How long does SEO take to work?

What actually happens, month by month

SEO is slow because it is cumulative, not because the work is slow. Here is a realistic shape for a local service business:

• Month 1 — audit, technical fixes, tracking set up properly, Google Business Profile sorted. Almost nothing visible happens. This is the month people get twitchy.
• Month 2 to 3 — content and on-page work lands. Long-tail terms start appearing in Search Console: the specific, low-volume, high-intent phrases. Traffic barely moves but impressions start climbing.
• Month 4 to 6 — local pack movement, traffic growth becomes obvious, and the first enquiries you can actually trace back to organic search arrive.
• Month 6 to 12 — the competitive terms become winnable. Work done in month two is still paying, and each new piece adds on top.
• Beyond 12 months — compounding. This is the part that makes SEO worth doing at all, and the part most people never get to because they stopped at month four.

What makes it faster or slower

Two businesses can start the same month and be a year apart in results. The variables:

• Domain age and history. A domain trading since 2009 moves faster than one registered last week.
• Existing content. A site with forty decent pages has something to work with; a five-page site needs building first.
• Competition. "Web design Mansfield" is winnable. "Web design" is not, at any budget we would quote.
• Technical state. If the site is slow and half of it is not indexed, the first two months go on fixing that before anything can rank.
• How much content you can produce. This is usually the real bottleneck, and it is usually on the client side.

How to tell it is working before the enquiries arrive

The enquiries are the point, but they are a lagging indicator. These move first, and if they are not moving by month three something is wrong:

• Impressions in Search Console — the number of times you appeared, even at position 40. This moves first, often within weeks.
• The number of distinct queries you appear for. Going from 60 to 300 queries is real progress even if traffic is flat.
• Average position on your target terms, tracked from a local point rather than a national average.
• Indexed pages. If you published twelve pages and Google has indexed four, that is the problem to solve.

When to conclude it is not working

Give it four months before judging, and six before making a decision. But if at month four your impressions have not moved, your indexed page count has not grown, and nobody can show you a list of what was actually done each month — that is enough evidence.

The most common failure is not incompetence, it is that £150 a month bought two hours of work and two hours a month is not enough to move a competitive market. Ask what you are actually getting for the money.