It also requires a lot of observation and data collection. Due to competition, SEO takes a while to climb the rankings. It can also be difficult to catch up with the competition due to the fact that they have been around longer. If a website continues to work in SEO, it's still a lot of steps ahead.
For the best of terms, there can be hundreds and even thousands of competing sites. Today, SEO is increasingly driven by natural language search, that is, people who perform searches that look more like normal questions than two or three keywords. This is because people use tools like Siri and Google Now to say their searches, rather than typing them in. And because people include more detail in their typed searches as they search for what they are looking for faster.
These keywords are much easier to rank for, because they're not as competitive. They are much more relevant because they include more detail and, therefore, traffic for these keywords is converted at a higher rate. And taken together, the number of long-tail searches often adds up to a lot more searches than you'd get with your “golden keywords.” So, the goal, when it comes to rankings, is not to rank some top keywords that stay the same over time, but to focus on a much larger number of natural language searches that are growing and changing rapidly. In a nutshell, SEO is time-consuming because search engine algorithms have become very sophisticated.
You can no longer end up on the first page of a SERP simply by filling your page with keywords. A strong SEO strategy now has many more aspects and factors that influence the results and ranking of a page. Whether or not you're working on a new domain is one of the key factors that influences the time it takes to see SEO results. That's why you should only hire SEO companies or SEO professionals who focus on results, rather than results.
In my article on on-page vs off-page SEO, I explain how the most influential type of off-page SEO is the number and quality of backlinks to your website. According to Mangools, “Keyword difficulty (also known as keyword competition or SEO difficulty) is an SEO metric that estimates how difficult it is to rank for a keyword. Before we analyze exactly how long it takes SEO to have an impact on your business, let's first look at why SEO takes to show results.
