Google’s John Mueller has an answer for those wondering about how long SEO takes to kick in. In the latest episode of Ask Googlebot on YouTube, he discusses recent changes that are being made and what it means for your website’s ranking process as well as some tips you can use to help with this transition period.
Despite being a question with an answer that can vary wildly, Mueller is not going to give you any guesses. Instead of his normal “, it depends” response, he does have some advice for making your website more search engine friendly in the meantime.
One of the most important things any site owner can do to ensure their ranking in Google Search won’t take longer than it has to is make sure that they have all content indexed and well-crawled.
One way Mueller suggests for how long SEO takes is by making sure your site’s content gets crawled as quickly as possible, which will help expedite indexing.
Mueller tackles the question of how to speed up page load times by breaking his answer down into two parts: indexing and speeding things up. He first explains that when a new webpage is published, it can take anywhere from __ amount of time for Google’s bots to pick it up and list it in their search engine results pages (SERP). Mueller suspects the best content will be picked up within about 7 days or so but there are some exceptions where he has observed sites not being indexed at all after 4 weeks even though they have plenty of high-quality articles on them. The second part deals with actually making sure your site loads as fast as possible once you get listed in SERP – this means reducing loading speeds through factors.
Sometimes there are technical issues on the web that make it take longer, and sometimes Google’s systems get busy with other things. But don’t let this slow you down! There are a few simple steps site owners can take to help speed up crawling and indexing:
- Optimize content for search engines by using SEO best practices (keyword density, URL structure) – Add links from within your website to related pages or posts when appropriate
To speed things up and make sure your site is crawling as efficiently as possible, do the following: Prevent server overload by making sure that your servers can handle a reasonable number of requests in a timely manner. When you have an overwhelming influx of traffic to any one page on your website or blog, it’s going to slow down everything including search engine indexing rates because they get bogged down too.
Have a prominent link to your new pages on the site. This will help Google’s system recognize what you think is important, and make it easier for them to prioritize crawling and indexing!
One of the most common reasons that search engines rank sites lower is because they have to crawl all over a site, which takes up more time and resources. To avoid this issue, take some time to go through your website and clean out any unnecessary URLs you no longer need for it.
Keep the quality of your website high by considering some important aspects. For example, how easy will it be for Google to spot a site? This is crucial in determining where that page ranks on search engine results pages (SERPs). If you want more traffic from major online platforms like Facebook or YouTube, make sure they can see what you have going on!
Aside from getting technical, Mueller emphasizes the importance of keeping eye on overall website quality.
The internet is a vast black hole, and as you grow and explore the depths of its expanse on your quest for knowledge there’s no telling what will be found. Some pages may never see an index from Google or any other search engine! Other times, this means that it might not show up in searches at all; but even when content does appear to have been indexed (still with some uncertainty) we can’t predict how long it’ll stay within sight.