How long does SEO take to work?

3 months: technical and on-page improvements indexed; long-tail keywords starting to rank.
6 months: first commercial keywords on page 1; first inbound leads from organic.
12 months: compounding traffic; SEO becoming a primary lead source.
18+ months: topical authority — competitors can't catch up cheaply.

• Domain age and history. A fresh domain takes 3–6 months to earn baseline trust.
• Competition. "Plumber in a small Yorkshire town" — fast. "Solicitor London" — years.
• Content velocity. Publishing 2 strong pages a month beats 20 thin ones.
• Backlink profile. Without authority, even great content stalls on page 2.
• Technical health. A slow, poorly-structured site can hold back the entire programme.

1. Indexed pages in Google Search Console climbing weekly.
2. Impressions growing month-over-month, even if clicks lag.
3. Average ranking position improving for tracked keywords (e.g. 47 → 28 → 14).
4. More queries appearing in Search Console for terms you didn't target — Google is starting to trust you topically.

• Six months in and impressions are flat.
• Agency reports only show "tasks completed" and no traffic or ranking data.
• Backlinks being built look like blog comments, forum spam or PBNs.
• Content output is high but no page is targeting an actual commercial keyword.

You can compress the timeline by fixing technical issues upfront, prioritising commercial-intent pages over blog filler, and earning 3–5 genuinely strong backlinks early (digital PR, niche directories, partner sites). You can't compress it by buying links, spinning AI content at scale, or chasing 50 keywords at once — those reliably make it slower.