determining why it’s fallen flat, will be the first priority.
We’ve decided on a different direction to the previous company, and there are several changes that we’d need to make.
Let’s say we’d need to remove excess landing pages and plant targeted keyword landing pages in their place, and we’d need to make all the onsite changes in conjunction with the direction we’d decided to travel.
We estimate that this may take anywhere from 3-6 months depending on the changes that we’ve decided to implement.
Asking the question: ‘How long does local optimisation take?’ Is a broad one. Ultimately it’s dependent on so many varying factors, so the answer can’t be truly answered, except in individual cases.
So if you couldn’t find the answers you were looking for within this post, why not give us a bell? We’re always happy to hear from new people.
The number’s at the top by the way…just saying.
