How Long SEO Takes for a Trade Business, and What Should Happen Each Month

You are three months in. The invoices have cleared. Somebody sends you a report with green arrows on it every month, and the phone is doing roughly what it was doing before you signed anything. You cannot tell whether you are early or whether you are being taken, and nobody in the conversation has any interest in helping you tell the difference.

Or you have not started yet, and the only question you actually want answered is how long until it pays.

How long does SEO take to work?

Anybody who answers that with a number is quoting you a sales figure, not a measurement. We are not going to do it.

What you can have instead is better than a promise, because you can check it. Month by month, there are things that should be visibly different about your business online. Some of them you can open in your own browser tonight. If those things are happening, the work is happening, whatever the phone is doing this week. If they are not, you have your answer months before any timeline would have given it to you.

An agency willing to tell you what its own first few months look like, in advance, is an agency you can hold to something. That is the point of the rest of this page.

Why will nobody give me a straight number?

Because the two things that decide it belong to Google and to your competitors, and neither one is taking instructions from your marketing company.

A brand new domain is the clearest case. It has no history. Google has never seen it, and has no reason yet to trust it against a company that has been at the same address online for years. That is a real constraint and it is worth saying plainly rather than dressing up. It is not an excuse either, because it changes with work.

The rest of it is your market. A trade with three serious competitors in your city is a different job from a trade with thirty, and both differ again from a search stacked with directories. None of that is knowable from a sales call, which is exactly why a number given on a sales call is worth nothing.

What should be different at the end of the first month?

Things should exist that did not exist before, and you should be able to see every one of them yourself.

Pages, first. Real ones, for the services you actually sell and the places you actually go, written in the words your customers use rather than the words in your license.

Your Google Business Profile should be claimed and verified in your name, with your categories, your hours, your service area and your own photographs on it. Your name, not the agency's. If you ever part company, that profile goes with you.

The site should be registered with Google's own tools so that somebody can see what Google is doing with it, and the phone number and forms should be tracked so a call can be counted when it arrives. And you should hold the logins to all of it.

None of that is a result. It is the material results are made from. But you can verify every item without trusting a single word anyone tells you, which makes the first month the easiest month of all to check.

What should be different in the second month?

Your pages should be findable in Google at all, which is a separate problem from being ranked well.

Those two get run together constantly and they are not the same. A page has to be crawled and stored by Google before it can compete for anything. Until that happens it is not losing to your competitors, it is not in the race. Take a full sentence off one of your own pages, put it in quotation marks, and search it. If your page comes back, Google has it. If nothing comes back weeks after that page was published, that is a specific question to ask, and a competent agency will already be working on it rather than hearing about it from you.

So the second month is about coverage: how many of the pages built are actually in. Your agency can show you that on a screen, and it moves whether or not anything is ranking yet.

Why is my Google Business Profile moving before my website?

Because it is a separate property from your website, and for local trade work it often moves first.

The map listings and the ordinary blue links underneath them are two different systems being decided in two different ways. Your profile has its own information, its own reviews, its own photographs, its own service area. Somebody who taps your listing and calls from it never touches your website at all. That is why early movement in local work frequently shows up on the profile while the site is still being read by Google, and why an agency that treats the profile as an afterthought has left the fastest thing on the table.

It has been three months and nothing has happened. Have I been had?

Maybe not. Here are the questions that separate slow from nothing, and none of them require you to know anything about SEO.

Can somebody name the pages that have been published since you started, and can you open them? Is your profile claimed in your name, complete, and getting photographs and posts? Are your pages in Google when you search a sentence from them? Can you see a record of calls and form submissions, with dates? Has anyone told you, in plain words, which searches they are trying to win and why those ones?

Slow work answers all five. Nothing answers none of them. An agency that cannot answer them does not have a patience problem, and no amount of additional months is going to fix it.

An agency showed me number one rankings. Why is the phone quiet?

Because rank checking software is not a customer, and it is very good at looking like progress.

The checks come from a desktop, the same phrase over and over, and not once does anything get clicked. It is a robot confirming that a page sits at a position. A person who actually needs a tradesman is usually on a phone, and is going to tap the number before they put the phone down. A dashboard full of number ones can sit on top of a business where nothing has changed.

Rankings are not the deliverable. They are an indicator, and only sometimes.

What should I judge this on instead?

Calls and inquiries that are on record, with two things taken out first.

Take out brand searches. Somebody who typed your company name already knew who you were, and counting them flatters everybody involved. Take out the rank checking robots, which visit sites all day and never became a job in anyone's history. What is left is people who were looking for the work you do, found you, and did something about it. That is the number.

Should I compare this month to last month?

No. Compare this month to the same month a year ago.

Demand in the trades moves with the season, and the season is louder than any marketing. A busy month tells you the weather turned. A quiet month tells you it turned back. Judge one against the other and you will spend more on a month that would have been busy anyway and cut a program in the month before your season starts. The same month against the same month last year is the only comparison where the weather is roughly held still, which is the only way to see what actually changed.

Where does this start?

With somebody looking at what you already have and telling you honestly whether it can do this.

If you run a trade business in Southern California and you want to know what the first months would actually consist of before you commit to anything, our contractor marketing agency page sets out how we work and what it costs.

Call, text, or send us your website address. We will tell you what we see.