It takes some time to make sure that your website is optimized for search engines, so it's natural to want to see results quickly. Unfortunately, that's just not always the case when it comes to SEO. Determining how long does local SEO take is dependent on various factors.
So how long does local SEO take? Typically, you should start seeing your website page in search after 1-2 weeks, and if you did a good job, you should be on the first page of Google in 4-6 weeks. The key is to make sure that you have optimized your page in the best ways to make sure that you can compete with the sites that are already ranking on page one.
Try my FREE Local SEO Meta Tag Generator to help you write the best Local SEO tags and descriptions!
Local SEO Tips for Ranking in Google Quickly
No one wants to wait months to see the fruit of their labor, especially when it means making more money in business. The more free traffic you can get from Google to your website, the more potential clients your business can obtain. Depending on how well you optimize your site, you could rank in as little as a few weeks.
Here are some tips to help you rank faster for local SEO!
Focus on one page at a time. Remember that Google doesn't rank websites, they rank web pages. Each of your pages needs to be optimized to rank for their respective local keywords. You should go through your site and pick the most important products/services that you want to rank for and start with those pages first. This will likely be your highest money-making product or service.
Check out the competition. There is nothing wrong with spying on your competitors to see what they're doing and how they did it. Do a quick Google search for your local keyword to see how your competition got to the top of Google. Here are a few things to take note of:
How often do they use local keywords on their page?
What do their page titles and descriptions look like? (Tip: After navigating to your competitor's website, right-click on the webpage and click "view source". From here you can see the source code with their SEO meta tags.)
Follow Local SEO on-page optimization best practices. People like to make this more complicated than it needs to be. You don't need to get a bunch of backlinks and do a bunch of circus tricks to rank your site. Just follow the basic best practices like setting up your meta tags, optimizing your content and headings, adding alt tags to images, etc and you'll be good to go!
What If My Local SEO Isn't Working After 4-6 Weeks?
If your site still isn't ranking as high as you would like even after 4-6 weeks, don't fret. Some niches and industries just take longer to break into on Google.
If I were working on your SEO and need to analyze what might need to be changed, I would start by taking a look at the bullet point items in the previous section. How complete is your on-page SEO? How does your site compare to competitors?
One really easy thing to look for is how early in the meta tag and page content your do local keywords appear. Remember that Google reads your website from top to bottom and left to right, so you can check to see how long it will take for Google to see your keywords.
Another thing to consider is adding more local keyword-rich content to your page. It could be that Google just needs a little bit more content to read and crawl in order for it to have a better understanding of your business.
It doesn't always take major changes to get that ranking up. Sometimes just small tweaks can mean all the world.
If you have some questions about this topic, feel free to reach out! You can contact me here!
