How long does it really take for SEO to work? Well, let’s look at the data. We track the organic search traffic for over 100 million domains. Of those 100 million domains, a bit more than 1 million have given us direct access to their analytics. Of those 1 million sites, we know through our software 42,391 actively focus on their SEO. We know this because they continually push out new content, focus on optimizing their code, even building links, etc... With those 42,391 websites on average, they saw their organic traffic: Increase by 11.4% in the first 6 months. Increase another 9.58% in the next 6 months. Increase a whopping 49.4% in year two over year 1. An increase of 30.7% in year 3 over year 2 results. Grow even a further 13.5% in year 4 over year 3. We couldn’t look past year 4 as we don’t have enough data. But based on the above data, year 2 is when a lot of companies see growth in their SEO traffic. Now this doesn’t mean you can’t get amazing growth in year 1 or even year 3 or 4. The more time and energy you spend on SEO the more potential traffic you can get. But keep in mind it just takes time for the algorithms to show you love. SEO isn’t instant traffic. Consistency is the key. The reason most companies feel SEO is hard is that they aren’t willing to put in the consistent effort for years. Or that they just quit too early because they feel the results aren't worth the effort.