Google released a “How to Hire an SEO” video this week, and one of the things mentioned is how long it takes for a site to see improvements due to SEO changes.

Here is what Maile Oyhe said:

In most cases, the SEO will need four months to a year to help your business first implement improvements and then see potential benefit.

It is interesting that Google is setting a timeline for how long it takes for an SEO to identify issues, make the changes and then see the improvements in the search result rankings after those changes are implemented.  This is often a question that comes up, especially for those either brand new to the SEO industry, or by site owners who are either wanting to know how fast changes can be seen in the results.

It also puts a bit of emphasis on the time it actually takes for average sites to see those changes.  Many site owners want results fast, but those are sometimes unrealistic if those sites don’t want to have spam issues further down the road, but site owners inexperienced with any kind of SEO might not realize “I want rankings in 2 weeks” is unrealistic in all but the most uncompetitive markets and will likely result in either a algorithmic demotion or manual action.

There are a ton of spammier SEOs that offer “guarantees” that sites will begin ranking higher within days or weeks, but often this means either using aggressive spam techniques or paying for those “rankings” via Google AdWords.

Of course, there are some changes where results will be seen much faster – such as the accidental use of a noindex tag or blocking Googlebot from crawling.  In those cases, rankings – or at the very least, indexing,  can be seen almost immediately.

Here is the video: