Anyone familiar with search engine optimization (SEO) will know there is no magic number of days, weeks or months before an SEO campaign begins to deliver search engine rankings.

A lot depends on your goals, what exactly you are doing in terms of SEO, as well as fundamental issues such as the competition for your targeted keywords, and whether you’re optimizing a website on a brand new domain, or are improving/maintaining your organic search engine rankings for an old website you’re redesigning.

According to Chris Boggs in Search Engine Watch, all things being equal, it will take anywhere from 3 to 9 months for rankings to appear for new domains.

The ramifications for redesigned websites are less clear, as so much depends on whether SEO is factored into the re-launch and what the re-design involves.

While it’s possible for a redesigned website to have new pages indexed within 12 hours, Chris Boggs says that, in his experience, maintaining rankings for all keywords can be difficult. Based on this, he indicates that you’ll probably lose traffic post-relaunch.

How do you minimize the damage? You factor SEO into the relaunch and monitor your analytics to see the impact of the relaunch on your rankings and traffic. That will enable you to make changes as necessary.

The upshot of this for relaunched sites is that you will probably be able to quickly maintain or improve your organic search engine rankings to the extent that you can maintain or improve your SEO efforts.

Source: Chris Boggs, “How Long Should It Take for SEO to Show Results?” Search Engine Watch, June 12, 2009

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 18th, 2009 at 12:00 am and is filed under Kikabink Lab, Search Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.