What can change quickly
- Fixing something broken. A page Google couldn’t index, a site that blocked search engines by mistake, a missing title: once fixed and recrawled, the effect can show up within days or a couple of weeks.
- Your Google Business Profile. Correct categories, hours and a verified profile can change what shows in the map results fairly quickly.
- Small towns and specific searches. “Roof repair Surfside Beach” has far less competition than “roofer Myrtle Beach”. Good pages for specific searches can rank within weeks.
What takes months
- Competitive searches in bigger towns. Here you’re competing with businesses that have had good sites and hundreds of reviews for years.
- A brand new website or domain. Google needs time to learn what a new site is about and whether people find it useful.
- Reviews and reputation. These build at the pace your business does.
How to tell it’s working before it ranks
Watch impressions in Google Search Console. Before a page climbs to page one, it usually starts appearing for more searches further down. Rising impressions with flat clicks means you’re on the way; rising clicks means you’re there. We track our own site and our clients’ sites this way, from the Performance export each month.
Red flags
- A guaranteed ranking. Google itself says nobody can guarantee one.
- Hundreds of backlinks for a low monthly price. Bought links are against Google’s spam policies.
- Hundreds of near-identical town pages. Google calls this doorway abuse.
- Reports with numbers but no Search Console data. If they won’t show you Google’s own numbers, ask why.
Written by Nikita Huttenlocher, founder and lead engineer at Huttenlocher Technologies, a web design and software company in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.