Have you often wondered how long it takes to see results from your SEO efforts? In this test, Matthew Bennett tests to see how long the wait is after making on-page changes before we can expect to see any ranking movement in the search results.
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Transcription below:
Hey everyone, welcome to this test publishing video. This is Test 663: How Long Does It Take For On-Page Changes To Affect The Search Results?
I mean this seems mundane, right? Like I posted and I submit my pages, I get them recrawled, I get them re-indexed, and then we sit and wait. We try to figure out the timeline or how long we should wait to see things run their course.
And a lot of times, what will happen is you'll actually do your changes, and then come the next day and you'll see a new ranking result, and you wait a couple hours, or a couple days, and then change some more stuff, and then you wait a couple days and change some more stuff. It's not a horrible process, right? It's not a horrible plan unless you're doing some insignificant stuff and I'll kind of show you why here, as this test rolls out.
This test was done by Matthew Bennett, it was done in March, April is when he marked it as complete and basically what we're doing is determining how long you should wait after making the on page changes before you expect to see the final - that's where it went, it went up or it went down, the final version of that.
And so what he did is he's in the water damage restoration market and he has a site up and he changed four of his landing pages - his location pages, and really just added some extra keywords to it, and some are related keywords to heading tags, it's just kind of little stuff that you would probably normally do in like a Page Optimizer Pro or Surfer one or a Coral Lite. So you're just going to change a couple of things here, add a little things here, and then he submitted that stuff for indexing.
Two of those four pages actually dropped out of the index, and he kind of surmised that as the internal linking was jacking that up, he doesn't have all that stuff set up in this particular site yet, but the other two did stay and you see how the rankings kind of fluctuated right here, from 69 to 26, and then everything just kind of rolled out in state, so 63 to 50 on the other page.
But you see the great difference, it's almost a month before things kind of settled out and then even in this first one, the volatility was still there. I think the internal linking really mess with that, but he made the changes, it went up and went back down and stayed, it shot up and then went back down, and then the volatility kicked in. So you can see that if he had made the changes on the third, looked at it on the seventh, and then did something, he may have never seen the shot up that made that increase sort of have never gone up. Or likewise, it could have given him a false indication - hey look, we're going up, and then he left it alone or he changed some more things to try to get up and it goes down, so he changes everything back, it goes up, and he's like - oh, I'm on the right track, and then everything goes back down again, right? When you look at it in a short time span, you're not necessarily getting the true representation of what's going on.
That's even more visible here, he made the changes here, got a little bit of an increase, and then it went down, and if he had reacted, that increase would have never came back. Then it went down again and disappeared, and then it came up to the 16 positions or 46 up to the top position and went down to 50. But if you started at 63, made a couple of little changes, and went up to 50, that's a pretty good result but he would not have noticed that and seen that he locked that in if he had changed it within two weeks, which is that case, the second of March or third of March all the way to the 16th, that's 13 days, so two weeks, essentially. If he had changed anything else, he would have never known what Google truly thought of that page by waiting that out.
It sort of validates what I teach people - if you're going to do a lot of on page SEO and you're going to be using a tool like Cora here, for instance, then you need to be planning on, I'm going to work on one page and then I'm going to leave it alone for like a month and I'm going to go work on my other pages. And as you rotate through a website, even a local website where you have, let's say 30 pages, it's one page a month that you can actually you mess with and by the time you're done with that last page, you can roll back and check on the changes where the results are the changes from the first page.
And that's actually really good for you because you're not sitting there and neurotically changing on page factors and sending back links and all that stuff, and wondering what is going on with my website, why am I ranking, why am I not, and driving yourself nuts.
This is a good test. I appreciate that he did it. The roll up is right there, you should pretty much just let it stabilize to see what is going on in a month is not really unheard of, three weeks to a month for backlinks is what I've been recommending. And then on page, you can pretty much count nowadays, it's going to be that way, as well.
I really do miss the old days where you publish, submit it to Google Search Console, it gets reset in the search results almost within like 12 hours, and then you know it's going to stay there because that's where we're Google wants it.
But the new algorithms in their systems in there, kicked in a lot of this SEO volatility and that's kind of what we're seeing right here. It's getting tested, dropping, tested, dropping, tested, dropping, tested. To stop this, I would actually go back and do some more on page or like he alluded to, add some more internal links to nail this down. Then you'll see what the internal links, it'll get steady right across the top and then you can go back and do some more on page or even a couple more internal links, and then the external backlinks in that process.
This one right here, it's ready for internal links, it'll bounce around some more, this is what I'm surmising, it'll bounce around some more, and then it will get up, and then he'll be ready for off page after that.
This is a good test, I like it. I'd like to see more like this. It looks simple, but it tells us a whole lot.
So what do you do with it? What do you do with this test? You need to monitor - find a couple of pages on your website, four is a good number or two, if you want to, it doesn't really matter, put it, find yourself a rank tracker that will give you this graph, make a change based off of any one of the tools or your knowledge, it's totally up to you, and then watch the 30 day graph, and see what your website's timeline is, what is Google grading your website.
If you have an older website, your timeline is going to be a little different, it's going to be faster, and you're going to lock in pretty quick, and it's going to stay steady. If you're a newer website, you're going to see something like this, if you're an older website, I would argue that this would be your normal, right?
So go figure that out, watch your two to four pages, get your timeline, and then you'll know how long you have to wait in between pages to see where you're on page stuff, in particular, is going to stick you when you make the changes off of it. 90% of your SEO is going to be your on page, you get all that locked in, and then you'd have to buy less backlinks, in the end, and that's where this is part of that process of being able to do that - figuring out if I make a change on X day, I can watch it but don't really make any more decisions and changes until I get to my 30 day mark, my Y day.
So take this view, look at what he did, and really just find your rank tracker where you can follow these graphs along, make those changes on the four pages, see what your timeline is, and now you know for that site, that particular domain, this is what Google likes about it, this how fast it's going to acknowledge the changes and re-assign ranking positions based off of your changes.
Hopefully that's helpful and we'll see you in the next one.