The discovery process begins with a known list of URLs and search engines can discover these in several ways:

Rendering is when search engines try to understand and extract key information from the crawled pages. In order to do this, they have to run the page’s code to understand how it looks to users.

Few people outside of the search engines’ teams themselves know too many details about this process. But all that is required at this stage is to know is that it involves extracting links and storing content for indexing.

Indexing is when processed information from crawled pages gets added to a search index.

The search index is what one searches when he/she uses a search engine. That’s why getting indexed in the major search engines such as Google is so important for business. Users can’t find businesses unless they’re in the index.

Google also needs a way to shortlist the 400 billion landing pages for every keyword from billions of users worldwide to a more manageable number. This is where the search engine algorithms come into play.

Search Engine Algorithms are formulas that match the users keyword to relevant landing pages stored the index in the form of search results. The search results are prioritised according to said search engine algorithms, with the result at the top being considered the single most relevant and useful for the any one keyword in question.

One of the primary advantages of SEO is that the organic traffic is free of charge. In other words, it can take a substantial investment of time and effort to get started and some patience to see a return on investment (ROI). However, once you start ranking, you’ll receive free traffic at no additional cost per click. Unlike paid advertising which is seen as a tap because you can switch the spending and subsequently the traffic on and off, SEO is a waterfall because it brings in new traffic consistently over the long term.

Another advantage is the sustainability of organic traffic. Once you start ranking through SEO, the rewards are often there to stay without the need for continuous spending and reinvestment. Building a sustainable stream of highly targeted organic traffic to your website could be the difference between your business surviving or seeing a downfall in times of economic uncertainties. In other words, while in the case of PPC, you may be forced to switch off the tap on ad spending, with SEO you may find yourself in a position where a decrease in spending won’t necessarily bring traffic drops.

Unlike more traditional channels SEO is Highly Targeted and has the capacity to target users in various stages of the decision-making funnel. Results served via organic search are inherently relevant to the search query that is entered by the user, allowing you to target potential customers looking for your products or services. SEO Managers can target different Search Intents by creating types of content that suit user needs determined by the keywords they are searching for at different stages in their decision-making cycle of buying a product or service.

SEO can also reinforce your brand-building and traditional advertising initiatives. You can use SEO to reinforce your brand at different stages in the decision-making cycle, and namely Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action. You may also use SEO to reinforce your traditional marketing initiatives by encouraging users to search for your Brand, as opposed to asking them to visit a website.

SEO and Paid Search can have synergies, providing the perfect opportunity for sharing resources considering in both cases customers use keywords to find products or services on the same platform with organic and paid search results being listed side by side. As previously stated SEO requires time while Paid Search is instant, which is why it’s so important to align the strategies and the reporting of the two. When used together, PPC and SEO efforts can indirectly have an impact on each other as they may target the same market on the same platform.

Considering search engines’ algorithms have gotten so advanced and look to reward high-quality websites that provide a good user experience to their users, in modern SEO, your User Experience (UX) team and SEO Team should be more aligned than ever. Some of the UX factors that affect SEO are mobile optimisation, page loading speed, website security via SSL certification, lack of intrusive interstitials and website structure.

Given the importance of backlinks for SEO, Public relations (PR) can have a significant influence on the overall SEO performance. So much so that SEO Managers have designed an entirely new discipline called digital PR, a spin-off of traditional PR designed to focus on building backlinks and getting mentions from reputable sources on the web for the purpose of building website authority, relevance and trust.

The optimisation process starts with SEO Research in order to establish an understanding of the organic search market, users and technology implications within its wider SERP environment.

The insights gathered at the SEO research phase then fuel the practice of Onsite SEO which targets both content and technical areas for improvement on the website at hand.

Lastly, the Offsite SEO or Link Building efforts are directed towards establishing awareness, authority and trust within the industry at large with the purpose of reinforcing the efforts behind onsite optimisation at large.

So as previously noted, even before getting to install WordPress, one major decision you’ll have to make is choosing a hosting provider and a hosting plan. If cost is an important factor, Hostinger is the value-for-money option. Otherwise, if prefer going for the very high-end of hosting, you should consider Kinsta.

Among the reasons for choosing Hostinger as your hosting provider are the fact that they’re big enough to allow for economies of scale, as a result both offering competitive prices for their plans. Most importantly, they are well-regarded as providing timely and helpful customer service, commited to promptly solving hosting issues and this is imperative for the rare ocassions when you do need support.

Hostinger offers a number of hosting plans and you should read the specifications carefully, paying particular attention to the approximate number of monthly visitors those plans will be able to serve and the storage capacity. You will want to ensure that the hosting plan can accommodate a significantly higher number of monthly visitors than you expect to have to account for traffic fluctuations and has plenty of extra storage to allow you to develop your website moving forward.

If you chose Hostinger, you should also consider if you’ll need:

1. A WordPress staging tool: employed to test various website features without publishing them on the website. The primary benefit of this comes in the form of preventing technical errors on the live version of the website which may arise as you add new and more complex features.
2. Object Cache: Capable of accelerating page loading speeds, which translate into positive signals to search engines about the perceived quality of a landing page.
3. Content Delivery Network (CDN): Helpful in accelerating page loading speeds on websites which are accessed by website users across the globe, as opposed to website users within a single country.
4. Dedicated IP address: Can be useful for increased control over the hosting environment among other things, which may be important for certain websites. As a general rule, hosting with a dedicated IP address is useful for either large or complex websites.

Although installing WordPress might sound like a lot of work, in reality if you’ve opted for “Managed WordPress Hosting” it can be acomplished with a few clicks through your hosting provider. You will, of course, have to go though the manual set up of the basic WordPress settings, choose a WordPress theme and pick any WordPress plugins you might need on your end, after the installation. All of the above processes are described below.

Assuming you have purchased your domain from Hostinger, you will need to log into your Hostinger account and find your “Domain Portfolio”. Once you find the domain listed on this page, click “Manage” next to it and find the “Domain Checklist” panel on the corresponding page. You will find the first step relating to your “Domain registration” marked as completed and the next one in line will be “Create your Website” with a “Get Hosting” button, which you need to click to kick off the WordPress Installation process, as illustrated below.

You will be presented with a list of options to tick and login credentials to create. At this stage, just make sure you have WordPress selected as the option for building your website and assign the right domain. Do not worry about having a WordPress theme ready at this stage and just select one of the themes provided for free.

If you bought your domain from another Domain Registrar, you will need to first create a website using Hostinger, specifying the domain name you have purchased from another Domain Registrar. You will, of course, need to go through a domain verification process with the other Domain Registrar, as illustrated below.

Although, instructions on how to verify a domain are provided on both ends, your Hosting Provider and your Domain Registrar, if you run into difficulties reach out to customer support. You will need to navigate to the “Websites” panel in your Hostinger account and find the “Check Guide” button explaining how to connect your Domain, as illustrated below.

Use the provided instructions on your Domain Registrar’s platform. Reach out to your Domain Registrar support if you’re unable to complete the process on your own.

Back in 2014 Google stated that HTTPS is a SEO ranking factor, so having this on the list can go a long way in improving your SEO. It is also considered a trust signal among users, meaning internet users are more likely to trust and interact with websites that are secured using HTTPS. If you want to take advantage of a secure connection via HTTPS, you need an SSL certificate on your site.

Thankfully, if you’re using WordPress with Hostinger, you’ll get an SSL certificate free of charge. If your website is new, the SSL certificate will be installed automatically with the installation of WordPress. However, if you already have a website and it still doesn’t have a SLL certificate installed, just raise it with customer service upon hosting migration to Hostinger and they’ll guide you through the process or install it for you.

To find out if you have an SSL certificate installed, just type your website name into the web browser and check if the URL starts with “https”. If it does, then your SSL certificate is installed and working as it should. Most websites on the web today will pass this test.

If you see your website address starting with “http”, most likely – you don’t have it installed. To find out for sure, try typing the website address using the “https” prefix as well. If the rare event that you can access both versions, the “http” and the “https”, it means your SSL certificate is installed, but you need to appropriately redirect all “http” versions of your URLs to their “https” counterparts. If you arrive to a “404 Page not Found” page or the “https” page redirects back to the “http” version of the URL, you can be certain that you don’t have a active SSL certificate.

If you prefer being thorough, you can test your website using SSL Installation Checker.

Mandatory Technical Adjustments post SSL Installation

1. Force HTTPS using Hostinger Website Dashboard: After Installing the SSL certificate, ensure that all your website visitors are redirected to the HTTPS version of your website instead of the previously-available HTTP version. To do this, log into your Hostinger account, find the “Websites” panel and click on the “Dashboard” next to the website in question. Then in WordPress > Overview find the Force HTTPS toggle and ensure it’s activated, just as illustrated below.

   

2. Use HTTPS in WordPress Address and Site Address fields on WordPress: Next, you will need to ensure your website address uses HTTPS instead of HTTP by logging into your WordPress Admin, navigating to Settings > General and making sure the “WordPress Address” and “Site Address” fields use HTTPS, just like illustrated below.

   

3. Update the website address in Google Search Console (URL Prefix property type): If you’re using Google Search Console and more specifically your Google Search Console property is using a URL prefix property (not a domain property), you’ll have to verify your Google Search Console from scratch as a new property. Taking into account you’re changing your prefix from “http” to “https”, you won’t receive any data for the old “http prefix” property moving forward. To verify a new property in Google Search Console, log into your account and expand the menu listing your website, then find and click “add property”. You will get the choice of using a “domain property” or “URL prefix property”, along with a “Learn more” button explaining the key differences between the two, as illustrated below. Once you’ve decided on one of the two options, you will need to upload a code snippet on your website and verify it. The data will start to become visible in no longer than a few days.

   

4. Update website address in Google Analytics settings: If you’re using GA4, log into your GA4 account and select the proper in question, then click “Admin”. Find the “Data collection and modification” panel and click on “Data Streams”. Your Data Stream will list the domain that is being tracked with the corresponding HTTP or HTTPS in front of it. If needed, replace HTTP with HTTPS by clicking on the stream and then the pencil icon, as illustrated below.

   

Once you have installed WordPress, there are a few basic settings that you will need to set, summarised below.

Setting the Preferred (Canonical) Domain

The preferred domain (canonical domain) specifies the version of the preferred domain (www or non-www) that precedes the domain name. To be technically accurate the www version of a website actually means the website will be placed on the www subdomain. Although there is no set preference by search engines for either one of these options, only one single version must be used across all the URLs on the website for consistency purposes.

If you use both domain versions on and outside your website, search engines will treat the two versions of the same page as references to separate pages, resulting in duplication issues on a large scale. When you set your preferred domain, you’re telling search engines which domain you want to be crawled and indexed. Although search engines do not give preference to any one version over the other, one argument for using the non-www version is that it makes for a shorter URL, allowing more space for what may, in fact, be important.

To set your preferred domain, you will need to login into your WordPress Dashboard and navigate to “Settings” > “General”, where you’ll need to ensure you have the preferred version of the domain specified, as illustrated below.

If it just so happens that you can’t access your WordPress website after doing this, you must change the settings in your database. You may reach out to your hosting provider’s customer support, explain that you’ve changed the preferred domain (a.k.a. canonical domain) in WordPress and kindly ask them to fix it for you. If you prefer fixing it yourself and you’re using Hostinger, just follow the steps below:

1. Log into your Hostinger account
2. On the left sidemenu find “Websites” > “Website list”, then click on “Dashboard” next to the website in question.
3. On the left sidemenu find “Databases” > “phpMyAdmin” and click “Enter phpMyAdmin” next to your database.
4. Once in the phpMyAdmin, find the “wp_options” subfolder (you may also use the search function) and select it.
5. Depending on how many websites you host, you may have a multiple “MySQL Databases”. If so, you’ll need to check them one by one to find the one you need and you can do so by following the next step.
6. With the “wp_options” selected you will find a table with a list of options, the first 2 of which will be “siteurl” and “home”.
7. If both of these text fields specify your domain URL (as illustrated below), you’re in the right place.
8. To amend your preferred domain (canonical domain), click “edit” and remove the “www” for the setting your preferred domain to the “non-www” version and vice versa.
9. This applies to both “site url” and “home” options.

Force WWW using the Hostinger Tools Plugin

You may force the www or non-www version of the website through Hostinger, but you’ll need to install the Hostinger Tools plugin in order to be able to do so. Once the Hostinger Tools plugin is installed, you will find a “Force WWW” toggle right below the existing “Force HTTPS” toggle.

In the event you don’t want to use the Hostinger Tools WordPress plugin, make sure to redirect the www version of the domain to the non-www to prevent duplication issues. Failing to do so will result in duplicate content issues as well as issues surrounding the consolidation of your backlink profile across the entire website. Domain-wide redirects for forcing www to non-www versions of the page or vice versa can be done in the .htaccess file, but you will need a developer to implement that for you. Forcing the “https” across the website (in case you’re not able to do it through Hostinger) can be done in a similar fashion using the same file.

Controlling the Website Visibility Settings

The single most important checkbox for SEO in WordPress is the one controlling whether search engines must not index your website. With this checkbox checked – no search engine will index your website and no user will be able to find your website in search engines. The primary purpose of this option is to make websites unavailable to search engines and thus users that might find the website through search engines, when the website is , in fact, not ready for the public.

To prevent search engines from indexing your website or to ensure that your website is indeed indexable by search engines use the checkbox next to “Discourage Search Engines from Indexing this Site”, found on your WordPress Dashboard under “Settings” > “Reading”, as illustrated below.

Specifying the Permalinks

Keeping a clean and SEO-friendly URL structure will have a significant impact on your SEO, which is why it is a good idea to set the permalinks preferences right from the very start. Doing this after you’ve already published your blog posts can involve a significant amount of additional work.

In order to change your Permalink Settings log into your WordPress Dashboard and navigate to “Settings” > “Permalinks”. Then, select Post Name as the option, as illustrated below. Post Name typically works for most sites. However, as you’re advancing in SEO you may end up implementing a custom structure depending on your preferences.

Controlling the Blog Post Comments settings in WordPress

If you prefer to not receive any comments from website visitors on your Blog Posts, you might as well disable this option. To do that you’ll need to log into WordPress and navigate to “Settings” > “Discussion”, locating the “Default post settings” section, where you’ll need to untick the “Allow people to submit comments on new posts”, as illustrated below.

If you’d like to provide your website visitors the opportunity to comment on your Blog Posts, you’ll have a large set of options to consider and control on the “Settings” > “Discussion” page within WordPress. However, if you prefer to rid your Blog entirely of the website visitor comments, which also includes disabling the “comments” option for your WordPress editors when they create posts for your website, unticking this checkbox is the only thing you need to do.

As it happens SEO is rarely the priority when a new website is built, which eventually turns into a pretty costly endeavour. Selecting a SEO-friendly theme can go a long way in preventing SEO issues later down the line.

Practical Considerations for Selecting a SEO-friendly theme

• Responsive Design: Google is an active advocate of responsive design use. Responsive design ties into the user experience on mobile devices which is also an important SEO factor. Most, if not all, modern WordPress themes are responsive, but it’s advisable to read the theme description and ensure that it is indeed coded with various devices and screen sizes in mind.
• Simple layout: Although a subjective consideration, a WordPress theme with a more simple layout is likely to reflect favourably upon the user experience of the website. As far as SEO is concerned, it’s wiser to have a theme with just the features and layout you need and extend the functionality later than have a theme burdened by unnecessary features, which may ultimately negatively reflect on your page loading speeds and cause additional SEO issues, fixing most of which will not be possible without the input of a certified web developer.
• Woocommerce compatible: If you’ll need an online shop or you believe you might need it in the future, you’ll need your WordPress Theme to be compatible with Woocommerce.
• Multilingual: If your website will use multiple languages, look out in the Theme description for topics related to multilingual support or translation.
• Theme Tech Support: If you’re not a certified web developer, it might prove very useful if with the purchase of the theme you get at least 6 months of support. This way you can ensure you have someone to turn to in case you encounter difficulties. You may also have the option to extend the support after. the initial period expires, that’s in case you found it useful to begin with.

These are very simple (soft) but practical considerations and most modern WordPress Themes will tick all the boxes. If you’ve found a manageable list of WordPress Themes that tick all the boxes above, run a few extra tests, as detailed below.

1. HTML Mark-up Validation: Ensuring your theme follows the most basic of best practices is another important consideration. Simply copy and paste the live demo of the WordPress theme into the W3 Validator to ensure it doesn’t have major issues, as illustrated below.

   

2. Another test you need to perform to check if a WordPress theme is worth using, it is the Google Page Speed Insights test, a shown below. A test score above 90 is considered a good score.

   

When it comes to SEO, plugins should always be installed with caution, as every plugin may negatively affect your SEO. This is because when you start overloading your WordPress website with plugins, you bring all their baggage to your website. Some plugins can negatively reflect on your website page loading speeds and, as a result, on your organic rankings in search engines. So, when it comes to selecting and installing WordPress plugins, less is more.

Testing your Plugins

It is highly recommended to install any WordPress plugins you may need one at a time and test its impact on Page Loading speeds after you’ve activated the plugin. To test the impact of any given WordPress plugin on your page loading speeds, you’ll need to compare the said page loading speeds before and after installing and activating the plugin. To do just that, navigate to Google Pagespeed Insights, enter the URL of your homepage or, if your plugin is primarily employed on other URLs – enter one of those URLs and check your page loading speeds before and after the plugin activation.

Installing a SEO plugin

Depending on the specifics of your website you may have to install different kinds of WordPress plugins. However, the single most important WordPress plugin to install for SEO is an All-in-One SEO Plugin. This plugin will enable you to control all the basic SEO settings, but is by no means the only plugin you will need for SEO purposes. Although you will find that the most used SEO plugin in the industry is Yoast SEO, there’s a number of other options on the market with the Rank Math SEO standing head and shoulders above the rest. You will find the free version of the plugin to be highly useful and the paid version – very competitively priced.

Being the first element both users and search engines see in search results, the Page Title is the single most important element in determining what the Landing Page is about. A good Page Title is rooted in thorough Keyword Research that can help answer such questions as what keywords to use and in what order. Some of the other aspects to keep in mind are the recommended Page Title lengths, the use of Keyword Modifiers and consistent use of Branding.

Every page title of an indexable landing page must be clearly specified and unique on the website to instruct search engines and users about the page contents and prevent different pages from competing for the same keywords. The SEO Audits from Ahrefs, SEMRush, Sitebulb and Screaming Frog are all able to diagnose such issues across the website, regardless of its size.

The Meta Description is a short fragment of text that can only be found right underneath the Landing Page URL in SERPs. A good Meta Description supports the Page Title in attracting users to the website by offering a slightly more in-depth picture of what the Landing Page is about. Although the Meta Description does not directly influence Organic Rankings, it can and does influence the click-through rate to the landing page.

A good Meta Description should follow a highly similar list of optimisation best practices to the Page Title. The only meaningful difference between the two is that given the longer lengths of meta descriptions, they allow more scope for the use of synonyms and keyword modifiers where appropriate.

The Page URLs are the links displayed in the search results alongside the Page Title and Meta Description and are also visible in the browser once on the web page. Like other onpage elements, Page URLs rely on keywords to give clues about the content on the page, but it is generally a best practice to avoid superfluous words to shorten the URLs as much as possible. A URL also plays a unique role as an onpage element through its structure which defines the relationship of the landing page to other pages or a subfolder (subdirectory) on the website.

The onpage optimisation aspect of URLs reflects only on the URL slug or the last portion of the URL preceded by or contained within the last forward slash(es), while the naming and the use of subdirectories is to be set up and managed as part of technical SEO. In addition, unlike the other onpage elements URLs have certain limitations which must be kept in mind, like the appropriate use of characters with reference to case sensitivity, non-English and extraneous characters and the reserved use of some characters for predefined technical purposes.

In the context of SEO, Content Optimisation stands for the optimisation of the information itself contained on any given landing page which can come in the form of text, but also more sophisticated forms such as data-visualisation dashboards and interactive elements. It can also extend to the use of images, videos and audio recordings but only in the context of the content itself rather than the technical specifications, which are handled as part of technical optimisation.

The key reason to develop an onpage optimisation process that gives consideration to the optimisation of body content is that it is the main factor in consumers’ assessment of the degree to which the landing page has satisfied their search query. In other words, if the primary onpage elements are responsible for attracting visitors to the landing page, the body content must offer precisely the content that is necessary for a user journey to conclude with a conversion.

At the bare minimum body content optimisation must take into account the first header as well as the other subheaders and their hierarchy as well as the introduction paragraph. The important of the entire page content can not be understated which is why it is generally part of a discipline of its own called Content Marketing. Depending on the landing page itself body content optimisation can also extend to include such aspects as the effective use of forms and interactive experiences (as part of Conversion Rate Optimisation), FAQ sections (for targeting Informational Intent Keywords which almost always happen to be Longtail Search Queries as well as targeting select Rich Snippets through the use of schema mark-up).

Internal Linking Optimisation stands for the optimisation of your website’s internal hyperlinks that lead from one internal page to any other internal page.

In the context of onpage optimisation in particular, Internal Linking serves as a hint to Search Engines about the way different pages on your website may be related to each other and, depending on your use of keywords in the hyperlink anchor text, what keywords those landing pages should rank for.

Image optimisation for SEO can generally include a number of aspects including the content of the image (aesthetics, visual appeal, ability to express a message), the strain put on the page loading speeds and the meta information provided to the search engines about the contents of the image.

In the context of onpage optimisation, Image Optimisation entails only the image contents and the use of code elements that help describe the image to Search Engines (including the image’s File Name, Title and ALT tag). The image’s File Name and Title are placeholders for the image title, while the ALT tag is meant to describe the image to Search Engines or visually impaired users. It is somewhat important to use these according to their intended purposes, which is especially true for websites which are part of industries that are heavily reliant on imagery to sell their products or services (i.e. fashion, travel).

Primary metrics are counts of interaction and tend to be definitive in their nature. On their own, they show limited insight on overall SEO performance, but they make up the core of the ones that do, the secondary and tertiary metrics.

One instance of primary metrics is any of the Keyword Metrics including Keyword Search Volume, Keyword Difficulty, Organic Traffic Potential*, and Paid Advertising Cost per Click, but also keyword impressions and keyword click-through rate. Global or National Keyword Metrics data can be sourced using specialised SEO tools, while website-specific keyword data can be found using search engines’s proprietary tools (requires website ownership verification).

Another instance of primary metrics could be considered any of the Web Analytics Metrics which include the Acquisition Metrics, Engagement Metrics as well as Conversion Metrics. Some examples of Acquisition Metrics can be the number of Organic Sessions, the number of Organic Visitors (split further into new and returning visitors). Similarly, some examples of Engagement Metrics are Engagement Rate (formerly tracked under Bounce Rate), Average Time per Session, and Average Pages per Session. Lastly two examples of Conversion Metrics are simply the number of Key Events (website events that are marked as Key Events, formerly known as Conversions) and the Conversion Rate.

Secondary metrics are compound of relationships between select primary metrics and contexts relevant to the business. Although things get significantly more complicated with Secondary Metrics – in simple terms, these are merely Primary Metrics viewed through an additional layer of context, like Timeframe comparisons.

Simply adding an extra layer of context, like in this case a timeframe comparison turns a Primary Metric (which can provide limited context on its own) into a Secondary Metric. Apart from comparing the same primary metrics at different points in time, you can also account for the competitive or the industry landscape (assessing competitor movements and industry trends) as well as the SERP landscape (assessing if any changes in the anatomy of the Google SERP had affected any of your metrics).

Tertiary metrics are likely to be determined in-house to better understand the SEO impact on the website’s measurable business goals, in a competitive context and as part of a changing ever-evolving market conditions.

Tertiary Metrics are the metrics that can show the value of SEO beyond the SEO department. Namely, things like Return on Investment are but a single Tertiary Metric that can estimate the inputs and outputs of, for instance, a Content Marketing Strategy over the period of a year, putting the monetary spend against the monetary gain over the one-year period. Tertiary Metrics are rather difficult to implement in technical terms but are of paramount importance in large-scale organisations.

The Timeframe Comparison reflects the evolution of organic visibility, rankings and performance over time. By exploring these clusters of metrics at two or more points in time, SEOs can establish hypotheses to guide further actions. These can optionally be extended to account for competitor movements, market and industry trends, changing SERP Features landscape, changing user behaviour, and the optimisation efforts carried on the website.

The competitive movements stand for the abstract understanding of the changes in website’s organic competing domains within the market and on any given search engine platform in particular. While it can be explored at domain-level, it can also be niched down to competing pages, product categories, and individual products within specific SERPs. This can extend to direct competitors just as much as to websites that may follow divergent commercial interests but compete in the SERPs for the same keywords.

The SERP Features Landscape stands for the aggregated collection of SERP factors manifested across all the SERPs the website is visible under. SERPs change and evolve over time, with a constantly increasing and decreasing number of rich features competing for user attention which has direct implications for the click-through-rate, organic traffic and the measurement at large.

Firstly, it depends on whether you’re working with a new or an established website. Generally speaking, since older websites have been around for longer, they tend to have a stronger backlink profile, more content, as well as already established rankings for keywords. As you would expect in this case you’re likely to see results in a relatively shorter amount of time. On the other hand, newer websites need more effort and resources to get off the ground, that come especially in the form of new content and backlinks. So if you’re working on a new website, it may take longer for SEO to show results.

Next is the competitive framework. If the keywords you’re targeting are highly competitive, it will take more effort and most importantly a longer time to outrank your competition.

Thirdly, it all depends on your internal and external resources. The more resources you can dedicate to SEO the faster your results will show. For instance, you could hire more content writers to create new content, allocate human resources to link building to build backlinks or invest in SEO tools to make your work easier, faster, and more efficient.

Lastly, it all depends on your SEO strategy because a nailed-down strategy on how you will tackle your target keywords can lead to a higher chance of climbing in organic SERPs. More specifically, if you have a strategy that targets a group of highly competitive keywords, you will find that no matter your efforts it may take years before you will be able to establish first-page organic rankings. While using alternative methods by targeting low volume and low competition keywords first may bring in results faster and reinforce your efforts for ranking for shorttail keywords in the long run.