SEO isn’t an overnight strategy. The first few months are dedicated to making updates to your site and waiting for the search engine spiders to crawl and index the changes. Depending on your website, the amount of work it requires, and the crawl frequency of the search engine spiders, it typically takes 3-9 months to begin seeing new rankings.

Traffic is typically a direct result of an increase in rankings. Once your rankings begin to increase, you will also begin to see gradual increases in traffic to your website. Keep in mind that new rankings and traffic are not instantaneous, it takes a few months to complete the necessary updates and get them indexed before you will begin to see these increases.

Achieving the rankings is only half the battle. Since the search engines are constantly evolving and updating their algorithms, your rankings can fluctuate from one day to the next. Maintaining current rankings is just as involved as getting new ones; it takes constant research, updates, and testing to keep your URL ranking in the top positions. Discontinuing SEO after you’ve achieved rankings will result in a loss of rankings fairly quickly.