How long does SEO take for eCom brands?

So what exactly does it depend on?

Time limiting dependant factors for SEO growth

SEO neglect

How the level of SEO neglect impacts the time it takes for changes to have an impact takes the shape of a modified inverted U. If your SEO is completely fine, there’s likely not many silver bullets that will immediately improve things so you’re more reliant on longer term tactics. With this being said, you may already be experiencing the benefits of having a strong SEO setup. The relative difference in growth may therefore take longer, but your baseline is higher than otherwise.

Too much SEO neglect and you’re fighting against the tide, often having to overcome multiple barriers before getting things into a position to have an impact. Until you earn the trust of search engines, it can be a long time until you see results.

Brand impact

Brand has a much more linear relationship - if you have a big, recognised brand this generally makes changes much quicker to see an impact from.

Backlink profile strength

Having a strong backlink profile is another aspect that can influence how long SEO takes to have an impact for eCom brands. Due to there being so many varying ” factors that influence the “strength” of a backlink profile this is harder to define than brand impact, however, will be a combination of:

● Number of backlinks

● Authority of backlinks

● Relevance of backlinks

● Combination of attributes (nofollow, affiliates)

● Landing pages links are pointing to (homepage, category pages, PDPs, blogs etc)

● Freshness of links

Age of domain

Google has often denied that a “sandbox” exists that prevents new sites from ranking, but in leaked files there were signals for both domain registration date and hostAge - both indicative of some level of domain age related influence on ranking performance.

To what extent this impacts performance, but logically it makes sense for Google to limit performance of new domains until certain trust factors have been secured.

The combination of these factors will have a multiplier/dampening factor on the speed of results, combined with what the available issues there are to fix and opportunities to take advantage of!

Competitors

SEO is a zero-sum game which means for one website to gain rankings, others must lose rankings. Therefore SEO success and how long it takes to see results depends not just on what you do, but what your competitors are doing too. Although not only a war of attrition, this is a crucial external consideration when analysing how long it will take to see results. If you are in a market with established competitors who have been doing, and are still doing, (good) SEO it will likely take much longer to see results than if you are investing and competitors are not.

What constitutes results?

Following “It depends” as an answer, the next most common answer around how long it takes to see SEO results is probably along the lines of “It’s a long term strategy, probably about 6 months”. But this also depends on what you consider results to be.

We tier our metrics into three stages of the metric ladder:

● Tier 3 - Delivery based input metrics - items that we know will lead to success. Number & ICE score of technical tickets, number of content created, number of links built (based on the metrics listed above). Although you would be hard pressed to argue that these alone constitute any form of result, knowing that the items that are known to influence performance increases are getting implemented means we can have a fair idea of success in the coming months. This tends to be the focus for the first 3 months.

● Tier 2 - Performance indicators of success, that are not the primary goal but indicate that a strategy is working and heading in the right direction - keyword ranking improvements for core term, number of keywords ranking, visibility increases. A successful strategy should generally see improvements in tier 2 metrics within the first 3-6 months.

● Tier 1 - Typical performance metrics that most eCommerce brands have as primary KPIs. Organic sessions, revenue, subscriptions, conversions, ROI etc. Improvements in these metrics generally begin to be seen from 6 months onwards into an SEO campaign.

Common issues/opportunities & timeframes for eCom SEO results

As well as the above, there are certain items that we have found can have more of an immediate impact than others in terms of how long they take to show performance increases.

Although certainly not a rule; we have found that generally the following timeframes  can be associated with the following technical items. As well as the influencing factors above, the time these items take also depends on the individual scale of the issue. For example, if you have a single hreflang error on your site, you will likely see no change from fixing it; if you have no hreflang and implement it correctly, the impact will likely be much larger.

 0-2 months

- Server side rendering key features of the site (global navigation, PDPs etc)

- On page optimisations for key pages (page titles, h1s, on-page content)

- Hreflang updates (websites ranking in the correct locales)

- Major speed/Core Web Vital improvements

3-6 months

- New category page creation

- Major internal linking improvements (breadcrumbs, global navigation)

- Specific content creation ranking and generating traffic

- Crawling/indexing improvements (robots disallow/noindex)

6 months+

- Wider impact of a content strategy

- Wider EEAT considerations

- Structured data improvements (specific items may see impact quicker, for example implementing AggregateRating on Product schema to see review stars in SERPs).

-  General technical health clean up (301s, 404s)

In conclusion, a simple question of “How long will it take to see SEO results” can have a rather complicated answer, which may be why often SEOs simply say “it depends”. You could argue that this whole article is a convoluted way of simply saying “it depends''! However, hopefully this gives some insights into what can impact the timeline of SEO results, which can be an immensely successful performance channel in the medium-long term.

About the author:

Daniel is Delivery Director at specialist eCom SEO agency NOVOS. He’s worked with a huge range of eCom brands to develop & execute successful SEO strategies and knows the trials & tribulations that can occur long the way (and how to navigate past them)!

Daniel has a passion for behavioural science and how small variations in how information is communicated online can alter customer decision making. Outside of SEO Daniel can be found playing rugby, running, or walking his red working cocker spaniel Jasper.