How long does SEO take for a local business?

For most local businesses, Google Business Profile changes start to show up within four to six weeks. Rankings across a whole service area usually take three to six months to move in a way you can see, and they keep building after that. The exact timing depends on your market, your competition and where your website and profile are starting from.

Be careful with anyone who promises page one within a month. Google says it plainly in its own guide to hiring an SEO: "No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google."

What changes the timeline

• Where you're starting from. A brand new website has to be found and indexed before it can rank for anything. A site that's been around for years usually moves faster once the pages are fixed.
• How many businesses you're up against. A plumber in a big county has more competition than a window cleaner in a small town, and it takes longer to pass a company that's been collecting reviews for ten years.
• Reviews. If the businesses above you have hundreds of reviews and you have twenty, the map rankings will be slower to move until that gap closes.
• How far the towns are. Ranking in the town where your business is located comes first. Towns ten or fifteen miles away take longer, because Google weighs how close a business is to the person searching.
• What your site has on it. A site with a page for each service and each main town gives Google more to work with than a single page that lists everything.

What usually happens month by month

Month one is setup. The profile gets cleaned up, the pages get built or fixed, and the site gets submitted to Google and Bing. Not much changes in the rankings yet.

Months two and three are when your site starts showing up in more searches. The number of times you appear in Google (called impressions) usually goes up before calls do, because you're showing up on page two or three at first.

Months three to six are when rankings move enough to bring in calls, as pages climb onto the first page and the profile shows in the map more often.

After six months, the work keeps building. More reviews, more pages and more history all add up.

Three real examples

These are websites we built and manage, with numbers taken from Google Search Console, Local Falcon rank grids and DataForSEO.

For Prime Power Wash in New Jersey, the number of searches where the site showed on the first page of Google was zero in April and May. It was 2 in June, 5 in July, 8 in August and 13 in September.

Trapani Electric's website launched in April. In its first few days live, it showed up in Google searches 93 times. In August it showed up 6,222 times.

Applewood Exterior Cleaning in Pomfret, Connecticut was already doing well on the map. We check 49 spots around its service area for "pressure washing pomfret ct." In May it was in the top three at 31 of those spots. In June that fell to 19, and by September it was in the top three at 41 of them. Progress isn't a straight line, and a bad month in the middle is normal.

How to tell it's working before the calls come

• Your impressions in Google Search Console are going up month over month.
• Your rank grid shows you in the map at more spots around your service area.
• More of your pages show up in Search Console as indexed.
• Your Business Profile performance report shows more searches and more profile views.

If none of those numbers have moved after three or four months, it's worth asking what's being done and why.

What you can do to help it along

• Ask every customer for a review, and send your review link right after the job.
• Answer the phone or call back quickly. More rankings don't help if the calls go to voicemail, which is why we set up missed call text back for clients.
• Send your SEO company photos from real jobs. They make the pages and the profile stronger.
• Tell them when you add a service or start working in a new town.

If you're weighing what local SEO should cost for that timeline, our post on how much local SEO costs breaks it down. You can also use our local SEO checklist to see where your business stands today.