How long does it take SEO to work?

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This is an interesting question because it represents a very limited understanding of what search engine optimization really is. People who ask “how long before seo works?” don’t understand that there are many search engine optimization tasks which have an immediate payoff within 24 hours or less. These payoffs may change your revenues substantially or they may not appear to affect your bottom line at all.

Search engine optimization is not, never has been, and never will be about improving your revenues. That is what the business decision-making process is all about. SEO must support the business decision. SEO can NOT be the business decision. It doesn’t work that way. The universe has a very different understanding of SEO from that.

Here are a few examples of immediate-payoff SEO tasks:

Fixing robots.txt errors that prevent crawler access (or allow crawlers into the wrong content)
Eliminating unnecessary page meta directives that confuse crawlers
Reducing page load/rendering times on heavily crawled sites
Adding or updating listings in local search directories
Eliminating “PageRank sculpting” logic from Websites
Adding a link on your home page to your most recently created section or page

In fact there are endless things that have an immediate impact on your search visibility and performance. Your mileage may vary when it comes to having an immediate impact on your income or profitability.