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SEO Takes Time
Posted by on March 3, 2026 at 9:04 pmJust want to share a personal win and first-hand observation of the whole "SEO takes time" thing.
Had a customer for 1 year in a relatively non-competitive industry. I stuck to the script, worked my butt off, and was underwhelmed by the results after a full year. Little-to-no improvements. The niche wasn't too competitive. What's more, Google was ranking things weirdly. Ranking the wrong pages with the wrong intents, and just simply not responding to my positive SEO efforts. On paper, there was no reason the couple competitors were outranking us for their most coveted keywords.
After a year, the customer let me go on good terms. They were pursuing another business venture. While they were "happy enough" and on good terms, in the back of my mind i was kicking myself thinking i let them down.
Fast forward 1 more year, the old customer contacted me, saying their company is under new management, and that new manager wanted to contact me about resuming SEO services (got the meeting tomorrow, fingers crossed)..
But here's the kicker. 1 year after stopping their SEO, I checked the numbers again. They're ranking the proper page for their top target, #1 organically, with a featured reviews snippet.. The holy grail.
My takeaway – SEO takes time not just for the work to compound, but Google can take a long time to run their algorithm, and adjust the SERPS accordingly. In my case, it took about a full year. The site sat untouched, but during that year, all the work from the preceding year finally accrued.
I've also noticed that the lag in being repaid for SEO efforts seems to be niche-dependent. My theory – Some niches are too small or uninteresting to Google. So they take their sweet time expending resources to run their algorithm and adjust the SERPS accordingly.
Anyways, I'm stoked. The work i did from a long time ago finally paid off, and sounds like they'll be hiring me back.. A customer that I was kind of kicking myself for not doing a good job on.
Trust the process, keep your nose to the grindstone, and communicate to customers that SEO can take 1+ years to deliver results.
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1 Reply
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It took me 2 years, but then once they hit number one, they’ve almost doubled their revenue every year.
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Thanks, Sherlock.
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>My takeaway – SEO takes time not just for the work to compound, but Google can take a long time to run their algorithm, and adjust the SERPS accordingly
Sorry but this is patently untrue. Pages pass through the indexing systems in seconds.
Google is made up of algorithms – not website appreciation committees that meet monthly.
>t. My theory – Some niches are too small or uninteresting to Google. So they take their sweet time expending resources to run their algorithm and adjust the SERPS accordingly.
This is easy to test – take the same content and put it on a domain with Topical Authority that covers that content – it will rank faster.
The reason people observe time: is that they cannot see what is happening upstream from the page. And this observation is as old as the hills. Either a link you had placed was on a page that suddenly started getting traffic or another page started ranking higher and started getting clicks – giving that page authority and it passed it to the next.
But there is no “niche” or topic that Google needs more time for. IT doesnt segment sites (apart from YMYL and these are much, much narrower that people think) – its largely agnostic to most content types.
> and communicate to customers that SEO can take 1+ years to deliver results.
If you’re in this position, you simply have an authority access issue
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