How long does SEO take to rank for a long tail keyword?

6 months to a year. To succeed online or as a traditional brick and mortar business, you need a process. For a new organic search campaign this is a multi-month effort. But it does not stop there, you need to keep the process going and continue to improve over time. I have found six months to be a good minimum time to establish a complete search focused process for any site. This does not mean it takes 6 months to rank, or you can just sit and do nothing after the 6 month period. It means it takes about 6 months to take care of the core tasks and estabish a process to continue to produce content your customers and potential customers want. Once the baseline is established it becomes easier to continue to gain new traffic and market share. It is like losing weight and getting into shape. It took me 108 days to drop 66 pounds. But I did not change what I did to get back in shape, I refined the process to become even better. So what does a 6 month plan look like? Month 1 – Establish a Benchmark Before making any changes you need to know how your site and your competitor site’s stand. There are many factors involved in this process. When we start managing SEO for a client, or ourselves, we do a deep dive to learn what we have to work with. This involves the following areas and more: Existing Content and its State The Site’s Technical Health How does the site convert traffic to customers Where is the site ranking now, what’s missing and what needs improvement What Keyword groups need to be addressed You will want to do this for your site as well as you primary competition. If you don’t know what you are competing against you have no idea how well you need to perform. Remember you are doing this to win a competition and if the other guy has all the traffic they are winning. You need to do better than they are. Month 2 – Establish Editorial Calendar Now you have hopefully corrected technical issues and identified areas to create content it is time to start making high quality content. So where do you start? Here is where a editorial calendar helps. Not only will it keep you focused on creating content targeting specific keywords, it helps you to see exactly what you need to create. Part of the first month’s effort was identifying target keyword clusters to target. These clusters should be used to plan your calendar. I like early wins, so I look for high volume, low competition keyword clusters. Targeting these first provide a faster feedback cycle to make adjustments for future content. Everyone’s calendar looks different, so I wont share one here. But it might be focusing on a keyword cluster each week. This includes publishing targeted articles, making videos, infographics and other media. It also means having a process in place to promote the new content, such as social media signals and publishing the content around various web 2.0 properties like SlideShare. It could mean publishing a new article each week, or maybe twice a day. It all depends on the niche and your available capacity to create new content. Month 3 – Establish Editorial Calendar Now you have a content creation process in place it is time to start building links to the content. This involves outreach and mannual efort. It should not be a one time process, but an ongoing effort for all the content on your site. Currating potential link sources is time consuming and sometimes fruitless. Stick with it, real links mean a lot for your ability to rank and not be out ranked by competition. Month 4-6 – Scale and Improve the Process By now the process should be established. This does not mean it is finished. It takes time to polish and keep a good organic search process working efficiently. Because the core process is proven it is time to step things up. Maybe you added a new article and updated one article a week. Now try doubling that effort and continue to experiment to see what converts the best. By the end of 6 months you should have a well oiled machine that will get consistent and reliable results. Don’t stop here, keep going. Remember, almost all niches evolve over time. This means there is always something new to create content. You will almost always need to update existing content. I update at least 15 articles each week on this site alone. The biggest gains will be these initial gains. But there are so many more to be had. You will continue to see more gains over time. What eventually starts happening is brand loyalty. This means you are present in search results more often, which translates to more consumer trust. A consumer that trust your brand it much more likely to buy from you than a new visitor. You want to be in the top 10 of every search result in your niche. This tells the consumer you are the market leader and thus easier to trust and buy products and services.