Why we plan on six months
Six months is long enough for Google to recrawl the changed pages, test them in its results and settle them, and short enough to judge the work on facts. Google's own page about hiring an SEO gives a wider range, four months to a year, because it covers every kind of site, new domains and national searches included. Either way, a promise of first-page results in a few weeks for a contested search should make you cautious.
What can move within weeks
- Pages Google already shows on page two. A better title and a clearer answer on a page with impressions can move it within weeks of Google recrawling it.
- Your Business Profile. A verified, complete profile with the right category can start appearing on the map for nearby searches quickly.
- Technical blockers. When a noindex tag or a robots.txt rule was hiding important pages, removing it can bring them back as soon as they are recrawled.
- Searches for your own name, once the site and profile are consistent.
What takes months
- Contested national searches, where established competitors have years of content and links.
- A new domain, which Google needs time to trust.
- Links, which are earned one by one and counted only once Google finds them.
- Recovery after a penalty, a hack or a redesign that lost its redirects.
A typical timeline
For a business site with an existing domain, starting from a reasonable base:
- Month one: audit, technical fixes, Business Profile completed, titles of key pages rewritten.
- Months two and three: impressions rise in Search Console, local searches start to move, new pages are published.
- Months four to six: clicks and enquiries follow for precise and local searches, links start to come in.
- Month six: a review of what moved and what did not, and the plan for broader searches, which keep moving as long as the site improves and earns links.
On our own site, launched on a new domain in 2025, the first results for its name and for "seo morocco" came after about three months. Broader French searches took longer, and still need more links.
What changes the pace
- How contested your searches are, and how strong the sites already ranking are.
- The state the site starts in: a clean site moves faster than one that needs rebuilding.
- How quickly changes are made: a month waiting for a developer is a month lost.
- Whether you can earn links and reviews steadily.
How to tell if it is working
Look at Search Console rather than checking positions by hand, which change with location and device. In order, you should see: more pages indexed, then more impressions, then a better average position on the searches you target, then more clicks, then more enquiries. If impressions are not rising after three months of work, ask why.